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Kai Tiaki : the journal of the nurses of New Zealand, Volume XVI, Issue 2, 1 April 1923, Page 80

Occu- For Wo- For pation Example men Example .Men Sedentary Secretary 2000 Clerk 2300 Manual Labour Waitress 25C0 Shoemaker 2500 Muscular strength Laundress 3000 Carpenter 3000 Soldier or Navvy up to 4000 The Nutrition of Man. The nutrition of man, as I tried to show recently, is not a narrow, dry-as-dust question of merely stoking the animal furnace, but is our most fundamental requirement, affecting and calling for the co-operation of every tissue and function of the body, and reacting on the mind, feeling's and moral nature. It was the vision of a poet and seer that led Schiller to say: "Love and hunger rule the world." Most of the great contests of mankind — epic and sordid alike — have had roots not merely in patriotism, love, hatred, ambition or predatory greed of territory, but largely in the means of subsistence ; and what the countries of the world are contending for now is, of course, to a great extent, the ensuring of ample food supplies, fuel, and clothimg, for use or exchange. This is the essential economic relationship of nutrition and war — regarded from the point of view of cause and effect. But to the physiologist and humanitarian the problem of Nutrition presents other aspects. Recently I have described some of Professor Graham Lusk's work in America, as illustrating the daily application of science and system to improving the provision and use of meals in restaurants. I may refer now to what led up to his practical life-work. In a little book of some sixty pages, "The Fundamental Basis of Nutrition/ 7 written nearly 10 years ago, before the war, Lusk says: — "It seems as though mankind had a right to a knowledge of the foods which a bountiful Nature has provided for his use.

How We Came by What We Know. Lavoisier : "A true conception of the nutritive processes could only be formulated when a knowledge of the existence of the va rious gases was revealed . It was Lavoisier who first showed, about 140 years ago, thai when an organic substance burned, the products of combustion were equal to the sum of the original substance and oxygen. Oxygen had but recently discovered by Priestly. Lavoisier burned plants and found that carbonic acid and water resulted. lie therefore concluded that they contained Carbon and Hydrogen. Animals and Plants) contained Nitrogen in addition. This was the first analysis of organic material. "Lavoisier went further and found that an animal or a man, like a burning piece of wood, absorbed oxygen and gave off carbonic acid gas. He discovered that the process of heat production in man was due to oxidation. . . He measured the gases given off by the animal, in order to determine whether the heat produced could be accounted for by the oxidation going on. "He furthermore determined that oxidation in man was increased by giving him food, by causing him to do mechanical work, or by subjecting him to the influence of cold. "To the darkness of the history of the French Revolution belongs the fact that Lavoisier, begging, according to Carlyle, for two weeks more of life in order to complete his experiments, was guillotined thereby becoming the greatest sacrifice to the insensate fury of his age. Carl Voit and Rubner. "Carl Voit, to Avhom the world owes so much of its fundamental knowledge of nutrition, used to say in his lectures: "Continual decompositions of matter are ahvays going on in the living cells, and the energy liberated in these decompositions is the power upon which the motions of life depend. Phenomena of life are phenomena of motion.

:< ln truly poetical language, Rubner (Germany's groat authority during* the late war), the most eminent of Voit's pupils, has written: 'Mute and still by night and by day, labour goes on in the workshops of life. Here an animal grows, there a plant, and the wonder of it all is not the less in the smallest being than in the largest. ' "The Workshops of Life require fuel to maintain them, and a necessary function of nutrition is to furnish fuel to the organism that the motions of life may continue. Furthermore, the workshops of life are in a constant state of partial brekking-down, and material's must be

furnished to repair the worn out parts. In the fuel-factor and the repair-factor lie the essence of the science of nutrition . ' ' Lusk ends his introduction with the following reflection, called up by the death of a gifted and heroic explorer and investigator in Labrador : — ' ' The following lines convey the spirit of the lost explorer, as indeed they represent the spirit of all true investigators : Something hidden, go and find it, Go and look behind the ranges, Something lost behind the ranges, Lost and waiting for you. Go!"