BACKGROUNDS

Food in Our Lives

HAZEL K. STIEBELING.

FOOD contributes to physical, mental, and emotional health. Food nourishes our bodies. When we eat in a favorable setting, we get another kind of well-being: A sense of belonging and other psychological and social values accrue from the pleasures of mealtime and from having our food with friendly companions.

People devote much time and effort and thought to food to producing the assortments of food that they need and want and to processing, distributing, and serving food in the places, at the times, and in the forms it is wanted.

People always have known they must eat to live children to grow normally and adults to keep strong. But food can do more than satisfy physiological hunger and carry psychological and social values. Modern science shows that all of us, regardless of purse, can add years to our life and life to our years if we apply knowledge about nutrition to our selection and use of food.

Both the kind and the amount of food are important to those engaged in strenuous physical work farmers, athletes, lumbermen, miners, to mention only a few.

Indeed, studies made by German physiologists in the 1940's showed that each kind of work activity requires a specific amount of food energy (calories) over and above the amount just to maintain life. For example, the output of miners in the Ruhr district directly paralleled the food energy available for work, which during and immediately after the Second World War was controlled by food rationing.

Management in industry in the United States and other countries became increasingly aware during the war of the value of providing good meals for the workers. Proper food during work hours made for increased efficiency of the labor force.

Brain and nerve are nourished by the same blood stream that builds brawn and bone. Persons of every age and in every occupation require food of kinds and amounts that enable their bodies to maintain the best possible internal environment for all of the cells and tissues.

THE GENERAL ASSOCIATION of diet and health comes from many observations.

Wilbur Olin Atwater, the first director of investigations of nutrition in the United States Department of Agriculture, commented on the contrast between the great beauty of the children and young girls in some parts of the Appalachian highlands and the prematurely aged appearance of the women by the time they reached their mid thirties. Dr. Atwater attributed this condition largely to the poor nutritional quality of diets in that area in the 1890's and early 1900's.

Major General Sir Robert McCarrison, a British physician and the director of the nutrition research of the Indian Research Fund Association from 1927 to 1935, was impressed by the great differences in stature and physical well-being of people in different sections of India. He fed laboratory animals rations much like the diets of the different groups. He concluded that diet was a major factor in the differences he observed in the longevity and health of the people.

Lord John Boyd-Orr, a Scottish physician and scientist, studied the nutrition, physique, and health of two African tribes for the British Medical Research Council. He described the superior stature and vigor of members of the tribe that had an abundance of milk and meat. He compared their condition with the lesser stature and vigor of the tribe whose food was primarily cereals and other foods of plant origin.

Margaret A. Ohlson and her research colleagues in the State agricultural experiment stations in Iowa and Michigan reported in 1948 on the dietary practices of 100 Midwest women 30 to 70 years old. The women who were in good general health had borne and reared healthy children and had no history of chronic or debilitating disease. The women in poorer health, although well enough to take part in the day-by-day life of their families, often had too little vitality to do much else. Their medical histories recorded chronic disease processes and many complaints of vague ill health, such as fatigue and irregularities of digestion. The women who were in good health were drinking more milk and eating more eggs, vegetables,and whole-grain breads and cereals than the less healthy group. Dietitians, psychologists, and physiologists of the College of Medicine of the State University of Iowa studied the importance of breakfast to men of all ages, college women, and schoolboys. Physical and mental efficiency was sustained better throughout the day when they ate breakfasts that supplied about a quarter of their day's needs for protein and calories than when they omitted the morning meal.

We of the 19th and 20th centuries were not the first ones to link wellbeing with the quality and sufficiency of diets.

Dr. Mary Swartz Rose, researcher, author, and the first professor of nutrition in Columbia University, abstracted Biblical history in these words:

"In an ancient chronicle [Daniel I: 1-15] we may read: 'In the third year of the reign of Jehoiakim, king of Judah [607 B.C.] came Nebuchadnezzar, king of Babylon, unto Jerusalem, and besieged it.' When the city fell into his hands, the king ordered that certain noble youths, 'well-favored and skilful in all wisdom,' be selected for training as courtiers. They were to have a special education and a daily portion of the king's meat, and of the wine which he drank. Living a carefully prescribed life, at the end of three years they would presumably be fit to stand before the great monarch.

"One of these youths 'with knowledge and skill in all learning and wisdom' objected to the dietary part of the program and purposed in his heart that he would not eat the king's meat nor drink his wine; but the prince of the eunuchs, who had him in charge, protested, saying, 'I fear my lord the king.' The young man countered with a reasonable proposal: 'Prove thy servants, I beseech thee, ten days; and let them give us pulse to eat and water to drink. Then let our countenances be looked upon before thee, and the countenance of the youths that eat of the king's meat.'

"This seemed a fair bargain and so the nutrition experiment was undertaken, with the result that at the end of the ten days 'their countenances appeared fairer and fatter in flesh than all the children which did eat the portion of the king's meat. So the steward took away their meat and the wine which they should drink and gave them pulse [peas or other leguminous seeds or porridge]'; and when at the end of their probationary period the king examined them they passed with a score ten times better than all the magicians and enchanters in his realm."

THE SCIENTIFIC EXPLANATION of why food makes a difference comes mainly from well-designed experiments in nutrition with domestic and laboratory animals whose metabolic, or life, processes have points in common with or can be related to those of human beings. Only in species of relatively short life can an investigator follow the influence of diet on growth and on health throughout the life span and through successive generations. Only with lower forms of life can the effects of different diets be compared while keeping other environmental conditions rigidly constant.

From long experience with domestic and laboratory animals, Prof. Elmer V. McCollum, of the University of Wisconsin and of The Johns Hopkins University, has concluded that human diets could contribute to what he called the preservation of the characteristics of youth if they were richer than average in certain components of food the nutrients calcium and vitamins A and C. He gave the name "protective food" to foods rich in these nutrients. Outstanding for these nutrients are milk, dark-green and deep-yellow fruit and vegetables, and citrus and some other fruits and vegetables that are important for the vitamin C they contain.

Maintaining certain of the characteristics of youth for a large part of the life span is important to the individual and to society. Creative thinking and outstanding productivity have tended to occur oftenest in early adulthood, especially during the thirties.