330 READINGS IN BIOLOGICAL SCIENCE 



that it must arise from special necessity. Along the Guinea Coast south- 

 ward into the Congo and for some distance eastward in Africa, the eating 

 of human flesh is today the main part of the diet of some tribes and the 

 market in human flesh is just as commercial and free from ritual as the 

 cattle market in the United States. This market undoubtedly owes its 

 existence to the need of foods containing adequate amounts of minerals 

 and proteins. 



The popular vitamin craze in the United States is evidence that the peo- 

 ple have awakened to the danger of nutritional deficiencies and are at- 

 tempting to correct them. The unfortunate fact is, however, most people 

 are not aware that vitamins, essential as they are to health, are merely activa- 

 tors. In the absence of the appropriate minerals, proteins, and other 

 nutrients taken by the plants from the soil, the vitamins have nothing to 

 activate. Moreover, some professional students of nutrition question 

 whether the synthetic vitamins and mineral salts purchased at the drug 

 store are not considerably less beneficial than vitamins and minerals taken 

 in the form of vegetable and animal foods. 



According to Dr. Parran, more than 40 per cent, of the American people 

 did not consume enough milk and milk products, citrus fruits, green vege- 

 tables, and meats to maintain good health and vigor; their diets were partic- 

 ularly deficient in calcium and the vitamins A, B complex, and C.** Under 

 wartime food restrictions they ate of necessity more of the energy- 

 generating carbohydrates and less of the protective foods which maintain 

 the organism in good development and repair. 



The author has seen no published reports on this subject, but during the 

 war physicians told him orally that the efltects of food rationing had ap- 

 peared in decreased resistance to illness, particularly in the case of grow- 

 ing boys and girls. "They look all right on the outside," said one busy 

 pediatrician of his patients, "but on the inside they haven't got what it 

 takes." This was in America, whose civilians as compared with those of 

 Europe had scarcely been touched by the war. 



A tragic glimpse of how war ravaged the civilian populations of Europe 

 with diseases of degeneration was revealed in a report from Paris by A. J. 

 Liebling.^° Liebling stated upon the authority of Professor Pasteur Vallery- 

 Radot, a physician of the Academie Fran^aise, that 54 per cent, of the chil- 

 dren born in Paris during the German occupation had rickets. Due to de- 

 ficiency of calcium and phosphorus in the diet, the bones of adults broke 

 "with sickening ease," and French physicians reported cases of adults who 

 lost as much as four inches in height due to the effect of this deficiency 

 upon their vertebrae. Similar tragic conditions were found in Poland, 

 Yugoslavia, Italy, Greece, and elsewhere. 



Despite the fact that the science of genetics holds acquired characteristics 



® Nutrition and National Health, The Technology Review, June, 1940. 

 1° Letter from Paris, The New Yorker, November 4, 1944. 



