The Bony Skeleton

New Zealand Listener, Volume 10, Issue 260, 16 June 1944, Page 18

The Bony Skeleton

(Written for "The Listener"? by DR.

MURIEL

BELL

Nutritionist to the

Department of Health)

GRUESOME title, which I thought might give me the excuse to recount a tale of the New Zealand hospital in which I was working during a certain earthquake. The man who attended to the pipes and heaters told me that when the ‘quake occurred, he happened to be bending down in front of a certain case in the nurses’ lecture room, and suddenly the skeleton began to kick him!

We began in my previous article a series dealing with the minerals needed by the body. We learnt that four-fifths of the body’s minerals are contained in the skeleton, and that these bone minerals consist chiefly of calcium and phosphorus, The calcium and _ phosphorus are laid down in a certain proportion in the skeletal structures; hence the importance of a certain proportion of these two substances in the diet of growing children. Too little calcium may therefore lead to "low calcium" rickets, while too little phosphorus may lead to "1 Qw phosphorus" rickets — though usually rickets is due to insufficient vitamin D, which in some unknown way is necessary for the proper deposition of the calcium-phosphate into the growing bone. Milk is a food in which calcium and phosphorus are present in the right proportions and the right amounts for proper bone-growth; add vitamin D in the form of cod-liver oil, and maintain the general health of the system, and you have the conditions right for proper development of the bones. These minerals are particularly needed during the whole period when new bone is becoming calcified. This process begins somé time before a child is born; hence the need for good supplies of these minerals in the dietary of the expectant mother and even more so in the case of the nursing mother. That is one reason why the mother is advised at these periods to take 1354-2 pints of milk (whole or skim) per day. Such a programme is a possibility in New Zealand; in countries that are short of milk, other means are being devised -for example, in Germany powdered egg-shells are being used. age also a large supply of calci is meeded all through childhood and adolescence. At All Ages Calcium is required at all ages; the amount contained in a pint of milk safeguards the needs of the adult for the day. Bone acts as a reservoir for calcium; if more is required than is present in the food, the body draws on this reservoir, and if this occurs over a period of years, the bones ‘become more readily subject to frac tures sin old age. _._ Calcium is one of the minerals that is in short supply in many dietaries in New Zealand. Phosphorus is not often ‘in short supply-at least not in human -_dietaries, as far as we are able to calculate. ‘However, we need to say something about the presence of these elements in our soil,