MAN'S FUTURE

Rotorua Morning Post, Volume 1, Issue 201, 18 April 1932, Page 6

MAN'S FUTURE

NIGHT-MARE PICTURE DISCOVERY OF NEW VITAMIN MAY GREATLY ALTER LIFE. DEFORMATIES OF PHYSIQUE. Will the human being of the future, through development of concentrated foods, end as a stomachless creature, shorn of his lower limbs, and forgetful even of the joys of a "good dinner," asks H. J. McKay, in the Sydney Daily Telegraph. The discovery of vitamin D in a pure state is announced. One ounce of this substamce is sufficient for the proper development and growth of more than a million children. This is merely a roundabout way of saying that one two-thousandths of a grain of the elusive substancfe given during one child's period of growth would keep it bealthy. It would not, of course, given alone, support life. And an overdose might mean death; cats have been killed experimentally with large doses of this vitamin ("large," relatively speaking, , for the amount was only a few grains). \ The outstanding discovery in dietetics of the twentieth century is the importance of the vitamins and mineral salts as health-preservers. To suport life, vitamins A, B (two kinds of this), C (also duplex), D; E, and F, together with salts of calcium, magnes'.um, sodium, potassium, iron, copper, manganese, nickel, cobalt, zinc, and some others, as well as iodine, silicon, phosphorus, and fluorine are necessary. Mere fractions- of a grain are needed; but drop any one of these, and the living being sickens and dies. But the gross' total of the food we eat consists clvefly of proteins (which replace waste) and carbohydrates and fats. (which are fuqls or en'ergy-pro-ducers). Experiments on animals prove that these can be cut down to a hitherto unbelievable extent, so long as the body gets its vitamins and minerals.

Much Waste. This signifies that most of what we eat is waste. We eat huge platefuls of food merely to extract the infimtestimals from it; we have developed all the intricately-coiled apparatus ' of our internal economy to perform this extraction, and (secondarily) to deal with elimination of th? waste or "roughage." Consider the "unhandiness" of most articles of diet. An apple is 82 per csnt. waste; white beard, 84 per cent.; potatoes, 78 ditto; lamb chops, eggs88; and even milk is 70 per cent. This waste is, in most of these cases, water, which mea'ns that if these foods were dried a lamb chop, for instance, could be packed in nearly one-fith' the space, and if compressed m addition would form a pellet as large as the average headache tablet. A three-course dinner could easily be concentrated into half a dozen or so tablets. All that is necessary is to add fractional quantities of vitamins and mineral salts, which are liable to be destroyed in the drying At the present t'me dietitians are opposing this obvious development of scientific meal-taking. On all side? we hear the argument "Back to savagery" siressed. The human; organism (they say) is adapted to omnivorous feeding, and (in 'especial) to dealing with raw fru'ts, nuts, and vegetables — the diet of the ape man before he invented weapons and took to cooked flesh as his chief diet. Nature's Answer.. But Nature has her say. In the long span of time betwixt the Java Pithecanthropus and the modern gourmand, she has definitely got rid of a large portion of digestive tract dealing with vegetable diet, leaving as a troublesome rudiment of it the appendix.

For all we know this evolution toward a simpler tract is, as our food grows more easily digestible, still going on. The present craze for raw diet and "roughage" may be some thousands of years too late. Already sugars can be synthesised (made artificially) from a series of chemical processes beginning with formaldehyde, one of the simpler carbon compounds which is a by-product of manufacturing processes. It is the aim of synthetic chemists (especially in Germany) to eventually manufacture (by a series of laboratory processes on an econom'c scale) the simpler proteins. Fats are already practically made in the laboratory. Should these dreams prove realisable the necessity for elaborately stuffing the system with huge meals vanishes. Meal times could be cut out altogether. By this means we would gain (allowing one hour to each meal) forty-five extra days a «year. As mankind took to swallowing a few tablets instead of impos'ng the present huge strain on his digestive tract, the' latter would atrophy and become more simple. It would eventually become a rudiment— on a par with! our third eyelid, appendix, "tail," ear muscles, gill slits, body ha4r, canine teeth, tree climbing muscles, and third eye (now sunken into the brain). Together with the parell'sl wasting of his lower limbs as motor traction and aviation developed, man would lose the lower part of his body altogether, and become a mere globular thorax supporting an ever-develop'ng cranium above. A nightmare picture — but possibly foreshadowed by the latest discoveries of science.