NUTRITION 87 



At the National Conference on Nutrition for Defense, held in Washing- 

 ton, D.C., a year ago, Dr. Thomas Parran, chief of the U.S. Public 

 Health Service, said: "Studies of family diets by the Department of Agri- 

 culture in all income groups of the Nation show that one third of our 

 people are getting food inadequate to maintain good health" and "less 

 than one fourth of us are getting a good diet." If this is true, that makes it, 

 not forty million, but about one hundred miUion Americans with an 

 inadequate diet, from any and all causes. The question is: Is this true? 

 These alarming claims for national malnutrition appear to be based pri- 

 marily upon a series of surveys conducted by the Bureau of Home Eco- 

 nomics of our Federal Department of Agriculture, assisted in some of the 

 field work and statistical analysis by the Department of Labor. These 

 surveys embraced some 4,000 urban and village families of various levels 

 of income and some 2,000 rural families of varying levels of income, se- 

 lected from representative regions of our country. The surveys consist 

 in reports from these families as to how much money they spent for food, 

 and what kinds of food were bought, and in the case of rural families, how 

 much and what kind of food they consumed from the crops on their own 

 farms. These field investigators (some of them on WPA) had to take or did 

 take the people's word for all these alleged facts. It is impossible to deter- 

 mine the degree of accuracy or honesty (accuracy as to memory) of what- 

 ever member of these families gave the facts or alleged facts to the enumer- 

 ators. 



Nor do the surveys indicate the amount of foods actually eaten or the 

 amount of food wasted. The latter factor is probably not inconsiderable, 

 particularly in the families of the higher income groups. I know of no 

 statistics on this point, but on the whole, my experience indicates that 

 the food waste at the table increases with the economic prosperity of the 

 family. 



On the basis of the kind and quantity of the food bought or grown on 

 the farms, the Bureau of Home Economics estimated the diets of these 

 families as excellent, good, fair or poor. We wish to point out that no 

 physical or medical examination was made of the members of these fami- 

 lies. Not even such a simple physical fact as the determination of the body 

 weights of the people involved seems to have been undertaken. I can 

 only express my great regret that the value of these statistics must so largely 

 be left up in the air as regards evidence for good or* bad nutrition in our 

 country by neglecting such an obvious factor as medical evidence of the 

 health status of these people concerned. Good medical examinations of 

 members of around 6,000 families in our country does not seem a super- 

 human task. I feel certain that if competent medical men in the U.S. Public 

 Health Service, in the Bureau of Home Economics of the Department of 

 Agriculture or in the Federal Department of Labor were not available, a 

 suitable approach to national and state medical societies would have re- 



