Gluttony—Disease—-Dope

Sun (Auckland), Volume II, Issue 388, 23 June 1928, Page 23

Gluttony — Disease —-Dope

“ . Many things sweet to taste Prove in digestion sour.

(Written for THE SUN by DR. H. T. J. THACKER.)

MODERN civilisation is merely a babyhood in the span of human evolution. Present-day humans are like so many kiddies playing with fire sticks or razor-blades, burning or cutting their fingers as they become more venturesome. The toy balloon lies frozen in arctic seas and the seasonal kite “Southern Cross” has dived through the partial vacuum of space between California, Suva and Brisbane —just by the skin of its teeth. It thrills and joys us as does the quick steal by the urchin son of some mother’s hidden treasure trove. Are we above the apes or do we just contain parts of them as we do parts of other living beasts? Who of us at times that cannot see the tragic likeness to some lower animal in our human brother or sister? We are at the whims and fancies of our ductless glands and their civilised diet —civilised diets and “good nourishing foods,” so called, that starve or overfeed our ductless glands. Why do humans smoke, drink tea, coffee, alcohol, and soft drinks? Why do we swallow down cereal mushes and starchy sugar messes instead of chewing and salivating fresh, natural uncooked foods? Why and yet why? We cocktail an appetite and then dope it with a saltpetred woodbine. At lunch we load a “sinking” petrol tank, and then without the simplest reason, we flood our carburettors with afternoon tea three hours later. Our poor gastric organ gets no chance to expand and get its house in order for its biggest job, our evening meal, dinner. The best and easiest way to get chronic nervous dyspepsia is to become a tea-and-bread-and-butter liver, with its fast-fluttering heart and its sense of impending danger. Our evolutionary substations. our ductless glands, never get their natural foods and stimulators —vitamines, those live electric units that cannot be cooked or bottled. Every living thing needs must carry something. The streptococcus of scarlet fever carries infection, death or future rheumatic disablement. A fly carries anything. A bee carries its wax and honey. A bird carries with its beak and a dog with its mouth. The mouth has evidently been the pre-human method of carrying. Can it be, then, that this ingrained instinct is why first man and now woman, per mouth, carries pipe or cigarette and simultaneously perfumes or fumigates person and surroundings? Smoking is a selfishness that is only akin to raucous midnight hoots in a city area. Smoking is felt, and seen at its worst in wowser-ridden prohibited U.S.A. Gluttony is a debauch of any kind, from ice-cream candies to

bootleg hooch—through heroin dop: and nicotine festivals. Are these th implements of evolution for the elimii ation of the unfit, or are they th brain deflections caused by a vrron. diet to our ductless glands? Gland therapy now fills our drug gists’ benches, our ancestor animal’, glands, raw and uncooked, are bein: called upon to supply the deficiencie. of their human cousins. Our goitr: glands are overtaxed thyroids—-thy roids that cannot neutralise by the! secretions the over-plus toxins o; digestion. All these glands act ii harmony. Upset one and they are al out of tune. Perhaps the most important ductles: gland is the pituitary, placed undei our brain, just behind our eyes ami at the root of our nose. It is the bandmaster of the orchestra of endocrine glands. Give it a debauch ol sugar, starch, chocolate, cocoa and it responds with that tense so-called "bilious headache” that sends madame to bed with anti-pain equipment. These coal-tar products produce a systemic vaco-dilation and the pituitary gland congestion is relieved, then comes drugged sleep, perverted digestion, depression and the call up of a stimulant —alcohol, tea, coffee, coco-cola. These caffeine fiends are becoming matters of grave concern. Caffeine has a direct tendency to create Bright’s disease, as the burden of its elimination falls mostly on the kidneys. Paint a rat or guinea pig three times with coal-tar and it almost unfailingly develops cancer. Indiscriminate inhalation of petrol fumes is beginning to cause lung cancer. Any constant irritation of epithelium anywhere will cause cancer. Cancer to-day is beginning to rival heart disease as the captain death producer. “It isn’t the mountain ahead that wears you out, it’s the grain of sand in your shoe. Be master of your petty annoyances and conserve your energies for the big worth-while things.” Soon the light of our world —the sun —will cross south to us. Out of the dry mat of last autumn's grass will spring the green leaflets of spring, everything in our so-faf-civilised wild soul will call out to us to get out to our former wilds, to gorge of the green thereof, and to cast off our winter lethargy. Who says; Can we spare the time? We can, and pick it up again at the end of our three score years and ten. Needs must we heed the magic pipes of Pan. or we grow old and the sap will not rise in our sere and withered branches, stiffened with the twinges of gout or the fashionable “neuritis.” To sit a.lone with nature is not time wasted, but a “brain duster” of which the Chinese wisely saith, “If you have two loaves sell one and buy a lily.”