THE DANGERS OF UNDEREATING

Gisborne Times, Volume XXVII, Issue 2616, 25 September 1909, Page 3 (Supplement)

THE DANGERS OF UNDEREATING

Few of the Little Tin Gods of our every-day life are more securely enshrined in the popular Pantheon than the widespread belief in both the virtuousness and the wholesomeness of undereating. We frequently hear it expressed, “If one would always leave the table feeling as if he could have eaten a little more he would never be sick, and would live to a good old age.” The rule sounds well, and it may be true, but there is no evidence to prove it, for it has never been tried in real life. Of course, like all popular beliefs, this one has a considerable element of truth in it. My protest is only against its indiscriminate application. In has its acceptance as a universal law and a curiously double origin. Naturally, it was recognised at a very early period that a certain amount of real easing,, with a reasonably frequent repetition of the ceremony, was necessary to life. Anyone who cherished any radical heresy or delusion of magnitude upon this subject soon died, and his heresy perished with him. Therefore the habit of eating survived and became popular. But it was early seen to have two serious drawbacks; it was expensive, and if one ate too much one became uncomfortable. Ergo to eat as little as possible, consistent "with survival, was a virtue.

This sounds both reasonable and convincing, but it overlooks two things: that appetite, “the feeling that you have had enough,” means something, and that Nature is not an economist but a glorious spendrift. She scatters myriads of seeds to grow hundreds of plants. Her insects of the air and her fish of the sea pour forth their spawn in thousands, nine-tenths of which go to feed other fliers and swimmers. Enough with her is nover as a feast; in fact, what to our cheese-paring, shopkeeper souls. looks like enough is to her far too little. If there be any operation of Nature which is conducted with less than at least 50 per cent, of waste it has so far escaped the eye of the scientist. Her regular plan of campaign is to produce many times as much as she needs of everything and let only the fittest few survive. Is it not possible that the same principle may apply in human diet, that we should eat plenty of the best of everything to be had, and let the body pick out what it wants and “scrap” the rest The man who attempts to save money on his butcher’s and grocer’s bills, seven times out of ten, is starving either himself, 'has family, or his servants. Economy may be the soul of wealth in business, but in the kitchen it is much more nearly the soul of starvation, and is usually practised at the expense of the younger or weaker members of the household. Like all business principles, it is excellent in its place, but its place is never in the feeding of young children. Eor instance, all careful students of the childproblem are convinced that the institutional or wholesale method of rearing orphan children is a failure and must go. A child reared in an institution, hospital, foundling asylum, or what not, is not much more than half a human being, and can usually be recognised by its dull eyes, pasty complexion, sluggish and lifeless movements and intelligence to match. Part of this is due to the barracks-like life and the absence of individual love and care, but no small measure of it is due to the fact that these children, fed by wholesale and with an eye to economy, are usually underfed, either by actual deficiency of calories or an excess of cheap starches in place of the more expensive meats, fats, and sugars, or by the deadly monotony of the fare. ( One children’s hospital, for instance, has had corned beef and red cabbage ' slaw for dinner every Tuesday for seven ( years.

THE MEANING OF APPETITE. What is the meaning of appetite, of the instinct for eating—the sense which tells us when to begin and when to stop? It is far too customary to regard this impulse as simply a mere animal appetite, inherited from generations of half-starved encestors as ravenous and as irrational as a hungry dog, which, if we give it the least right of way, is going to plunge us into all sorts of gorging excesses. Nothing could be more utterly absurd and untrue. The situation, to put it in a word is this: Man has always found himself under the stern necessity of eating in order to live: So stern was the pressure of mouths upon the means of subsistence that only those who developed a vigorous determination to eat-—in other words, had good appetites—couid survive. On the other hand, those who tended to eat too little for the fuel needs of their bodies lowered their vigor, fell behind in the race, and ultimately, were eliminated. On the other hand, those who tended to eat too much also impaired their efficiency, devoured their whole kill or crop in a few weeks, and also died ofF. Only those, whose appetites impelled them to eat just about the golden mean, neither weakeningly too little nor surfeiting]y too much, survived. ‘From an evolutionary point of view, the formation and persistence of any instinct injurious to the race is unthinkable, and in the dietetic field only the rational or moderate appetite could have survived. The main part of this gradual acquisition of an accurate, responsive, reliable apnetite-guide, had little to do with reasons or intention, scarcely even the consciousness —though these have played a part in the later stages—but was simply a stern and merciless weeding out through thousands of generations of those who did not have the right kind of appetite for survival. THE APPETITE TO BE RESPECTED. Obviously, the food-appetite, like all the race-continuing instincts, to be strong enough to 'keep the race alive must also be powerful enough to lead to occasional excesses. But the important point in the matter is that these excesses, like all other excesses of appetite, in the long , run defeat themselves, and the race is, as a rule, neither to the glutton nor to the asoetic, but to the man of moderate appetite. So that instead of treating our natural, unspoiled appetites as mere gross am mal impulses, which are more likely to be wroim than right, and which it is a positive Virtue to thwart and suppress Se overwhelming consensus of the best of opinion of the laboratory, hospital, the family physician, the. sanitor xum and the diet-latchen is that the appetite, is to be treated with thegreatest respect, is to lie thwarted only tor toe best reasons and m special emer "encies, and is, all things considerec ,

Enough with Nature is Never as Good as a Feast. What we Really Need is Pure Food and More of it. (By WOODS HUTCHINSON. M.D., in the “ Cosmopolitan.”)

the most reliable, indeed, almost the only active guide that we have in matters of diet. / ’ One of the most unfortunate popular misapprehensions within the last decade is that the findings of the laboratory and the results of_the highest and most advanced scientific experimentation in matters of diet and food fuel have entirely contradicted and undermined. —or at least, gravely shaken — all" our previous standards of dietetics. both popular and scientific. This has been chiefly due to a small group of well-meaning, and high-minded en-thusiasts—nine-tenths popular and onetenth scientific—who have sent out a flood of vivid and highly readable expositions of the damage, physical, economical, social, and spiritual which they firmly believe' is done to the t human race bv our gross and deplorable habit of overeating, especially of that dietetic fons et irigo mali, meat. The impression is an unfortunate one for two reasons: first, because it utterly represents the actual state of the case, inasmuch as at least nine-tenths of pure laboratory and abstract scientific opinion is still,, in the main, in accord with, and in heart support of, the prevailing dietetic standards; and second, because, while we cordially welcome intelligent honest investigation of every problem and challenge of every law or standard, no matter how important or apparently firmly fixed, it is not fair to ask us to accept evidence based upon experiments conducted by the large popular wing of this anti-over-feeding army upon single individuals—and those individuals usually the orators themselves—or by the small scientific wing upon mere handfuls of individuals for a few weeks at a time, as undermining and discrediting the results of our racial experience of hundreds of thousands of years, and of our scientific tests in barracks, hospitals, sanitoriums, and laboratories covering half a century and hundreds of thousands of subjects. ' THE NEW STANDARDS UNSAFE FOR CHILDREN.

The new views may be right, and, considered as illustrations of what men in tile prime of life and under favorable circumstances can stand in the way of deprivation of food without gross or apparent injury, they are extremely interesting. But to insist that the re-

sults apparently obtained under these circumstances and the rules derived shall be forthwith applied indiscriminately, and at the discretion of the victim or his guardian, to young and old rich and poor, sick and well, is not merely absurd, but, in men who may be presumed at least to have had the advantages of scientific training, little short, of reprehensible. It is safe to say fffitt "should these new r standards of dietetics be applied to children and to c’onsumptives, for instance, they would result in the sacrifice of thousands of lives every year as certainly as the sun rises and sets. Soldiers and college professors can live and survive on anything for certain periods—they have had to all their lives; bub the man in the street and the child in the gutter and the woman in the home are not adapted to such Spartan fare.

Noav what are these standards dietaries. these regulation fuel-require-ments, which our economist-reformers dismiss so lightly, as little better than mere arithmetical statements of inher-

ited prejudices in favor of overeating? About fifty years ago they first assumed definite scientific form in the laboratories of three- great German chemical pioneers: the famous Liebig. Pettenlcofer, and Voit. They set themselves carefully to work out the precise relations which exist between the amount of food taken, the amount of energy expended upon it, and the amount expended by the body in the form of work, growth, or heat. They were literally pioneers, for they had to invent most of their apparatus and make it themselves; but so admirable were their methods that their results have been

surprisingly little changed. Almost toe only departures from the standards which they established have been such as are due to the crudeness and necessary imperfection of their home-made apparatus. THE STANDARD DIETS. As a result of these experiments Petten'kofer and Voit laid down the now famous standard diets known as the subsistence diet, which is the smallest amount which will prevent starvation, the rest, light-work, moderate-work and heavy-work diets, ranging all too way from fifteen hundred calories or heat-umts for toe first, to forty-five hundred to the last. So thorough and careful was their work that, with all the perfection and elaborateness of modern scientific appliances, these figures have never been markedly altered by the thousands of tests both practical and laboratory to which they have been submitted. The changes that have been made are largely accounted for by toe imperfections of toe early apparatus and by a slight inclination to increase the liberality of the ration as the modern food-supply has improved and it has been discovered that more

work can be got out of the human machine by a more liberal supply of better quality of fuel. These dietaries, based, of course, originally upon the. net results of the experience of millions of years, have since been adopted as the working formulas of civilisation and tested thousands, yes millions, of time® upon armies in barracks and in the field, in prisons, in hospitals, , in toe commissary departments of railroad gangs, lumber camps, and the Suez and Panama canals, upon Arctic relief expeditions and exploring trips into darkest Africa, with toe unvarying' result that toe human engine develops power precisely equivalent to toe energy put in in the shape of food. In fact, the relation between food and work is as definite and as fixed as it is between coal and steaming power. Ex nihilo nihil fit, and any attempt to get a steady succession of day’s work out of the average human machine on less than three throusand calories of food is irrational and practically as impossible as lifting oneself by one’s boot-straps. A SENSE OF EXHILARATION IN THE EARLY ' STAGES «OF , STARVATION. One rather unexpected physiological fact must be borne in mind, which accounts for toe gratifying initial success often claimed for marked reductions in toe amount of food. That is toe curious, sense of exhilaration, of clearness and buoyancy .of mind, which comes in the early stages of starvation from any

cause. This Avas long ago discovered by religious enthusiasts and ascetics of all sorts, whose most valued and frequent means of reaching or inducing the trance condition was, and still is, fasting. To precisely what this singular mental state is due Ave Me at loss to decide, but it is as Avell marked a symptom both of starvation and, in the course of a chronic weakening illness, of approaching death as the sense of satisfaction and drowsiness after a heavy meal. The feeling is one of clearness and lightness and weakness of both mind and body, Avith the impression that one could work forever without groAving tired, and never would be fatigued again. The sensation is a pure illusion, fit only for the dreaming of dreams and the seeing -of visions, and usually lasts for only a feAV hours or days, during Avhich time the work done is of poorer quality than usual and smaller in amount, in spite of the sensation of buoyancy and boundless energy ; and is followed. by collapse or an apathetic condition with disinclination for any form of exertion. A LESSENED SENSATION OF FATIGUE A DOUBTFUL BENEFIT.

The only explanation that has been offered of this apparent diminution of the sense of fatigue, due to a low diet, is that, since fatigue is not due to exhaustion of our muscles, but to tlieir being loaded with the Avaste-products of their OAvn activity, and as these waste-products are A’ory similar to, if not almost identical Avitli, certain nitrogenous extractives produced in the digestion of meat, our muscles are not so rapidly loaded to the fatigue-point upon a diet consisting chiefly of vegetable substances as upon one rich in meat. This latter result, Avliile from one point of vieAV a disadvantage, may be, from another, a A'aluable protective mechanism, guarding us against excessive and laborious overstrain. As muscular overAvork, or over-strain is one of the greatest and most serious dangers to which our body is exposed, the apparent increase of endurance for forced spurts, from a lessoned sensation of fatigue, sometimes attained upon a A'egetarian or low-portein diet, may proA’e a very doubtful benefit. In fact, it is probably an injury and a detriment to the general vigor and resisting poAver of the body in the long run. No race or class of vegetarians yet discovered can stand the attack of infectious disease or the Avear and tear of war as Avell as meat-eaters or mixed-feeders, although some individual vegetarians accomplish remarkable single feats of endurance. One of the corner stones upon which our diet-economists base their claims

is that by diminishing the amount of food, and more thoroughly masticating and digesting it. they can thereby extract the last remnant of nutrition from it, and thus save the enormous Avaste which goes on upon ordinary diets Many of them, in fact, have boldly claimed that they can save 30, 50 and even 60 per cent, of the foodfuel ordinarily consumed and subsist on from one-third to one-half the standard, popular diets.

THE BODY WASTES BUT LITTLE FOOD.

Unfortunately for these claims, however. the reformers neglect to ascertain the exact amount of the food in our average or standard dietaries which actually goes to Avaste in the body.

This, of course, can be determined with as absolute accuracy as the amount of ash made by a particular kind of coal. It was one of the first things ascertained in the scientific study of nutrition, and the results, laid down as tables, have been corroborated a hundred times since. These show that upon ordinary diets, under average conditions only from 5 to 15 per cent, of the food taken into the mouth is discharged

from toe body as waste. Of beef, for instance, all but about 2 per cent, of its available nutriment passes into the blood, of milk all but about 3 per cent., of bread only 6 per cent, is wasted. How, out of an average of less than 10 per cent., our diet-reformers are going to save 40 per cent, is, of course, a puzzle to everyone but themselves. If their claims were true we would be justified in leaping to the logical conclusion of the Irishman who, when assured by an enthusiastic hardware dealer that a certain make of stove would save one-half of his fuel-bill, promptly replied, “Sure, thin, Oi’ll take two an’ save toe whole av ut.” This brings us to the question, what are toe diseases of underfeeding, and what are the diseases of over-feeding? To hear the extraordinary claims trumpeted forth on every occasion by the apostles of a slender regimen that “Man digs his grave with his teeth,’’ that gluttony is the deadliest vice of our age due to over-eating, and that the race is fast gorging itself into degeneracy and final extinction, one would surely conclude that the most imposing array of diseases in our text-books of medicine and the hugest totals in our death-lists would he found directly and unmistakably enrolled under the head of diseases due to overeating. On the other hand, from the incessant praises of plain living and high thinking we would confidently expect that all those who, either from necessity or from choice, practised this gospel of starvation would have a high longevity, a low mortality, and an obvious freedom from disease, and that under toe head of diseases due to underfeeding would be found a vast and eloquent blank. FEW DEATHS DUE TO OVERFEEDING. But what are the facts? Of the fortytwo principal causes of death in the United States census.of 1900, only three are to be found which are in any way due or possibly related to overfeeding —diseases of the stomach, diseases of the liver and diabetes. Two-thirds of the deaths due to these three causes have- nothing whatever to do with overfeeding, but even if w r e were to grant them in their entirety to the anti-food agitators, they would amount to only 3 per cent of too total deaths. Those diseases most often and confidently ascribed to overfeeding, such as gout, dyspepsia, apoplexy t obesity, neurasthenia and artoroiscierosis, are such insignificent factors in toe death-rate that they do not appear in the list of principal causes at all. too other hand, those diseases which are either directly due to underfeeding or in which the mortality is highest among those who are poorly fed and lowest among those who .are abundantly fed—consumption, pneumonia, diarrhoea! diseases, typhoid and inanition (a polite official term for. starvation) • —account for a death-roll' of; 250,000 victims, or nearly 30 per cent, of all the deaths. Diseases even possibly due to or aggravated by overfeeding, 3 per cent; diseases certainly due to, or aggravated by underfeeding, 30 per cent. THE FRUGAL POOR HAVE THE HIGHEST DEATH-RATE. Jt is a roal surprise to some of our smug pseudo-philanthropists to learn from the stern and unimpeachable evidence of the mortality and morbidity records that the blameless and frugal poor have the highest death-rate, the

feeding are the pestilences of the poor, that SAveep them away by the thousands and by the millions. Two-thirds of the patients who came to us, as physicians, from whatever Avalk of life, are underfed. Even gout has little to dp with over-eating, and nothing at all with red meats. “Poor man’s gout” is just as common as ‘ ‘rich man’s,” now that we have learned to recognise it. To paraphrase Gotlie, “Food, more food,” is our cry. EA-ery increase in the abundance. the cheapness and the purity of our food supplies lowers the death-rate of the community an notch.

highest disease-rate, and the lowest longevity-rate of any class in the community. The same statement is equally true of nations. The most abundantly fed races in the Avorld to-day are those which are in the van of the world’s progress. The measure of spareness and the slenderness of the diet of a race is the measure of its backwardness and stagnation. We have heard so much baseless fairy-tale and poetic cant about the healthfulness and the endurance of the blameless Hindu and the industrious Mongolian that it really comes almost as a shook to us to discover, Avhen Ave are brought Lice to face with, these interesting peoples, that their Avorking efficiency is from onefourth to two-fifths loss than that of the meat-fed white • man; that their death-rate is from double to treble that of the civilised races; and that the average longevity of the Hindus, for instance, is barely twenty-three years, as compared with some forty-seven years in our American Avhites. Ten days of practical observation abundantly demonstrate that the only reason on earth wliv a Hindu or a Chinaman or any other Oriental lives upon a diet of rice, or pulses, or vegetables, is that he cannot afford anything better! The sole cause of a vegetarian or loavportein diet in any race is -plain poverty. The moment that a Chinese or a Hindu in America begins to earn something like a white mairs wage he abandons his former diet and begins, as he expresses it, to, “eat American.” As soon as he does so he increases his Avorking power from 20 to 40 per cent, and diminishes his liability to disease in the same proportion. FAMINES FOLLOWED BY EPIDEMICS.

Finally, apropos of the diseases of underfeeding versus those of over-feed-ing. I would call attention to the significant fact that practically every prolonged famine is followed by the outbreak of some epidemic. In fact, from one-half to tiro-thirds of the deaths in a famine are due to some

form of fcA-er, Avhich the loAvered nutrition of the victims has allowed to gain a foothold. There are a dozen diseases, from typhus and typhoid to cholera and plague, which are known by the significant name of “famine fevers.” If any epidemic or widespread disease has ever resulted lrom over-feeding or folloAved on the heels of a too abundant crop, it has entirely escaped the eye of medical science. PURE FOOD AND MORE OF IT. To sum up: Nature is no fool, nor has she been Avasting her time these millions of years past in sifting out the best, both of appetites and individuals, for survival. A certain definite amount of fuel-value in food is essential to life,

health, and working poAver, and a surplus is ne\ r er one-tenth as dangerous as a deficit. Particularly is this the case in groAving children and in women during the reproductive period. It is doubtful, in fact, whether these two classes can be induced, to absorb more real, sound, wholesome food than is good for them. The vast majority of our diseases of dietetic or alimentary origin are now recognised as due to poisons absorbed with the food, or resulting from its putrefaction. What we really need is pure food and more of it, instead of less. The diseases of q.yer-fee*ling are chiefly the pathologic amusement of the rich, and exercise a comparatively trifling influence upon the death-rate. The diseases of under-