MILK SURVEY OF THE CITY OF ROCHESTER 55 



Those are the characteristics of animals in the second half of life, or even 

 much earlier, where they are fed on diets affording wide variety and 

 which might fill the need of a dozen years ago, but not properly dieted. 



"We find on examining the diets of mankind that there are large 

 groups of specially employed people in cities who are purchasing almost 

 all of their food supply from a grocery store or meat market; and our 

 system of food distribution has led to the development of certain lines 

 pi food products which can be handled with little hazard by the grocer. 

 Those are the cereal products; wheat flour, rolled oats, rice, corn prod- 

 ucts ; various kinds of canned goods ; tubers such as potatoes, sweet pota- 

 toes, and meat. These things are the staple articles of diet. That class 

 of foods in no combinations has ever succeeded with experimental ani- 

 mals beyond simply bringing them up to partial completion of growth, 

 and faulty performance of the functions of adult life; low reproductive 

 ability; high infant mortality. 



"This same kind of diet supplemented with an abundance of green 

 vegetables makes a diet sufficiently complete to make the type of human 

 beings we see among the Chinese, the Japanese, and the Philippines. Dr. 

 Reiser told me that in his experience a full grown, middle aged Philip- 

 pine who had grown up on a Philippine diet, a diet of meat, vegetables, 

 cereals, grain and fish, would, when he went into the Government em- 

 ploy and was fed up according to European standards, the average adult 

 Philippine would gain about 30 pounds in weight. These are undersized 

 people, not because they do not have enough to eat, but because it is not 

 properly selected. Their diet is capable of bringing up to adult life, but 

 not capable of promoting physiological well being to the extent which 

 is reached in the United States. 



"We find on examination of the situation through visiting nurses 

 and city health authorities, certainly in Baltimore, that large groups of 

 employed people who derive so large a portion of their diet from meat, 

 cereals and tubers, are the ones who furnish the very high mortality every 

 year from tuberculosis. Here again human observation correlates very 

 nicely with the observation on animals. When we feed animals on a 

 faulty diet, we find they may come up for a time and look fairly 'vigor- 

 ous and normal up to the point where they cease to grow, a little under- 

 sized ; they fail at an early date ; by the time they reach the age of half 

 way through what the species is capable of, they will begin to go down 

 hill; they do not simply die of malnutrition, but at a certain point in 

 lowered vitality they are susceptible to infection of one kind or another; 

 some die of tuberculosis and some of pneumonia; some infectious dis- 

 ease usually takes them off. That is what happens in the course of famine 

 conditions in the world. In the first place, when the population passes 



