TRACE ELEMENTS NECESSARY
Nutritive Worth Of Foods of Xutntion.l In past centuries people had net the choice of foods whi cb we i have, generally speaking, today—they ate what they could get In I those days the average life spell! of a man was only 25 or 30 years' —as it remains today in some i countries. About the beginning of the last j century analyses of food and de-' fierminatiQn of the way in which l it is used in the human body! began to- be carried ©■rat in a num-! ' ber of chemical, physiological and; veterinary laboratories. As a result of all this work) [ most scientists came to the con-I i clusiGn that what was important; ■ in assessing the nutritive worth!' of food was the total calorie ! ; «energy-producing), value, pro-' teins being kept at a minimum. ! ! At the end of the last century j .' and' in the early years off this, fur- . ther research brought to light the! . fact that, besides the calorie-pro- j , ducing elements and the body- , building proteins, food contains; . small. but highly necessary, , amounts off other substances—the vitamins and. the so-called trace , '.elements.. [.. The assessment of nutritive value was not so simple as the [ earlier researchers had thought and, to drive home the points. • Eykman—one of the first scien- ' tists who had shown how neces- ’ sary these trace elements were to, ' nutrition—entitled one of his lec- • tures ‘‘‘Simplicity is no mark of • truth.” The lack of vitamins and trace ! • elements had already been responsible for the death of mil-1 ■ lions of persons through such iB- ■ nesses as beriberi, scurvy, and. t pellagra—now known as the de- ! fieiency diseases. The amounts of these newly- ■ discovered substances required by a human being are very small— ' for many of them a few milli- I grams daily, for seme only one' milligram or a fraction of a milligram. Indeed for the r ecentlydiscovered vitamin. 812 (cobalamin). only one thousandth part of 1 a milligram in the days diet is ; necessary. So it was that the earlier die-! turn: for human nutrition you need only make sure of enough ■ calories, plus a certain amount of protein, became changed to:! make sure you have enough protective foods (milk, cheese, eggs, meat and animal foodstuffs, vegetables and fruits) rich in vitamins, ti-ace-elements or proteins, plus enough calorie-foods (cereals,! •potatoes, and so on).
Permanent link to this item
Hononga pūmau ki tēnei tūemi
https://paperspast.natlib.govt.nz/newspapers/CHP19570430.2.76
Bibliographic details
Ngā taipitopito pukapuka
Press, Volume XCV, Issue 28264, 30 April 1957, Page 11
Word count
Tapeke kupu
391TRACE ELEMENTS NECESSARY Press, Volume XCV, Issue 28264, 30 April 1957, Page 11
Using this item
Te whakamahi i tēnei tūemi
Stuff Ltd is the copyright owner for the Press. You can reproduce in-copyright material from this newspaper for non-commercial use under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International licence (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0). This newspaper is not available for commercial use without the consent of Stuff Ltd. For advice on reproduction of out-of-copyright material from this newspaper, please refer to the Copyright guide.
Acknowledgements
Ngā mihi
This newspaper was digitised in partnership with Christchurch City Libraries.