PLEA FOR PORRIDGE

Evening Post, Volume XCIII, Issue 48, 24 February 1917, Page 14

PLEA FOR PORRIDGE

ITS VIRTUES ASA FOOD

MEDICAL WRITER'S TESTIMONY,

Dr. Saleeby, knowing that the Englishman does not take kindly to porridge in his own home, although fond of it elsewhere, urges its greater use as an articlei of diet. In the Daily Chronicle he admits, that the plate of porridge alone, with milk and sugar, usually served 1 at the hotel breakfast table, is an adequate meal for a really normal appetite, with moderate work. Scottish experience has proved it. In times past, oatmeal was the staple food o£ Scotsmen, whom anthropologists then reckoned to be the tallest of mankind, with the most splendid and substantial skeletons. " Many a time, in Edinburgh, in past years, have I seen a pack of such Scottish forwards, doubtless breast and por-ridge-fed to a man, shove English, Welsh, or Irish forwards back for yards in a Rugby 'scrum.' So much for the body. As for the development of the brain, which is body, too, but almost more, oatmeal need fear no challenge. Everything one needs it contains. Truthful history is the tradition, astonishing as it has always sounded to Southern ears, educated in Scotland, that in times past tha son of the Scottish manse left his home in the autumn, for one of the four Scottish universities, with a 6ack of .oatmeal, upon which he lived during the winwr, and acquired the knowledge ■with which he later conquered London, or Labrador, or the Tropics. Gone for evei' are those days, when the Scots boy thus ' cultivated learning on a little oatmeal' —that now despised oatmeal which scarcely figures at the beginning of the gross and' Gargantuan dietary of a Glasgow hotel to-day—but the lesson is one for.all time."

Oats are rich not only in proteins, but also in fat; a good source of , heat is needed for a young plant that is to grow in high latitudes. This applies to a young child. Thus oats are rich in fat, whereas rice is poor. So much the better for oatmeal"as a food in northern lands, and in winter. Doubtless many of us find ordinary oatmeal tiresome to digest, because of the irritant and innutritious husk. The .recent rolled bats, so largely advertised under various names, meet this need, though in these the remarkable percentage of nourishment has been slightly reduced. Oatmeal porridge is very well absorbed by the normal digestion, and has unquestionably played a primary- part in the history of Scotland, and thus of the Empire. Oatmeal and milk was formerly the' staple diet of the Scottish, peasant. Fortunate was he to have the most nutritious of all cereals growing, almost for nothing, at his door. Rich 1 in' iron and other salts, as well as in. fat—besides the protein and stavch —this food not only contains everything necessary for life, but has a constitution well fitted for children, who need iron for their blood, salts for their bones, and fat to keep their little bodies warm. Oatmeal is also rich in vitamines, and even contains genuine stimulant substances, which the late Sir Lander Brunton, a fine Scotsman, compared with strychnine—a truer analogy, I fancy, than that of another famous Scottish doctor of that old school, who preferred to compare oatmeal with champagne at night, forgetting the real pain in the morning.

Dr. Hutchison in a comparison of two meals, in respect of food value and cost (in normal times), shows first a meal of tea and bread and butter, second a meal of porridge and milk. For the same sum (three halfpence) the porridge and milk 13 far superior both for tissue building and supply of energy. . The Scottish child of to-day, however, is no longer brought up on jporridge, as he was. When the revelations of the Boer War directed attention to the children's physiques, an enquiry conducted by women medical students in the homes of Edinburgh showed that tea, and white bread and jam were replacing porridge and milk to an extent which almost sufficed to . account for the deplorable physique of Scottish city childhood in our days, and the monstrous distribution of rickets, a disease of malnutrition in which oatmeal is very valuable, on account 'of the iron, fat, and phosphorus it contains. A certain strong man issued a version of the official report, with paiallel columns, in which he argued that physical exercises, of his prescription, would save our physique and fill our regiments with superb manhood. The exercises which will straighten bow legs and knock knees, or restore teeth lost ten or twenty years ago, have yet to be defined. The right nutrition of childhood is an essential foundation of Empire; knowledge we have, but wisdom lingers.