Sophisticated Diets and Man’s Health 
malnutrition in the pre-school child in tropical Africa if wage 
structures and custom allowed. 
However, coincident with the improvement in quality and 
quantity of available foodstuffs, there has occurred a population 
explosion which threatens to neutralize all the benefits in many 
parts of the world. 
We can examine certain changes which have occurred to 
a striking degree among the privileged nations of the Western 
world where population has not outgrown the improvement in 
quantity and quality of available foodstuffs. Among 
the parameters, two can be measured with sufficient 
accuracy to be incontestable. These are life expection and 
stature. 
Life Expectation 
The evolution of what we call Western civilization has 
coincided with a remarkable increase in life expectation. 
Figures produced recently by the Metropolitan Life Insurance 
Company of the U.S.A. show that this trend towards better 
expectation of life is still continuing in both sexes, being in the 
year 1960 an expectation of life at age 5 of 70.7 for white 
females and 63.8 for white males. These figures are far in 
excess of comparable figures in the U.S.A. twenty-five years 
previously and in all but a very few small regions of the world 
today. Negroes and coloured people in the U.S.A. have an 
expectation of life at age 5 of 66.2 and 61.9 for females and 
males respectively. Although it is possible that genetic factors 
underlie these differences between White and Coloured people, 
most students of life expectation and morbidity and mortality 
trends believe that the differences are due in the main to 
environment. The rdle of socio-economic factors among the 
total environment is well exemplified in differences between 
white and Cape coloured people in the Cape Peninsula of 
South Africa. These two populations have lived cheek by 
jowl for more than two hundred years in the same climate and 
exposed to the same infections and other stresses. The only 
important environmental difference between the two population 
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