OCR Text |
Show Most Workers 'Starved' For Vital Food Elements Nutritional science supplies the solution so-lution to the problem of how to attain at-tain "buoyant health" in a single word vitamins. In most cases the failure to enjoy buoyant health is due to vitamin deficiency. In the past two clecades a tremendous amount has been learned. Recently Doctors Stiebeling and Phipard of the department of agriculture agri-culture made a careful survey of the diets of working people from coast to coast They found that half of those workers lived on poor diets; 35 per cent could call their food "fair." Only 15 per cent had diets that were good. The chief difference between the "good" diets and the "fair" and "poor" diets was in the amounts of vitamins and minerals they contained. con-tained. Eighty-five workers out of a hundred, although they might be getting enough food by bulk and weight, were in realty partly starved for vital food elements. Early last spring, when our own national defense went into high gear, the Nutrition Group was organized or-ganized at the California Institute under the headship of Dr. Henry Borsook Dr. Borsook and his associates as-sociates have conducted nutritional surveys, carried on clinical work with vitamins, analyzed foods and performed studies of the effects of vitamins on human beings. They proposed to see how their new knowledge could best be put to the service of national defense. The old idea that if people got enough to fill them up they were getting get-ting a good diet has been proved erroneous. er-roneous. There must be not only enough food to provide energy and repair wear and tear, but enough vitamins for the body to use this food efficiently. The amount of vitamins any of us needs daily is amazingly small. A person can be healthier on a little food nd plenty of vitamins than on plenty of food and too few vitamins. |