IMPORTANT EXPERIMENTS

Timaru Herald, Volume CXLV, Issue 21216, 10 December 1938, Page 15

IMPORTANT EXPERIMENTS

DIET TO END DISEASE VALUE OF SKIM-MILK Recent medical discoveries have given rise to the hope that it will be possible at some future date to stamp out, or at least greatly reduce, the incidence of disease by means of diet. We know, for example, that certain diseases such as rickets, beri-beri, and pellagra are due solely to the absence from our food of certain essential elements known as vitamins. When those elements are restored to the diet the diseases are prevented or cured. More recent research suggests that diet may play a prominent part in the fight against the more deadly diseases caused by germs. Striking confirmation of this view has been provided by some experiments conducted by three workers at the London School of Medicine and Tropical Hygiene. They fed 100 mice on a normal diet. Another 100 they fed on a diet part of the oatmeal in which had been replaced by dried skimmed milk. Then they housed each batch with twentyfive mice Infected with typhoid and left them together for sixty days. The Perfect Diet The experiment was repeated three times. Each time the mice fed on skimmed milk resisted the Infection approximately twice as well as those without the milk. In the first experiment only 9 per cent, of the mice without milk survived, compared with 18.5 per cent, of those who had it. In the second the proportions of survivors in the two groups were 18.5 and 56.3, and in the third 39.5 and 75.5. Another interesting discovery w’as that the does fed on skimmed milk were more fertile than those without it, and the young gained w’elght more rapidly and were less liable to die in the first weeks of life. As the Lancet points out, in a comment on this research, the results are suggestive. If the addition of skimmed milk alone to the diet can double the power of resistance to infection, might not other foods enhance them still further? We have not yet reached the stage when dieticians can provide us with a diet that will enable us to resist all the attacks of germ infections. But these experiments give rise to the hope that we may one day do so.