154 Sanitary Studies of Baking Powders 



damage done by any of these products ? ' But may it not be asked in 

 turn : Are not many cases of illness probably due to the eff ects of such 

 substances in food, quite unknown to those who ascribe the sickness in 

 any instance to a different cause? It is easy to understand that rela- 

 tively very shght absorption of aluminium, day after day, may ulti- 

 mately (as in chronic auto-intoxications) develop biochemical inco- 

 ordinations leading to perverted function, def ective structure, decreased 

 resistance to disease, or other undesirable modifications of one or more 

 qualities or parts of the body. How many people have been obviously 

 injured by Saccharin, for example? Perhaps milHons have eaten it 

 without noting any hurtful result. Nevertheless, Saccharin has re- 

 cently been officially declared a dangerous sweetening agent because it 

 does exert injurious influences, and its use as a sweetener will soon be 

 prohibited by law. Yet, if this decision had depended on authentic 

 reports of cases of sickness arising from the ordinary use of Saccharin 

 as a sweetening substance, its prohibition would probably never have 

 been announced. So it is with aluminium. Alum baking power may 

 be injuring thousands without afifording any obvious sign of damage. 

 While doubt remains, its use should be avoided " {Gies). 



The applicability, to people, of the foregoing inferences from the 

 results of our experiments was rendered doubtful, two years ago, 

 by a brief preliminary report, on this general subject, by the Referee 

 Board of Consulting Scientific Experts of the U. S. Dep't of Agri- 

 culture.^ In that report the Referee Board stated that aluminium 

 was not found in the hlood of four men who served as subjects in 

 the Board's experiments.''' The Referee Board concluded, also, that 

 "alum baking powders are no more harmful than any (!) other 



6 Bulletin 103 : U. S. Dep't of Agric, Apr. 29, 1914. A more complete report 

 has not been published. 



'' The Statement on this point in the Referee Board's report reads : " Follow- 

 ing these experiments (length of interval not indicated) four men took i gm. of 

 aluminum a day each for several days (whether in aluminized food or othermise 

 is not indicated) — corresponding to approximately 10 level teaspoonfuls of alum 

 baking powder — and then their blood was tested to detect any aluminum that 

 might be present in it. (Amount of blood taken and method of estimation not 

 stated.) No aluminum was found in the hlood." (Nothing stated about tests 

 for aluminium in the urinc.) This quoted statement appears in the part of the 

 report that summarizes the share of the work done by Prof. A. E. Taylor, from 

 whose laboratory Schmidt and Hoagland published the method referred to (as 

 theirs) in the succeeding papers (2-7) of this series, in this issue. (Schmidt 

 and Hoagland : Jour. Biol. Chem., 1912, xi, p. 387.) 



