IS N.Z. BUTTER SUPERIOR TO DANISH?

Shannon News, 6 October 1922, Page 4

IS N.Z. BUTTER SUPERIOR TO DANISH?

OPINION OP A WELL-KNOWN M.D. In the course of a lecture on Milk and its Influence on Health, delivered by Dr. H. Hardwiek Smith before the Red Cross Society in Wellington recently, after detailing the various substan- i ces comprising milk, he said that milk. | was the sole article of diet for babies i for the first months of life, and during the next few years entered largely into the diet of the growing child. If it was so important, did it not. behove them to see that the all-important food contained the essentials of life and to rid it of any .death-dealing germs which might be present in it. They may not know that the vitamine value of milk ’ varied not so much in this country, but chiefly in the colder climates of Europe and North America. In the long winter months, when grass ceased to grow, stock had to be fed on straws and dried foods. This diet, whilst fattening the cows and allowing them to give a plentiful supply of milk, caused the milk to be deficient in the life-growing vitamines, so that a child fed on that diet -was liable to develop rickets and other diseases of malnutrition. Milk in New Zealand was obtained all the year round from cows fed on grass in the open. They did not realise that advantage; it meant' that the milk was perfect as a food, because the vitamines in grass were passed into the milk as body-building and disease-resisting agencies. He often w r ondered why the butter distributors at Home did not advertise the fact that the cows in New Zealand were fed all the year round on pastures, whereas in Denmark for about six months in the year the cow r s were stall-fed.