KEEP THE BODY WARM

Hokitika Guardian, 8 February 1929, Page 7

KEEP THE BODY WARM

FATTY FOODS FOR COLD DAYS. (From a Medical Correspondent in the London “ Daily Mail.”) Tin •re is a sharp and abrupt transi--lion from the warm air of a eomifori aide house or a modern office lo the chill of. the streets outside when Ihr temperature is helow free/,ill" point, as it has been lately (December). The reaction of this is common knowledge. It is best summed up in the popular phrase of “ catching cold.” T! io human body has its own centralheating organisation. Its furnace is the digestive system and its fuel the food that we eat. Food that is assimilated undergoes a chemical change indistinguishable from burning. Foods, like different varieties of coal, differ in their heat-producing value. The instinct that makes us long for fat bacon in winter and oehew it in summer is an inborn knowledge—which modern chemistry and old “wives’ knowledge has confirmed—that fats and oils are good fuels. OI’KNINC Til F l> ADI ATOR. The pipes are the blood vessels and the radiator the skin. When the hod' grows too hot there is an engineer-in-eliicif in the shape of a tiny cluster of cells hidden away in the brain who, as it were, turns a stopcock. AYe know nothing about it, of course. If these things were under our voluntary control we might die of cold in our sleep. Hut the effect of that change is, put into execution, a message, telegraphed along the tiny nerve-threads that are built into the walls of every artery, to open the blood-vessels of tin skin a little further, so that loss bl heat to the outside air may be increased. There is a water-cooling mechanism. Coo. which can be used when necessary. Yi'o call it the sweat glands, which are dotted all over the skin. It cools by evaporation, as the engine oi a car is cooled by a douche' of water and the subsequent rush through the air. When necessary the reverse process takes place. The same control that widens the radiator-pipes can contract them. The process takes time, ft is no' possible instantaneously to adjust every tiny vessel in the skin. That is the danger of a sudden change from hot to cold air. It patches the body in an unprotected moment. It leaves it chilled i.e.. in a temporarily abnormal condition, for the maintenance of an equable temperature is essential to the proper carrying on of the processes of life. T* gives the microbes which are always present in every healthy throat I’ opportunity, and the overwhelming stratgetie advantage of the element o! siiprise.