FOOD FASHIONS.

Auckland Star, Volume LXV, Issue 267, 10 November 1934, Page 6 (Supplement)

FOOD FASHIONS.

FADS ANI> DIETS. Everyone in a food faddist, chiefly through auto-suggestion and emotion, says Professor V. H. Mottram, Professor of Physiology in the University of London. We are all food faddists, because food fashions are invariably determined by upbringing. We eat foods because our parents taught lis to eat them, or we refuse to eat certain foods to draw attention to ourselves, to be different from other people, or to relieve some inferiority complex, and not for any sound dietetic reason. The average man can never know what "did him good" in diet because his emotions are tangled in his scheme of dietary. When a man obtains a sense of well-being after taking a patent medicine or food, or adopting a food fad, ho naturally pins his faith to the medicament, whereas it may well be that his sense of well-being is due to auto-suggestion. The vogue of patent foods and medicines, particularly of purgative foods and medicines, owes much to psychological considerations. Most changes in fashion, Professor Mottram says, ' produce a reaction. Many of the. common ills of the body have been attributed to each new foodor drink in turn. Cancer was once supposed to be due to eating tomatoes. More recently it has been attributed to meat eating, to the eating, of white bread, or to the absence of indigestible material from the diet. It is odd that the food faddists have not attributed it to the increase of sugar in diet, to American breakfast foods, or even to the rough, indigestible material of salads and vegetables. The next turn of the wheel will bring an indictment of fruit and vegetables as the cause of cancer, diabetes, arthritis and other diseases. Few people realise the extent to which food fashions have changed. In Queen Elizabeth's days very few of Hie foods which we regard as indispensable wore available, with the exception of meat, fish, bacon, eggs, and butter. In those days the diet of thu rich was very like that of nomad races, and the poor must have been content with "bacon and sometimes an egg or two." All classes did without tea, coll'ce, and cocoa, which had not been introduced, and drank wine or beer with their breakfast—a habit which apparently died out in Oxford (home of lost causes!) only in the eighteen-seventies. Our ancestors in 1800 used to .eat but a few pounds of sugar per year. To-day we eat nearly our own weight every year. Changes in fashion which decreased the gargantuan amounts eaten and drunk and increased the variety of foods, particularly vegetables and fruit in winter months, are to be welcomed as dictetically sound. There should be no fads in diet, Professor Mottram declares, and only one fashion—to take an all-round mixed diet containing dairy food, market garden produce, and food from the s-ea, combined with anything else for which one has a fanf