DON’T SPARE THE LIME

Lake County Mail, Issue 43, 31 March 1948, Page 7

DON’T SPARE THE LIME

By the Department of Health

See that your household is not short of calcium. You can ensure that everything that comes out of your garden is as rich in calcium as possible by regularly liming your soil —unless you kiiorv from a soil analysis that it is already rich in lime. See that your family are milk consumers, for milk is the best of the lime-containing foods. Cheese is next best. Milk, cheese and vegetables for calcium —for future New Zealanders tall and virile, and with better teeth. Our main sources of calcium are milk and cheese; poorer sources are vegetables of all kinds and eggs. If therefore, we arc not milk drinkers nor partial to cheese, Ave depend mainly on our vegetables. Y our garden soil should not be allorved to be short, in lime.

Good home gardeners use plenty of lime at the appropriate season. Not only do they increase their yields many times, but their vegetables are rich in calcium, which is essential to our diet.

New Zealand dietary surveys show a grave shortage of calcium in many households. It means our growing children will he smaller honed and frailer than need he, or will have) poorer teeth than they should. This calcium shortage means soft teeth which won’t last well in adult life. It means that our grown-ups will break their limbs more readily than they should. For, if your intake of lime is insufficient the body makes up by taking it from your bones. We canlive on our bones for quite a while, drawing on our capital in calcium, but the bones become thinner and softer. That is sometimes the reason why old folk will break a limb in a tiny slip—they have been living too much on tea, bread and butter, and have been short in milk, cheese and vegetables.