Show FOR THE BETTER TOO even babies are affected by revised eating habits features LINCOLN chances are your great grandmother would have no more thought of eating a love apple than of flying to china but now we call love 4 apples p 1 es by the more prosaic name of tomatoes and not only eat them but drink em too that prove much except that peoples eating habits change the university of 0 nebraskan Ne braskas food and nutrition laboratory is trying to see to it that they change tor for the letter better take babies six weeks old for instance A lot of mothers would g gape ape in a astonishment if 11 you said why dont we give the baby a nice helping of meat today they might even tell you scornfully that babies dont get meat until at least nine months old babies like it yet dr ruth huth M leverton university nutritionist and two tri clans ians ha have ve been feeding meat to tiny liny bab babies es for some time now the babies like it and the results have interested even the american med leal ical association journal which doean doesn t get Inte interested very easily the big thing that dr lever ton ion and her associates associate i found Is that m meat em t added for eight weeks to the diets of babies as young as six weeks can knock out nutritional nutrition I 1 anemia this they a say Is important because that type of anemia Is common to bior most t infants the researchers dont pretend that blocking anemia from babyhood Is going to produce a race of super men and women bumieny do say that anemia ne m is keeps keep the human body little or big from per cent performance it may b be that freeing infants from anemia will let them gr grow ow strong enough to toss off some of the usual childhood diseases any way what dr leverton hopes and the laboratory Is assisting with further study along that line launch experiments the Iver itys food and nutrition laboratory launched its attack on en anemia aneal a seven years ago it found that mea meat t added to the diets of a group of coeds co eds reduced simple anemia during the war a second study revealed that meat was of benefit to blood bank donors next came a study of expectant mothers A meat supplement to their diets boosted their hemoglobin values which Is a fancy way of saying they did not become art anemic ernic encouraged by these results the researchers turned to babies when the study started strained meat for babies was not yet on the r market ez but meat processors coo cooperated cooperate and produced strained meat of custard consistency which could be added C to baby formulas since then a meat product has come on the market commercially in cooperation with doctors at chud child saving institute in omaha om aha at st thomas orphanage in lincoln and with a small group of parents the battle of babies versus anemia was beggin at the outset a third of an ounce of strained meat was added daily to the formulas for babler six fix weeks old this amount was increased until at the end of a week an average of a full ounce of meat a day was being added show marked gain records of child saving institute disclose that the 18 19 meat babies showed an average gain of per ce cent t in hemoglobin content of the blood et at the end of eight weeks their competitors 18 15 babies of the same age group and same general condition who did not get meat lost 10 3 per cent during the same period the red cell values of the meat eaters eater jumped an average ot of per cent while their competitors chalked up a gain ot of only 62 per cent nurses at me institute reported the babies who got ment meat seemed less fussy and slept better than their competitors the institutions pediatrician said the general physical condition of the meat eaters was better too results comparable to those at child saving institute were obtained at st thomas orphanage among the babies in private homes the records were not as spectacular c ular probably because the routine of care was not as exacting but even in the homes the meat eating babies showed no loss in hemoglobin content of the blood bind while their competitors peti tors who did not get meat lost 8 per cent it was this ability ot of the meat eaters to avoid hemoglobin I 1 loss oss that th the e researchers consider important according dr leverton it means that the protein in the meat diet kept the babies from taking the downward road to nutritional anemia |