88 READINGS IN BIOLOGICAL SCIENCE 



suited in cooperation sufficient to carry out such a medical sur\^ey at little 

 or no cost to the government. The surveys as conducted were made at 

 considerable cost to our tax-paying citizens. 



Is that the only evidence of national malnutrition? Do our hospital 

 records, our mortality statistics, our medical examination of our young 

 men for the Army and the Navy point to a nationwide malnutrition in 

 America? Mortality statistics, even were they reliable, would only reveal 

 extreme malnutrition. They would not tell us much about early stages 

 of malnutrition. Between three and four thousand people are recorded as 

 dying from pellagra (a disease due to an inadequate diet) each year. There 

 is no recent rise in this category. Of course, there are many more people 

 sick from pellagra than people who die from this disease, possibly 

 as many pellagra patients as 100,000 in our country each year. Advanced 

 scurvy is now almost unknown in the United States. Beriberi is some- 

 what less rare, especially if we include those cases due primarily to 

 chronic alcoholism and consequent failure to eat enough good food. 

 Rickets is not a killing deficiency disease. We may have anemia from 

 too Httle iron in the diet; but lack of iron is just one of the many 

 causes of anemia. So national mortahty statistics fail to answer our 

 question, but so far as they go, they do not point to a state of well-nigh 

 universal malnutrition in the United States. And the same is true of records 

 of our hospital admission. Of course, you may reply that doctors do not 

 recognize early stages of malnutrition. Well, if physicians don't, are WPA 

 workers and Washington politicians any more competent in this field? 

 According to Colonel Rowntree, M.C., U.S. Army, the first 800,000 

 Army draftees of 1941 examined were on the average 67^/4 inches tall, or 

 of the same stature as our 191 7-1 8 Army draftees, but our 1941 draftees 

 averaged 8 pounds heavier than those of World War I. According to Gen- 

 eral Hershey rejections of draftees on account of underweight are so far 

 about the same as the rejection for obesity, or each around 4 per cent. So 

 you see even the story of our draftees does not point to a universal and 

 demonstrable malnutrition. According to the Statistical Bulletin of the 

 Metropolitan Life Insurance Company, the average length of life as com- 

 puted on the basis of mortahty of the company's industrial policy holders 

 in 1 94 1 was 63.42 years. This is an all-time high for the sixty years that 

 the company has recorded this information. This docs not support the 

 claim that one hundred miUion Americans suffer from malnutrition. 

 But I am not willing to go all the way in supreme optimism, as does Mr. 

 J. R. Hildebrand {National Geographic Magazine, March, 1942), who 

 asserts that our "machine food age — born of roads, research and refriger- 

 ation — has made the United States the best-fed nation in history." We 

 have the food to do it, had we the intelHgence. 



Well, what happens to us when we do not eat enough good foods? Can 

 we know, without asking a doctor, when we suffer from malnutrition? 



