HEALTH AND POPULATION 58 1 



made out and the knowledge distributed by propaganda methods, 

 as in Europe and America. In some tropical countries outside 

 Africa this is already being done. In Malaya, for example, sheets 

 are published showing dietetic values of all the principal foodstuffs, 

 and a tropical diet chart illustrates a number of minimum diet- 

 aries. Professor Rosedale of the biochemical laboratory at Singa- 

 pore has been active in spreading knowledge in Malaya by such 

 means. Some of the results are apphcable in parts of Africa, and 

 the Malayan sheets are exhibited in the food section of the museum 

 at Zanzibar. 



Further studies may be divided into two stages: (i) the survey 

 stage, consisting of general studies of existing conditions, combined 

 with surveys of the distribution of diseases, and (ii) the experimental 

 stage, consisting of detailed work on individual villages where ex- 

 periments can be made by changing the dietary. 



The contribution of the social anthropologist to dietetic studies 

 has been elaborated in detail by Raymond Firth (1934), and the 

 results of anthropological work on diets in Northern Rhodesia have 

 been published by Dr. Audrey Richards and Miss Widdowson 

 (1936), and in the Northern Territories of the Gold Coast by M. 

 and S.L. Fortes (1936). There have also been several local studies 

 by Government officers, sometimes of medical and agricultural 

 departments in co-operation; for example, in Uganda two agri- 

 cultural officers and a medical officer recently made a joint 

 nutritional study in the Teso district; in Tanganyika similar 

 surveys are in progress. Expert medical investigation seems to be 

 essential in such surveys, since many variations in the incidence of 

 disease are associated with differences in diet. To take the 

 most obvious case, a meat-eating pastoral tribe is likely to suffer 

 from lack of carbohydrates, while a neighbouring grain-eating 

 tribe requires animal protein. Africa, at the moment, may be 

 compared with a nutritional laboratory in which innumerable 

 experiments on controlled diet have been progressing for a hun- 

 dred years or so. Much may be learned by simply collecting the 

 results of these experiments, but this knowledge will be far more 

 difficult to attain in a few years time when local food customs have 

 broken down with the disintegration of tribal organization. In 

 some parts of the continent, moreover, there are living isolated 



