DEVITALISED DIET

Evening Star, Issue 19019, 14 August 1925, Page 2

DEVITALISED DIET

DRUGGED FOODS DANGERS OF PRESERVATIVES. Efficient housing, avoidance of overcrowding, proper means of recreation and control of the traffic all played an important part in our daily existence, but even these, essential as they were, faded into insignificance compared with the problems attending the proper feeding or an ever-increasing population, said Sir William Milligan, in a speech recorded in the 4 Daily Despatch,’ of Manchester. “ I venture to think,” he added, “ that we are of all nations the worst fed. Our diet is often insufficient, illbalanced, and monotonous, our cooking leaves much to be desired, and the quality of our food supplies fa by no means’ always sans reproche. “ The tendency of the age to live upon prepared and more or less preserved articles of food was shown by the great increase in the frequency of dyspepsia, gastrointestinal disease, and intestinal lethargy. “ Our food supplies are largely devitalised, denaturalised, devltaminised, doped, and drugged. Our food chemists, the greatest slayers of mankind, in response no doubt to popular clamor, have been busy trying to discover how food may be kept by means of preservatives and cold storage until it is literally mummified; how it may be colored by dyes, aniline and mineral, to make it pleasing to the eye: and how it may be predigested to make it suitable for our weakened digestions and edentulous jaws.

“Bread, the very staff of life, fa tflj day more often than not deprived of its all-important bran, is bleached w make it pure white, and fa treated with chemicals to make it the more easily baked. Wholemeal food is to-day con* Burned in decreasing quantity. If deed it can be obtained at aIL Thfl quest for the artificial instead of the natural is the sign of a decaying people.” lie did not, of course, rule out the use of preservatives altogether, hut said the absence of pure and natural food, with resulting vltamine starve* tion, was so lowering our. powers of resistance that most members of thd population were undergrown, ii'-ds* veloped, and of even less than average brain power. “As civilisation advances,” he mJS, “ as luxury becomes more general, s 6 does the consumption of denataraliß<H and preserved food increase pari passu, with the result that atony, of the Intestinal tract is now an almost universal complaint. The constant consumption of artificially-prepared foods contaminated with one or other preservative induces changes in the delicate lining membrane or the digestive tn rr . with the result that intestinal ft.-W: is induced, the natural power of ic i * ance is diminished, and the normal n-". takes on malignant characteristics. The ingestion of artificially-prepared and E reserved foods may yet be found to ave a very important bearing on the incidence of cancer.”