W. H. SEBRELL 



Store, the restaurant, and the lunch room. The educational material 

 has not been tied in with the food seller and distributor. Until nutri- 

 tion education is applied at the point of sale of food and the available 

 food is related to the educational material, we cannot expect to obtain 

 maximum educational results. Furthermore, the group to whom 

 education would mean the most, namely, the children, has been largely 

 neglected. Nutrition education in our secondary and high schools 

 still consists very largely of teaching the way to prepare appetizing 

 food. Litde attention is given to nutritive value, to nutritive losses 

 by various methods of cooking, or to the necessity for an adequate diet. 

 The chance to establish good food habits at an early age in the ele- 

 mentary schools is ignored. No attempt is made to correct bad food 

 habits established at home, and a golden opportunity is lost to establish 

 good lifetime food habits. Class room lectures and cooking classes 

 should be closely correlated with the foods served in the school lunch 

 room. A start has been made in this field also — and an increasing 

 number of schools under the stimulus of the Office of Education are 

 making progress in this field, but again we still have a long way to go. 

 Recently, great advances were made in our knowledge of the 

 effects of different methods of food preparation and handling on the 

 nutritive value of food as it is eaten. It is now well known that some 

 methods of preparation result in practically complete loss of some 

 nutrients, while other methods of preparing the same food will con- 

 serve much of its nutritive value. The effect of this knowledge of food 

 preparation on the population at large has not been material because 

 it has not been applied: we still have mashed potatoes, overcooked 

 vegetables, and the use of too much water in cooking; cooked foods 

 frequendy are held on warming tables for hours before consumption. 

 These are all well known as methods of handling food which result in 

 a high loss of nutritive value; much educational effort has been spent 

 on attempts to correct these practices. In addition, most of us eat 

 certain foods only because we like them and not because they are good 

 for us. Too many of our cooks do not know how to prepare food 

 that is both appetizing and nutritious. 



A new factor of great public interest has been introduced into 

 the nutrition picture by the discovery of the chemical structure of several 

 vitamins and the development of methods of synthesis on a commercial 

 basis. Here science has furnished us with a new, powerful, and valuable 



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