HEALTH NOTES

Otago Witness, Issue 4042, 1 September 1931, Page 8

HEALTH NOTES

By

R. J. Terry.

I would like to take this opportunity of thanking readers for the personal interest they are taking in myself and the notes I write in this column. I .am rece.ving most cheering letters in addition to questions with reference to health. I want to cultivate that personal feeling between my readers and self. 1 want them to feel that I am not just out to write, but out to help them. Often when I am dictating my copy I seem to be able to see them sitting in their homes. Admitted, it is an imaginary home, but the feeling helps me. The parents of a youth who at one time resided in Taranaki have asked me to tell readers how their child was transformed. The father some time ago had a chat with me, and afterwards brought the child to see me. He was very poorly developed and tjtunted in growth. One immediately noticed his smallness and the poor quality of his bones. Doctors and other advisers had stated that the child lacked in bone formation. He had had various treatments prescribed for him, and still there seemed to be no growth. It was a very difficult matter to get the child to take medicine. (Possibly there was an instinct that medicine was not doing good.) The father and I had quite a long chat. It appeared that the mother was a delicate woman, who came of a consumptive family; that the child had not been breast fed; that he was very small when born, and was rubbed twice a day with olive oil. He was reared on two patent foods, which are largely composed of starch, and so they did not helii mothers much. For a few- days the father saw me repeatedly. One day we were chatting about his dairy herd, and he mentioned that he had a paddock of lucerne which gave him splendid returns. Then I had a brain wave. Years ago when I was an officer of an Agricultural Department in Australia, and was requested, amongst other duties, to endeavour to turn my State from an importing to an exporting State, in regard to hams and bacon, I carried out very extensive experiments in pig feeding, so that I knew exactly what

it would cost to grow a pound of pork on a healthy pig. Having obtained this knowledge, I then went deeper into research, and instituted a series of experiments, the object of which was to determine the effect of various foods on the bone formation of the animal, especially as regards the feeding of lucerne. Twenty sow pigs, all of the same age and the same average condition, were divided into four , ve eac h- Two lots were fed with all the lucerne, that they would consume during the period that they were carrying their young. The same feeding was continued during the rearing of the young. lhe progeny continued to be on an abundance of lucerne until they were nine months old, when they were killed for investigation. The other two lots of sows were treated and fed in exactly the same manner as the others except they did not have any lucerne, clovers, or legume, but had plenty of roots and succulent green stuff, without being allowed access to pasturage. When both lots of progeny were slaughtered it was founds that there was a remarkable difference between the frames of those fed with lucerne, and the quality of the bone was such that the breaking strength was two and a-quarter to two and a-half times better than that of those not fed on lucerne or legumes. It also came to my mind that certain canny thoroughbred horse feeders had sent foals after weaning to King Island to develop JP le P° rtlon King Island to winch they were sent was largely comP° s , ec , °T rotted shell. A Spanish ship bad been wrecked in the vicinity some years previously and the breaking up of the ship vibrated the mattresses used by the sailors. The mattresses were stuffed with melliott, which is a plant of the lucerne family but is surface rooting instead of deep-rooting and is only an annual. It simply revels in lime formation —in fact, will not develop unless lime in a fair quantity is in the soil. This plant in time made useless waste land really valuable. The same plant can sometimes he se^ n near the smaller ports here in New Zealand, especially in the north. Some of my farmer readers may know, a R- ,°Uiers may not, that lucerne and allied plants have a great affinity for lime and, in a lesser degree, for general mineral salts. The father and I put our heads together and the boy was to be fired with the ambition to be a great footballer. Then the father commenced to eat green lucerne and pretended that he was eating much more than he really did. The boy wanted some, but was told that he was not big enough and that only big boys and men could eat lucerne and it would make them good football players. In fact, the All Blacks were quoted as having chewed lucerne from the time they were boys. When the small boy’s imagination was sufficiently fired he was allowed to eat the green lucerne in moderation and encouraged to chew it, swallowing

the juice and spitting out the fibre all the tune. The parents must have been very painstaking, for the child had a strong will, as the lucerne would be somewhat bitter in taste, but all the relatives and friends were let into the joke, as it was termed, and the child took the eating and chewing of the lucerne quite seriously. After a few months of this treatment the parents wrote me that the child was absolutely transformed. When he had been having the lucerne tor a month he was also once a week given a calf’s sweetbread—what is generally termed sweetbreads. I am sorry that I do not think it advisable to tell my readers which gland or sweetbread was used in this case, because different gland? have different effects, and in some casco they might do harm. Four years have now passed since the experiment, and the parents are so grati fied with the result and the permanency of the improvement that they have asked me to make it public. Naturally I am pleased with the result, but what I would like to point out is that many of us might do good if we “swopped” ideas. For instance I obtained this idea through studying cattie food years ago, and I suppose those studies, together with the study of soil, were the first steps to studying huinar foods and fitting me for this work that' I love, but an orthodox doctor would be afraid of being held up to ridicule if he advised the eating of lucerne. Yet he might prescribe, and did prescribe, sone of the tonics which the lucerne contained, but Mother Nature the chemist put up the drug in a different form from that put up by the human chemist, and so tr.e child’s stomach and system did not rebel. I would willingly hold out the olive branch of co-operation to any medical practitioner who wished to increase his know ledge by assimilating things which I learned in another school from his. I recognise that I can accomplish only limited amount of research and influence a comparatively small number. Further, the time will come when mentally and physically I shall need a rest, and 1 am open to help others carry on the work. I do not mean by this that I am pre pared to train amateur dietitians. To put it in another way. If a man has reached the stage of being able to do high-class glasshouse or grafting work he would be wasting his time by teaching amateurs to dig. But if there are doctors or others who are honestly out to gain increased knowledge of the effects of food on the health, then I am quite prepared to assist them. This case alone shows the necessity in the name of humanity for greater co-operation.