PRESERVATIVES IN FOODSTUFFS.

Star (Christchurch), Issue 18085, 19 February 1927, Page 1

PRESERVATIVES IN FOODSTUFFS.

»AKING the risk of UNKNOWN DANGERS. (Written for the “Star” by Dr 11. T. J. TIIACKER.) Preservatives are not prevention, save that they prevent a whole lot of semi-decomposed and rotting foodstuffs going to a destructor incinerator. There’s one way only by which food can be maintained fresh and wholesome, and that is by cool storing. Electricity makes cool storing a possibility in all homes, and a statutory necessity in all wholesale and retail shops that vend perishable goods. Should any preservatives at all be permitted? There is not the slightest hesitation in saying no addition whatever should be permitted. The addition of preservatives to sound and satisfactory foods is a serious risk. To the unknown risks is added the common one of various pollutions being masked or covered up by preservatives. This danger is real because those defensive human instruments, the nose, the eye, the smell, the taste are swindled by real and impressive camouflage. Coal tar figments and metallic colouring make our candies, and drinks look anything but. what they arc. Formalin and formaldehyde can in a twinkling turn a tainted salmon into a fresh article. Suitable Bait. Human beings are as suspectible to a suitable bait as any fish, fowl or animal. If not, how is it that our wonderful womenfolk pick out some of the husbands that they do? The law of England, 1927, has made it penal to use certain adulteratives that hid the truth. Who can tell what becomes of the benzoic acid in sausages, sausage meat, coffee extract , pickles and sauces, grape juices and wines; or the metallic colouring compounds of antimony, arsenic, chromium, copper, mercury, lead, zinc, or again the vegetable electrically charge all complete nature are not Nature's foods, and it is most evident they destroy vitamines which electrically charge all complete. Nature, foods, and these are until plucked and knocked about in transit and handling completely insulated elecrical units. Vitamines are t.he btood-stream fighters —those antibodies that kill infection or hold it at bay. If not., then they are so closely allied to them that one cannot be well without the other. Thev have not vet been bottled, but their actions arc detailed from clinical observation. Clinical Observation, Clinical observation, when carried out by a great mind and in strict accordance with scientific method, has achieved most striking results, results which are entitled to our highest admiration when we consider the extreme difficulty of the problems and the scanty means at. our command to solve them. Often, however, the results, great as they are and accurate as they are, lack the precision of detail that sometimes the experimental method is capable of supplying, and then the experimental method is responsible for the completion of that which has been trul}- founded by clinical observation. Health Education. Health education can be promoted °nly by emphasising all aspects of health—plmsical, mental, social, moral. The teacher of health should look for normal development of the child from all. of these points of view. The ideal of health is not mere freedom from obvious deformities and pathological symptoms. It is the realisation of the highest physical, mental and spiritual possibilities of the individual. You cannot have prize stock, fowl, bird or man, anywhere unless there is an educated, trained and experienced culturist. Mankind's is the doctor. Preventive Medicine.—l suggest that under adequate medical statesmanship Ibe rank and file of private practitioners of medicine must excel industries, insurance companies, and governments in their zeal for the promotion of preventive medicine. That is to sa)', under adequate medical statesmanship, the men in the private practice of medicine will deliberately set out to educate their clientele to look to physicians primarily for the care of health rather than for the cure of disease. Unfortunately, the people still look on doctors mainly as experts to be called in emergencies. On account of this shortsightedness of the people, doctors actually have a vested interest in ill health instead of a vested interest in good health. The prevailing attitude of 1 he people toward doctors actually puts a premium on disease rather than on health. In the main, doctors still secure their income from curing sick folk, not from advising well folk how to keep well. The tendency toward retaining doctors as health advisers is growing, but it is still a tiny tendency that affects the total health problem only slightly. Alan is a machine, and his fuel is Nature’s natural foods. Here is how he is being side-tracked and put on the toboggan slide to disease. Food Devitalisation. The present-day striving for ance and convenience has undoubtedly resulted in the devitalising and demineralising of many of our most important articles of food; this is especially true as regards flour, cereals, vegetables and fruits, which should contain and supply not only the essential vitamins but also the exceedingly important minerals and inorganic salts that are necessary for the encouragement of normal oxidation. Among these essential elements are iron and manganese, both of which are normal blood substances and both of which are needed to provide the mineral element required to oxygenate the blood and maintain its structural, integrity. Without a sufficient proportion of these oxidizing elements the circulating fluid is incapable of properly burning up and disposing of the useless portions of the food intake, and the entire organism is thus overburdened with the task of excreting an undue quantity of effete products, and toxemia results. Woman is innocently and subconsciously helping man to win out, for has she not to-day after 1000 years cast off that “preservative harness” the corset, for did it not preserve the figure? This article of destruction and deformity was first named in 1510 A D. and at that time was not .stiffened with steel traces or whalebones, it was modified to mould an overweight figure and to stuff a lean one. In the reign c»f Henry 111. appeared the real bodice of ■whale bone worn by men as well as w omen. It is said that Catherine de Medici must have imported this style from Italy; for a time it became all the rage- Its results were disastrous. It was at this time that Ambroise Pare, physician of the Hotel Dieu, showed his pupils on the dissection table the forms of young women whose corsets had so bound, compressed and displaced their vertebrae that thev were hunchbacked and miserably emaciated for lack of nutriment. Pare was thus the first doctor who took up anus in the name of health against the corset How did man escape so quickly and well?