RIGHT AND WRONG DIETS

Press, Volume LXXX, Issue 24366, 19 September 1944, Page 3

RIGHT AND WRONG DIETS

AN EXAMPLE FROM INDIA (Issued by the Department of Health.) This is intended chiefly for those people who regard proper dietary principles as just so : much faddism. They are the people who “can eat anything,” and'probably do, and when they get aches and pains where they ,'east expect them, they wonder why. But there’s a tremendous difference between right eating and wrong eating. Here is a striking example of it: In India the Sikh of the Punjab is noted for his manliness and fine physique. He is every inch a man, and a great fighter. In the south of India there lives the Madrassi, of delicate features and small and poor physique. He doesn’t, as" a rule, live very long. The Sikh drinks milk or uses milk curds, something like junket; he has for bread a pancake-like chappatti of coarsely-ground wheat; he eats lentils and meat; cooks with ghee, or clarified butter, and has. plenty of raw fruit and raw and cooked vegetables. The Madrassi, on the other hand, has very little milk, if any; uses rice instead of wheat; eats lentils but no meat, sometimes a little fish; cooks with oil and spices his food very highly; has bananas and raw and cooked vegetHere is the difference between the two diets; milk, butter, meat coarse wholemeal. , • . All this bears out the contention that a man is largely what he eats. If children are to grow up into healthy, virile adolescents and adults, they must get the right food. Eating the right food is not faddism—it’s plain com-mon-sense—and in this country we are well supplied with the right kinds of food.