TALKS ON HEALTH.

Shannon News, 26 July 1927, Page 1

TALKS ON HEALTH.

(By a Family Doctor, in the Christchurch “Star.”) STRAINING THE HEART.

The heart is a much-abused organ. It has to work night and day. It begins to beat long before you are born, and goes on beating for a little after you are dead. There are no Bank Holidays for the heart. It is a common error to believe that when a man is dead beat after a race that the lungs are the distressed organs. The truth is that what is popularly c'aflled ‘‘the wind” is really the heart. The effeet of muscular action on the heart may be demonstrated by a simple experiment. Count the number of heart-beats —i.e., the pulse —per minute while you are Iving down at complete rest. You will find the number is about seventy. Now sit up and count again. ' The small amount of extra exertion in sitting up will send the pulse-rate up a few beats. Now walk round the room and count again. HEART AND LUNGS.

If vou want to appreciate the extra work'done by the heart, try punching into a punch-ball seventy times a minute, and then increase the number of punches to 120 per minute. You will soon feel sorry for the heart. Although the heart and the lungs are separate organs they work together in such close harmony that they may almost be regarded as one. Anything which interferes with the heart embarrasses the lungs, and vice cersa. When the anaemic girl arrives at the top of the stairs and cannot get her breath, it is her heart that is at fault, not the lungs. When a foolish young man, wishing to make an impression on his sweetheart by the manly exercise of smoking cigarettes, damages his heart, the first sign is breathlessness. THAT FEELING OF EXHAUSTION. Now we come back to the question of weight. Every extra stone of superfluous fat puts a decided strain on the heart. In thehot weather, we may pity the fat old lady struggling along with florid face and clammy skin. She weighs fourteen stone, and, for her height, the proper weight - should i be nine stone. Poor old heart! No wonder the old lady has to go into'a shop and ask to be allowed to sit down. That feeling of exhaustion is a sign that her. heart has had enough of it. If she walks along , much -farther the heart will'actually go on strike, and she will faint. A faint is a protest, in no uncertain language, from the. heart-mus-cle. Overload the motor car and put it at a steep gradient, and the engine will stop. THE CARDINAL RULES.

There are thousands of people whose lives would be happier if they would reduce their weight. Two cardinal rules must be laid down in connection- with this question of fat-reduetion. (1) The reduction must not be too rapid, or weakness will result. When you see an advertisement announcing a rapid reduction of flesh, avoid the stuff as you would the plague. It is dangerous; it probably contains some acid which prevents the digestion of food; it may accomplish what it claims and reduce the fat, but the end of the treatment finds the patient thin and with a ruined digestion. (2) The reduction of the quantity of food taken is far more'important than changing the dietary. For instance, a man may be told that potatoes are fattening; but that he may take lean meat. So, in his daily dietary, he leaves off half a pound of potatoes and eats an extra /three-quarters of a pound of lean meat. Result —he puts on a quarter of a pound of flesh and declares the treatment to be faulty. A WORD TO WIVES.

The whole household must combine to help dear old dad get his weight down. Wives often pride themselves on encouraging their husbands to eat. Dear creatures that they are, they look upon it as their first duty to provide good food and plenty of it for their precious husbands. “My John lias such a splendid appetite, he eats four square meals a day. ” Probably one and a half square meals would really satisfy his bodily wants. Really, mother, your aid John must not have that second helping of gooseberry tart and custard, if he is hungry give him a piece of dry bread. It is no proof of wifely devotion to overload his liver. We shall have to engrave on your tombstone, “She was a devoted wife and overloaded her husband’s liver.” A TWENTY-STONE MAN.

I object to over-eating just as much as I do over-drinking. I was in a tram the other day and sat opposite a man who had been drinking too much. A ladv asked that he might be put out of ‘the tram. Quite right, too. But seated near the bibulous one was a man weighing twenty stone, and I asked that he might be put out, because his weight proved him to be a man who regularly over-indulged himself three times a day. DO SOME WORK! If you are observant, you may have noticed that when a fire burns, coal is used up and disappears. If you know that, you will readily understand that the work of the body cannot be done on air alone: it requires fuel just as the fire does and the more work you do with your body, the more food do you use up as fuel. Therefore, to prevent the storage of . superfluous fuel in your body, you must do some work. Old John does nothing; after dinner he sits in the armchair, and that is about the hardest work he does. If he were to walk twice round the square three times a day and gradually increase the distance, he would be employing a valuable method of fat reduction.