NATION OF INVALIDS.

Hauraki Plains Gazette, Volume XXXVII, Issue 4936, 8 February 1926, Page 3

NATION OF INVALIDS.

FAULTY METHODS OF LIVING.

SURGEON ATTACKS OUR DIET,

Avoidable ill-health coSite the country the astounding sum pf more than £1,000,000,000 a year. Nearly 90 per cent, of the health troubles and diseases of civilisation could be avoided.

These remarkable assertions have been made by Sir W. Arbuthnot Lane, the famous surgeon.

"I have no> hesitation in stating tna.t the financial burden of avoidable ill-health and disease is very much heavier than that imposed by our war debt,” he writes in the Fortnightly Review. “The heaviest .tax of all is our tax on health. It inflicts a calculable burden of £500,000,000 a year on the nation in the form of lost earnings, and it inflicts an additional im■post of considerably more than £500,000,000 a year on the people at, work, because their working power and efficiency are reduced by physical malaise and mental depression consistent upon it.

' “I have come to the conviction that of the health troubles and diseases of civilisation approximately 90 per cent, are quite unnecessary and are comparatively easily avoidable.” Sir William blames “injudicious feeding, and faulty methods of living” for the ill-health of the civilised world. His cry is “back to natural foods.” He asserts that we throw away the most valuable constituents of our food, and that we over-boil our vegetables. He advocates brown bread and brown sugar. WHITE BREAD, “Preserved food, chemically treated food, tinned food, and p,vei cooked, sloppy food have taken the place of our time-hallowed diet,’ he says. “With the assistance of modern machinery we extract the inner skin and the germ from the wheat, leaving the dead white flour, r and we have the outer iskin polished off our rice, bailey, etc. Providence has put the most valuable constituents of our food into the veiy portions which we give to animals or throw away. “We boast of this age as being the health age. Yet there was never a time when disease, in the true meaning of the word, was more prevalent than it is, now. Of ten people one meets, nine complain of more or less impaired health. At no time in the world’s history was the taking of medicines as much in evidence as it is to-day. To millions of people medicaments have become as, necessary as their daily bread. UNKNOWN ILLS.

“Among primitive races leading primitive lives' indigestion is almost unknown, and so are appendicitis, colitis, gastric and duodenal ulcer, gall stoneS', etc. "While .certain diseases such as tuberculosis are swiftly being eliminated, others, such as cancer, the various, diseases pf the digestive tract, arteriosclerosis, heart disease, insanity, and others are increasing in a very alarming manner. "Nerve troubles, which are becoming ominously prevalent, are by no means due to the rush of modern life, as so usually stated. The most nerveworn among the people are . not the rushing city men who gamble with fortunes every day, but are seamstresses, and other people who lead a quiet life, and who subsist on white bread, margarine, jam, and strong tea with plenty of white sugar.’