DIET AND HEALTH

Dominion, Volume 13, Issue 305, 18 September 1920, Page 7

DIET AND HEALTH

WHEATMEAL BREAD RECOMMENDED. ■ (Published under *he authority of tho • -Education. Department.) Some mention has been made of the importance in diet of certain' vital elements of nutrition, known as vitamines. A diet composed of purified foodstuffs from which vitamines are absent will not sistain life for more than a few monjhs. Partial deficiencies of vitamines, which may not bo sufficient to cause actual brcadown, are yet a cause of defective nutrition and lowered resistance- to disease. Tftese deficiencies in the diet of children are many times More serious as their growth demands a comparatively rich supply of such.vital nutriment. Bread has been rightly named tho staff of life. It forma by far the greater part of'our diet. It is of prime importance, therefore, that it should be as nutritions and a3 complete a food as possible. Wheat contains a comparative abundance of these vitamines. but in the process of milling by which -white flour is made tho vitamines are completely removed. White ' flour not only is wholly deficient in. vitamines, but has been deprived of more • than 50 per cent, of the lime and "other salts of the grain. Animals fed on white bread and water die earlier than others given water alone. It is, of course, possible to mako good the deficiencies of white bread by other foods, but in practice this is seldom done, hence the pravalance of dental decay and rickets in New Zealand children. Rickets, although its exact cause has not yet beon finally ascertained, is a disease or mulnutritiori in which deficiencies of vitamines and like salts appear to take a part. , Along with the excessive consumption of manufactured 6ugar tho, use of fine white flour, according to . Dr. J.' SimWallace, Dr. Stanley Colyer and many others, is a prominent cause of: dental decay. Only since the introduction of highly-refined flour has dental decay assumed flhe proportions of a national and even world-wide problem. The billsticker does nob make his paste of wheatmeal, but of the finest white flour. In the same way white bread sticks ifa pasty n.asses in- ilhe crevices of the teeth. Especially when combined with sugar, as iir bread and jam,, sweet biscuits or cako, it tends to-remain there' and destroy tho protective enamel of tho teeth.

It) cannot "be too often repented thatowing to the war the use of flour containing a greater proportion of the wheat grain and the restriction of- sugar, resulted in an onormous decrease of dental decay in t'ihe school children-of England. The lessons of the war have been many, and not the least, important are those showing the relation between diet and health. The greater use'of wheatmeal bread,-especially in lflie diet of children, fe strongly urged for the prevention of dental decay, and for the improvement of their general health. ■