FEMININEREFLECTIONS

Sun (Auckland), Volume I, Issue 243, 4 January 1928, Page 5

FEMININEREFLECTIONS

Ideal of Slimness

UNATTAINABLE BY EATING TOAST

Fond Illusion Shattered

For years past people who are stout have eaten toast in preference to bread, believing that it is less fattening, and that by its use superfluous flesh would presently disappear. Slim people who desired to keep a fashionable silhouette have eaten toast with the idea that it would prevent them joining the ranks of the bulky. But toasted bread as a remedy has been deprived of the lofty position by a man of science, who is publicly supported by at least one well-known medical authority. Professor R. H. A. Plimmer, Chair of Chemistry, University of London, in a lecture on “Common Errors of Diet,” denounced as quite wrong the proverb that something was as full of meat as an egg, because the egg had only half as much protein as meat, says a London correspondent in an exchange. It was a fallacy to believe that toast was less fattening than bread. What happened was that two pieces of toast were eaten instead of one stodgy piece of bread, and the toast was a much more concentrated food. The belief that water was fattening was quite erroneous, and the way to

become thin was to cut down sugar, flour and meat, and eat watery foods such as fruit. Doctors claimed marvellous cures for reducing fat by cutting off water, but all that happened was that ihe individual became more concentrated like toast, and less spongy, like bread. Adequate Day’s Diet Herring was better value than cod and cheese than meat. In all public dinners, and in hotels, the mistake was made of using protein as a body fuel. In a properly-balanced diet, one-sixth should be protein, one-sixth fat, and four-sixths carbohydrate, but rich people unduly increased the protein and the fat, and cut down the carbohydrate. An adequate day’s diet would be half-pint milk, one egg, 4oz of meat, or fish, 2oz of cheese, Boz of bread. lOoz of potatoes, Boz of cereals, and 2oz of sugar. No one food, he said, was a complete food, except milk for infants. Nearly every one of the national foods has been tampered with. Tinned fruit has not the value of fresh fruit. Highly milled grain has not the value of natural grain, and milk and eggs are

not as they should be if the animals I producing them have been improperly fed. Fatness and Foul Blood Sir W. Arbuthnot Lane, who has given special study to the subject of dietetics, agrees with Professor Plimmer that the belief that toast is an aid to slimness is a fallacy. “It is an actual fact —there can be no argument about it —that toast is just as fattening as bread. When bread is toasted only the water in it disappears. That toast is an aid to slimness is an old fallacy, and one very difficult to destroy. People who are fat will not get thin by eating toast; that is certain. The best thing they can do is to diet —and take plenty of proper exercise. Fatness is generally the result of foul blood. Fat is deposited in those parts of the body which are not moved sufficiently.” Sir Arbuthnot Lane insisted that not until fat people got their blood into a healthy condition by means of wise dieting and exercise would they attain their ideal of slimness.