THE MEDICINAL PROPERTIES OF BUTTER.

Waimate Daily Advertiser, Volume VI, Issue 9, 24 January 1905, Page 7 (Supplement)

THE MEDICINAL PROPERTIES OF BUTTER.

Butter is so common a commodity that people use it and scarcely ever think what wonderful value lies at their hands in the pats of dainty, yellow, cream fat. Of course, they know that it is useful in many branches of cookeiy, and that without its aid the table would be bare of its thinly-rolled bread and butter, its delicate cakelets and its other usual accessories. Beyond these uses the value of butter is a thing only vaguely thought of. But this delicate fat, says Science Siftings, is as valuable as the dearer cod liver oil for weakly, thin people, and the doctors have frequently recommended the eating of many thin slices of bread, thickly spread with butter, as a means of pleasantly taking into the bodily tissues one of the purest forms of Tat it is possible to get. Butter is a hydro-carbon, and all excesses of it are stored up as fat in the body. It gives energy and power to work to those who eat heartily of it. So it is not economy at table to spare the butter, even to the healthy folk. For anyone afflicted with consumption, butter cookery, if plenty fat can be digested, is one of the best ways of curing the disease, should it be in its early stages, or of keeping it at bay if advanced. In all our consumptive sanatoria, patients are urged to eat as much butter as possible, and it is no rare thing for a patient to consume half a pound of butter daily. Butter is not a simple fat, composcu merely of one sort. It is a mixture of no less than seven different sorts of fats, and no more complex oil can be taken than this. There is nothing new in these statements regarding the great value of butter in consumptive cases, vver fifty years ago it was recommended and used uy English and Scotch physicians. Consumptive patients were sent to farms and were enjoined to eat all the butter and cream they could stand with other foods consumed. The stipulation was added that both must be fresh, and no butter over three days old should be eaten. When the palatability of butter is consdered, why, asks the paper above referred to, should patients be asked to use the nauseous cod-liver oil that is generally prescribed in such cases. By all means physicians should prescribe good, fresh butter and let cod liver oil fall into innocuous desuetude.” German physicians, many years ago, prescribed fresh tallow, cut up small and boiled in milk till the fat was 'extracted, and the milk then poured off and drunk warm, in consumptive cases. It produced a sort of oleo, much more palatable than cod liver oil, and said to have a higher medicinal value. But fresh butter is still better, and it will be found, as a rule, that those requiring it in considerable amounts have a longing for it, a sign that nature recognises its virtues. Young children who are inclined to be weak and puny should be encouraged to eat as much butter as possible. It will be found that they generally have a craving for it. But use only good, fresh butter with fine fla-