My Old Grandmother...

New Zealand Listener, Volume 13, Issue 333, 9 November 1945, Page 9

My Old Grandmother...

N a recent A.C.E, Talk called "How Well Did Our Ancestors Feed?" it was mentioned that lecturers on nutrition have frequent trouble with the "grandparent" argument: "My grandmother never heard of a vitamin but she had 12 children and lived to be 90." This argument with its many variations can be answered partially as it was in this talk, by the statement that our ancestors sometimes had a very good diet-better perhaps than ours. But the point that I think should be made strongly in this. case is a matter of arithmetic. If a grandparent is robust, fertile and longlived, it has a great many descendants to remember it and to use the grandparent argument about it. If it dies, say of T.B., at the age of 30, it will leave only a few descendants and be unknown to them. Anyone who dies really young is naturally nobody’s grandparent and is quickly forgotten. So that when we cite healthy grandparents we are holding up for example those few who have successfully survived. They are often far from being typical of their generation. The A.C.E. promises to return to this subject later in the year. When it does so it could strongly justify its case for better nutrition, and prove the progress already, made, by indicating in no uncertain terms the wide extent of ill health in the past- even if it means harrowing us with stories of scurvy and beri-beri, declines and wasting diseases, convulsions and apoplexy.