An Egg for Breakfast is Nature's Best Medicine.

Kaipara and Waitemata Echo, 12 June 1914, Page 8

An Egg for Breakfast is Nature's Best Medicine.

IMPORTANT DISCOVERY OF STTF-

FICIENT IN AN EGG TO PEED

OUR NERVE CELLS 'ONE DAY

Eggs have long been regarded as extremely nourishing, a good food for invalids and also a good, light food for breakfast, but it is only recently that the important discovery was made as to just why the egg is actually one of nature's best medicines. It has been learned that in the yolk of the egg there are 16 grains of lecithin (pronounced "leck-eh-thin") and for a long while physicians have been administering to certain nervous patients daily those of this valuable lecithin amounting to 15 grains ! Lecithin is a glycerophosphate. Its exact chemical name is mono-amino-phosphatide. It is found, as already told, in eggs, about 16 grains to the average sized hen's egg. But lecithin is also found in much smaller quantities in many • her body tissues. It is now recognised that if we starve our body, evil results hap■•n. Our body demands many different ch(-i ' als to feed it, these chemicals being the same matter as constitute our various cells. If it should so happen that in all we eat there is nothing to feed these cells, death would quickly follows. If wo starve part of these cells, illness follows. Each of the cells needs building up with the same chemicals as it is actually made of. Thus a medicine made from the thyroid gland of a sheep works 'wonders with human beings whose own thyroid glands arc deficient. And so it is with nervousness, really a very dangerous disorder. The cells that control nerves must not be starved. For nervous people physicians have been administering from three to five grains of ; lecithin three times daily ; thus the maximum amount of lecithin given nervous people has been fifteen grains. ] This is what makes the discovery that there is lecithin in eggs so remarkable, for whoever eats an egg in the morning is taking -into the system sixteen grains of lecithin. Some authorities have gone so far as to maintain that nerve centres depend upon lecithin, which is really a phosphatised oily subj stance found in the yolks of eggs. They declare that without lecithin our nerve centres cannot perform their proper functions and that : nerve and brain exhaustion really results from a poverty of lecithin in the system. This may be caused i through taking no diet that supplies sufficient lecithin, or through some fault that makes us expend more of the lecithin than we can repay. In cases of nervous people physicians have found that the adminis—J tration of lecithin corrects their nervousness and also causes such patients to gain in weight and to feel extremely well. If this is the case, an egg diet is extremely valuable, not only after fasting, as the early observers of Lent learned, but in the case of people suffering with nervousness and also malnutrition, for lecithin is a great aid to those who are not sufficiently notirished. The most fruitful source of lecithin is the egg, and it is also the easiest to procure. People who have been in the habit of eating an egg every morning and yet are suffering with some form of nervous disorder should probably increase their egg diet. It contains the extra lecithin that physicians now find ite needed for building up brain cells. Lecithin is not a food, but its presence in some foods, meaning in eggs, has a singularly good influence on growing organism, according to the scientists who have made these discoveries. Of course, lecithin is present in a good many food substances, but its quantity is so very slight, as compared with the quantity in an egg, that, for benefits from it, the eggs should be eaten. And so, these scientists have discovered your morning egg contains a substance which their investigations have shown is peculiarly adapted for cases of nervousness and malnutrition. In other words, the breakfast egg, held in such high esteem by so many millions of people for so many years, really takes on an added value and becomes more j than merely an easily digested, nutritious food—it becomes an easy-to-secure remedy for malnutrition and for nervousness, building up certain brain cells, enabling emaciated, nervous people to gain in weight and health.

Miss Millie Mills, a girl of fifteen, is probably the only lady bus conductor in Britain. Her father is the owner and driver of the omnibus which plies bet—wii St. John's and Woking. When she left school a year ago she took up the novel oc-' cupation, which she is still efficiently filling,