SEPARATE DIETS

Wairarapa Times-Age, 9 May 1938, Page 5

SEPARATE DIETS

FOR HUSBAND AND WIFE WILL NOT MAKE LIFE PERFECT Separate diets for the ordinary husband and wife will not make married like perfect, according to leading Sydney dietitians. In Hollywood the other day, Miss Gladys Swarthout, the film starsinger, claimed that she and her husband had lived the perfect marriage for five years by eating separate diets and avoiding food which caused irritability. \ Miss Swarthout’s claim was supported by Mr George Bernard Shaw. He told interviewers in London that he and his wife had been on separate diets for 40 years, and so had avoided domestic irritability. Thomas Carlyle’s married life, he said, would have been much happier if his household had practiced the idea. “Yes, the idea of a separate diet to suit everybody’s tastes, which seems to be the general tenor of Mr Shaw’s remarks, is quite sound; there is, however, no medical evidence that separate diets alone will make every marriage perfect,” said Dr H. G. Wallace, senior medical officer of the Health Department. Irritability in marriage, he said, might certainly be brought about by unintelligent eating on the part of either husband of wife, and so it might be desirable for them to have separate diets. To say, though, that separate diets would solve the question of every unhappy marriage was an ambitious statement. There was no scientific reason why it should.