VITAMINES 47 



boiled. Many of the advertised proprietary breakfast 

 foods and invalid foods are practically vitamine free. 



In connection with the antiscorbutic vitamine 

 in particular let it be called to mind that tinned 

 foods are largely used in poor households, for one 

 thing because they often need no cooking. In 

 these very households salads are rare, and during 

 those periods of the year when fruit is dear extra- 

 ordinarily small amounts of fresh food-stuffs are 

 consumed at all. 



Yet, it may be said, in spite of all this, beriberi 

 or pellagra or any disease like them is unknown 

 in this country ; and scurvy is, to say the least of 

 it, very rare. But disturbances in health may 

 exist without arriving at the extreme stage when 

 the appearance of a severe set of symptoms leads 

 to the recognition of actual disease. In particular 

 is this true of conditions of malnutrition, and, unless 

 the considerations I have put before you are wholly 

 baseless, malnutrition may arise irrespective of 

 the quantity of food eaten. It may depend not 

 upon insufficient food but upon badly- treated foods 

 or upon an ill-chosen combination of foods. There 

 is no point in all that I have said that I would like 

 to emphasise more than this. Absence of an essential 

 vitamine from the food means disease : but no 

 more than a relative deficiency of a vitamine may 

 mean bad nutrition. In my own opinion at least 

 the diets of the poor — and once again it is the 



