FOOD AND HEALTH

Evening Star, Issue 20993, 6 January 1932, Page 7

FOOD AND HEALTH

REMARKABLE EXPERIMENTS Few branches of medical research have made such strides during the last twenty years as that relating to diet and its relations with health and disease. Particular interest attaches to the lectures recently delivered at the Royal College of Surgons by Colonel M'Carrison, director of Nutritional Research under the Indian Research Fund Association.

At the Coonoor research laboratories in the Nilgiris, 6,000 feet above sea level. Colonel M‘Garrison has been conducting a large-scale experiment for the last two and a-quarter years. Under ideal climatic and hygienic conditions he has been keeping, feeding, and breeding many hundreds of albino rats, says a London paper. This healthy stock has been fed upon a diet similar to that of some of the finest physical peoples of Northern India—namely, a diet of whole-wheat flour, fresh butter, raw vegetables, milk, a little raw meat and bones, with plenty of water. Fed thus. Colonel M'Carrison is able to report that there has been no case of illness in his community, and, apart from accident, no infantile mortality. And nearly 1,200 careful post-mortem examinations have confirmed the bodily health of the rats so brought up. Side by side with them, however, living under identical conditions but differently fed, are families of rats with a very much less satisfactory record. These have been given alternative diets, designed faulty, but in many cases the actual dietaries employed by other Indian peoples or groups of the Indian population. In these deficiently-fed communities many diseases have developed, including, surprisingly, the appearance of adenoids, the incidence of _ middle-ear disease, various skin complaints, glandular enlargements, nervous instability, and neuritis. And Colonel M'Carrison remarks incidentally that one of the worst diets, judged from this standpoint, consisted of white bread, margarine, tea, sugar, jam, preserved meat, and over-cooked vegetables—a diet that, as most social observers will agree, has a rather ominously familiar appearance.

It is the deficiency of vitamin A, contained in such substances as fresh butter and cod-liver oil that appears to have been chiefly responsible for the ailments produced by this diet. Colonel M'Carrison supports the conclusion that vitamin A is particularly associated with the functional health of the cells covering the body both within and without. This accounts, in his opinion, for the appearance, when vitamin A is absent, of such diverse abnormalities as adenoids and gastric ulcer, the first occurring in the lining of the nasal cavity and the second in the lining of the alimentary canal. It has been further found that diets deficient in vitamins A, B, and D —the two latter contained in such food substances as wheat germ and animal fats respectively—rendered the rat communities peculiarly liable to many of the ordinary bacterial infections. This was also found to be true of monkeys similarly fedand although a certain caution is required in assuming that these observations are necessarily applicable to human beings, there can be little doubt that, in a general sense at least, they may be so regarded. Indeed, as Dr J. B. Orr, of the Mowett Research Institute at Aberdeen, has recently reminded us, there have been studies lately undertaken in Africa, that are remarkably confirmatory of M'Carrison’s findings. Two African tribes were carefully investigated from this particular point of view. The diet of one of them, consisting mainly of cereals, was deficient in calcium and the vitamins A and D; and it was found that bronchitis and pneumonia accounted for a third of all cases of sickness, tropical ulcers for another third, and pulmonary tuberculosis for 6 per cent, , The other tribe lived upon a diet consisting mainly of milk, meat, and raw blood, deficient, that is to say, in some of tlie substances contained in the other diet, and rich in many elements that the first lacked. Here, bronchitis and pneumonia accounted for only _ 4 _ per cent, of the total sickness, tropical ulcers for only 3 per cent., and pulmonary tuberculosis for 1 per cent. —the prevalent complaint in the second tribe being rheumatoid arthritis. And it is difficult to resist the conclusion that there was a definite relation between the diet and disease-incidence of these two human communities. _ It may justly be said, m fact, that there is already a group of diseases, whose origin was obscure a generation ago, now definitely known to be due to a faulty or deficient habit of nutrition. There can be little doubt that there are many others which will soon be included in this class. It has been said, for example, that 90 per cent, of deafness in adults is due to preventable causes in childhood; and M'Carrison’s observations would appear to suggest, in this field alone, the future of prevention, if not cure, lies in a right understanding of oU£ dad# food-.