NUTRITION 89 



And if we ask the doctor can he tell us when and what? The simplest 

 situation is this: Assuming absence of chronic diseases, if an adult does 

 not eat enough for energy needs he loses weight, if a child does not eat 

 enough for energy needs he soon ceases to grow. Any layman can strip 

 and step on the scales. The physical and mental impairments following pro- 

 longed inadequate intake of essential protein, essential fatty acids, essential 

 inorganic salts and vitamins are more insidious. They can not at present be 

 diagnosed even by the physician, unless they are well advanced, and by 

 exclusion of many other factors that may produce similar symptoms — 

 such general symptoms as decreased physical and mental endurance, de- 

 creased appetite, etc. The anemias we encounter in the population are 

 usually not due to too little iron in the diet. Nervous disorders and poor 

 intelligence are very rarely due to vitamin deficiencies. The signs and 

 symptoms of such dietary deficiency diseases as scurvy, rickets, pellagra, 

 beriberi, "war" edema (protein deficiency) any up-to-date doctor can 

 detect and eliminate. But no one (doctor or layman) can be sure in regard 

 to the early stages of these dietary deficiencies. We have recently been 

 told by a national committee of physicians, who should know, that one 

 of the first signs of malnutrition is decreased appetite, and that laymen 

 can diagnose their own state of nutrition by the state of their appetite for 

 food. This is too good to be true. If it is true, and it is also true that one 

 hundred million fellow citizens suffer from malnutrition, it is clear that 

 the American appetite for good food is sunk, and that it probably will 

 take something more potent than synthetic vitamin pills to restore it to a 

 level of national safety. 



This sounds discouraging, if not alarming, at least to laymen. Must 

 our national safety and well-being in the matter of nutrition be thus left 

 in the fog, pending further medical and nutritional research? Not at all. 

 America is a paradise in the matter of abundance and variety of all the 

 foods requisite for an optimum human diet. And if we are average normal 

 men and women, we still have our primitive urges of hunger and appetite, 

 notwithstanding recent published assertions to the contrary. How do you 

 suppose our ancestors carried on, in the total absence of modern knowl- 

 edge of food chemistry, vitamin requirements and the alleged necessity 

 of "a pint of milk a day"? I do not think Sioux Indians got much milk from 

 the wild buffalo. The American Indian had neither cows nor goats. And 

 yet he carried on. It is evident that for the greater part of human history 

 man did very well nutritionally by eating enough of all available varieties 

 of natural foods, guided by his hunger and appetite. Nutritional safety 

 lies in omnivorousness, in consuming, so far as possible, foods in their 

 natural states, and, in the case of fruits and vegetables, eating some of them 

 raw. Some of our malnutritions started with the processing, the refining 

 and the "purification" of such foods as the cereal grains, modern milling 

 processes shunting the most valuable part of these natural foods into the 



