VITAMIN B

Wanganui Chronicle, Volume 80, Issue 136, 10 June 1937, Page 6

VITAMIN B

Sir,—ln answer to your correspondent, the sources of vitamin B are:— Vegetable extract, whole grains and wholemeal, vegetables and fruit, nuts, eggs, wheat and rice bean, peas, beans, lentils, and cellular organs such as liver, kidney, and fish roe. Vegetable extract is both preventive and curative; rapidly so, if adequate eliminative treatment is adopted, of infantile paralysis. It should interest your readers to know that, commenting upon the effects (including paralysis), on the nervous system, of a dietary deficient in vitamins and disproportionately rich in starch, Major-General Sir Robert McCarrison says:—

“Long before nervous symptoms supervene, others, such as loss of appetite, impaired digestion, diarrhoea, colitis, unhealthy skin, low temperature, slow respiration, cardio-vascular depression, progressive anaemia, and asthenia result from deficient and illbalanced food. Do not these form a disease syndrome which is, in children especially, as familiar as its cause is unrecognised? It will be shown in the course of this book that such evidences of disease as those I have just recounted manifest themselves as certainty when partial deficiency is protracted over long periods as when more extreme deficiency is experienced over shorter periods. It is no doubt of great importance to be aware that food deficient in. certain vitamins will ultimately cause nervous symptoms of a definite order. . . But since these are end results, it is of still greater imoprtance to realise that the same faulty food will give rise more early to gastro-intestinal disturbance and other forms of vague ill-health; and that these, like the nervous symptoms, can be prevented (as well as cured) by supplying the necessary vitamins and adjusting the balance of the food.”

What possible object your correspondent, "M.N.0.,” can have in attempting to bolster up the dying belief in germs as the cause of infantile paralysis, or of any other disease, one cannot help wondering. Disease is due to unhealthy living. Germs when associated, are secondary. As another correspondent recently pointed out, the maggots under a dead dog were a consequence, not the cause of his demise. Disease, germs are scavengers; they live on effete matter; they do not attack healthy people. Therefore, as I said before, live healthily, good people, and you’ll have little to fear from disease—l am, etc;, ULRIC WILLIAMS.