TRACTS FOR THE TIMES.

Auckland Star, Volume LXIII, Issue 226, 23 September 1932, Page 6

TRACTS FOR THE TIMES.

A COMEDY OF VITAMINS.

(By I>RO BONO PUBLICO.)

We've had a real day among the vitamins ■to-day, and, late in life, I have been learning something. You know how important it is that we should Jiave vitamins in sufficient quantities to save us from'all'sorts of diseases, including beri-beri, pellagra, and acidosis, well, a lady visitor who had lunch with us told us all about them. It started over white bread. I like brown bread occasionally, and said so, and our visitor said S'he was glad of that, because wholemeal bread contained vitamin B, and even ordinary brown bread wa-s very good for you, because it contained bran. Before we knew where we were wo were listening to a very informative address on the subject of foods and the necessity for keeping up the supply of vitamins. It weems that they teach these things in the schools now. You learn, if you are young enough, that vitamin A is an oily substance that prevents something or other, B does something else, prevents pellagra, if I remember rightly, D stops you having rickets, and so on. We had just got to the stage of making notes of the special foods we ought to pat in order to get full supplies of vitamins when ■the doctor blew in and asked for a l)ite of lunch.

In a few minutes the lady and the doctor were ■swopping information like long-lost friends. They had bacon and eggs down in calories, they compared oranges and turnips, they discussed the merits of raw milk and the demerits of boiled, they talked about fructose, dextrose, levulose and pentose, and we were getting quite ill from thinking about our careless diet in the past. It came out that you ought to eat your vegetables raw instead of cooked, that you ought to expose the whole body to the sunlight for a certain time every day, that cod liver oil in moderate dosee is almost essential to health, that white bread causes indigestion and is deficient in vitamin B, and that in the not-distant future vitamins will be sold in tablet form in the proper proportions to correct every known disorder. I was so worried over all this that I went out with the doctor to his car, and I mentioned to him that talk of the kind made one feel pretty blue. He took a look round and then he said, confidentially: "I wouldn't worry" if I were you. I've been jn'this district a good many years now and about the only kind of job I can find is bringing babies into the world. As the birth rat© is falling, I think there may be a deficiency of vitamin E in the diet, but I'm not verv sure about that." "You don't think there's very much in what you were talking about, then ?" I asked. "There's £V lot in it," he replied. "All these vitamins are absolutely essential to good health. But our young friend is not very up-to-date. The absence of eome vitamin may cause a disease, but tjhe more we learn about them the more we find how plentiful they are. You don't need, to be an expert to find them, but, believe me, you would have to be a first-class expert to find a diet that didn't have them." ,