PHYSICAL FITNESS

Nelson Evening Mail, Volume LXXII, 26 January 1939, Page 9

PHYSICAL FITNESS

. lo The Editor I Sir—Readers of "The Mail will have | noticed that according to a report just ( issued by the League of Nations’ i Health Commission, Australia leads j the world in the fight against the most| common cause of all ailments, mal- 1 nutrition. The extensive enquiries j that have been carried out by the Australian Government show that 17.9 per cent of the children examined are suffering from inadequate nutrition. It is significant that country children in Australia fare much better than do those of the towns. Here are some of the details:— DISEASES CAUSED BY MALNUTRITION Town Country per cent, per cent. Nutritional Anaemia .... 12 3.4 Active Rickets 17 10.3 CShronic Infections 4 1.7 There are no parallel New Zealand figures with which to compare these results. The Dominion still chooses to occupy the conspicuous position of being the only civilised country not having followed the 1935 recommendations of the League of Nations’ Health Commission in this respect. It is a "fact, however, that 66 per cent of our school children together with 80 per cent of our pre-school toddlers, each year suffer from ailments which are largely preventive and the larger proportion of which originate in the first place from incorrect nutrition. It is a matter of sheer commonsense that these ailments can neither be rectified nor prevented by the forthcoming campaign lo popularise physical training. Measures designed to achieve bona-fide physical and mental fitnes, as distinguished from physical education itself, may only be succesfully applied by a governing body comprising doctors, biologists, physiologists, educational scientists and gymnastic instructors. No such governing body having yet been appointed in New Zealand, it is intended to publish in this column from week to week the authentic findings of scientific specialists who arc studying, working and experimenting in true physical fitnes in Bitain, America, Austria, Czechoslovakia, Denmark. France, Germany, Poland, Australia and New Zealand. All-round physical fitness involves the study of man as a real science of the human being from the pre-natal period period through the growth years <o adult age. Surpisingly enough, scientific wok in child-welfare in New Zealand has hilheto been concentrated upon the first twelve months of life, as if normal growth were confined to that particular period. We have as yet no chair of pediatrics in this country. This may explain the fact that there is a period in the development of New Zealand children which has been almost wholly neglected, so far as national heallli measures are concerned. The pre-school age includes the most critically impolant years for the future development of the chikl and of the man. How pre-school toddlers may benefit from the spread of scientific knowledge concerning bona-fide physical “education” will be outlined in our next article. —We are etc. PHYSICAL AND MENTAL WELFARE SOCIETY OF NEW ZEALAND. Onchunga, 21st January.