Your Personal Health
By William Brady, M. D.
Dr. Brady will answer questions pertaining to health but not disease or diagnosis. Write letters briefly and in ink. Address Dr. Brady in care of The Tribune. All queries must be accompanied by a stamped, self-addressed envelope.
“There is no Justification,” says R. H. A. Pllmmer, distinguished British authority on nutrition, “for the statement so often made that white bread eaters get plenty of vitamin B from the rest of the mixed diet. The chief natural supply of this vitamin is in the seeds of plants, and if the germ and bran are removed from our staple cereals in the milling, the vitamin B is removed and its loss can be compensated only by the addition of some specially concentrated vitamin B food such as yeast extract. The amount of yeast used in ordinary bread is too small to be of any account.
A distinguished American authority, O. A. Cowgill says: “Students of nutrition now emphasize a greater use of the so-called ‘protective foods, which are primarily milk, green vegetables and fruits… Taking the distribution of foods characteristic of the average American diet described by Sherman as a basis of estimation, Jolllffe’ finds that one would have to consume dally a combination of 625 Qm. (1 & 1/4 pounds of fruit, 600 Gm. of potatoes, 880 Gm. of other vegetables and 1260 cc. (4 & 1/2 pints) of milk. This combination is, of course, impossible because of its bulk.”
It was Jolliffe, by the way, who made this comment on the change in food habit In this country in the past century, referring to the milling of wheat especially:
“It seems, therefore, that a 55 per cent fraction of the calories in the American diet of 1840 containing a minimum of 600 international units or vitamin B1″ (and of course proportionate amounts of all of the other entities or factors in the natural vitamin B complex) “has been replaced in the contemporaneous American diet by a like fraction containing only about 50 international units.”
The old fogy practitioners who assure people that a reasonably varied diet provides all the vitamins one needs and the half-informed chemists who assure people that consumption of the protective foods compensates for any vitamin shortage in other foods, have some explaining to do—but they never explain nor apologize for their mistakes. Like the great Pooh-Bah of the A. M. A., these experts who insist the grocery store and dairy and market is the place to buy vitamins can do no wrong. If they make mistakes they know the public is too dumb to remember. They have to explain also their Inconsistent attitude In regard to getting the vitamins we require to maintain good health and functional efficiency m the natural form (that is, as the vitamins grow, in food, such as vitamin B complex in wheat) and on the other hand bestir themselves so actively in promoting the so-called “restoration” of white flour—adding synthetic thiamin, which, they imply, will give people the vitamins our ancestors got from whole wheat flour a century ago.
Men, women or children who cannot or will not eat one-quarter pound of wheat germ daily should at least manage to eat that much or more plain wheat daily. For Instructions and recipes send stamped envelope bearing your address, and ask for pamphlet “Wheat to Eat.”
From The Bismark Tribune. Bismark, North Dakota. February 20, 1941.
