Health Notes

Hutt News, Volume 16, Issue 34, 17 February 1943, Page 6

Health Notes

By H. K. & D. W. Adamson, (Osteopaths). With eggs so scarce, the time is perhaps opportune to return to the question of the. time honoured milk pudding, baked and boiled custards, and similar sweet desserts which many regard as such indispensible features of a dinner. Desserts have their origin in an instinctive desire to give variety to a meal and thus provide for a higher standard of nutrition than is procurable from the restricted diet of flesh foods and the few roots and berries that were available to primitive man. Gradually, however, this perfectly natural desire for foods "needed" became supplanted by an unnatural craving for foods "wanted" and to fulfil this want, every cook and every cookery book endeavours to excel all pre-

decessors in concocting new and more intriguing flavours with which to further enslave an already enslaved public to its stomach.

It may come as a surprise to many of those who regard a dinner as woefully incomplete without one of these desserts to be told that their value is very much exaggerated. That, in fact, there is little to commend them—at dinner. The milk and egg puddings or other sweets containing them, are highly nutritious up to a point. But the point becomes somewhat blunted when saturation point is exceeded, which so frequently happens when these concentrated carbohydrate or starchy concoctions are included in an already heavy meal. It is perfectly true that they contain good quality proteins, are rich in calcium and possess a good assortment of other valuable mineral salts. Also, they are loaded with energy or carbohydrate elements. One of these desserts is a meal in itself. In fact it proyides far more nutrient matter than the total provided by the average meal partaken by many people. But, this is its danger. It I is too rich —in carbohydrate (or starch) and saturation point in this essential energy producing element: is too easily reached or passed.

No matter how rich or nutritive a food may be, its value can only be measured by the amount that is absorbed and utilised. All else becomes a burden. Superfluous amounts have no more value in hu-

man stomachs than is left to decompose in the kitchen pantry They clog the system, cause' fermsntation and catarrhal disorders. Therefore, to get any real value from these desserts, either make a complete meal of them or reduce the consumption of all other starchy foods to a minimum. This, by the way, is merely compromising. The ideal dessert for a dinner is a vegetable salad. In the absence of fresh uncooked fruit, the vegetable salad is the perfect substitute. It furnishes all the mineral elements without the excessive starches and sugars and in addition, it provides the value vitamins which all cooked meals, including those containing the puddings and custards so badly lac!*. ;