IMPORTANCE OF BEING FAT.

Dunstan Times, Issue 3149, 25 December 1922, Page 2

IMPORTANCE OF BEING FAT.

(By C. A. Dawson Scott).

A Hurley .street doctor has been telling women that they would be better without breakfast, and tbat. speaking generally, tbey eat too much. Tbe war taught us that if we abstained from. Mesh-forming foods we isvvw thin: that it is no good frying to avoid tho conclusion that people are fat because they eat more than is necessary to keep their bodies in a healthy condition. Yet. granting Ibis, there are. several things to be said for the habit. To eat pleasant food and drink encouraging wines are agreeable ways of passing time. Tbe man or woman who has just dined, not perhaps wisely but delectably. will be in a mood to listen benevolently to the troubles and needs of others. Finding the world a good place they will want to make it as cheery for other people as for themselves. The pleasure tbey have experienced will give them a fellow-feeling for those to whom such io\ s arc denied.

Nor is food —taken, I admit, in greater quantity than is strictly necessary—only the source of much of humanity's easy benevolence. It often proves a beautifier. When Pharaoh told hie dreams to Joseph, he spoke of the seven good' kiue who came up out of the river as "fatfleshed and well-favored," while to his mind' the lean-fleshed kine were "illfavored such as I never saw in all the land of Egypt for badness." The king evidently considered; —as, indeed, do many Eastern racesI—that 1 —that fatness is in itself a beauty. Bosita Forbesi—who is very tall and very slender —told us that when a certain sheik of the desert offered to mony her he said he could not afford to give many camels as he would have to spend so much on fattening her. During the war a woman I know conscientiously ate only as much as would keep her alive. She had been a younglooking person of middle-age; but, before long, hollows and wrinkles gave her the real and more than the real number of her years, until one day she overheard a friend saying, "Isn't it a pity poor Anne looks so much older than she is?"

It is regrettable, of course, that from that hour she should have grown less patriotic, but when the curves came back they brought with them the youth —or its appearance—that had slipped away.