A NUTRITION POLICY IN recent issues we have frequently drawn
attention to the problem of nutrition ; and the results of enquiries by scientists, such as Sir John Orr, by Medical Officers of Health, such as Dr. M'Gonigle, and a recent debate in Parliament have combined to emphasise the pressing importance of the subject. But perhaps no statement of the problem yet made deserves more attention than the Interim Report, published today, of the Mixed Committee on the Problem of Nutrition appointed by the League of Nations. In language intelligible to everyman it summarises the results of scientific research in the last 30 years, the information collected and analysed by its scientific and technical experts, and the con- clusions which the committee has been able to make. The economic aspect of the problem is also discussed, though only briefly; yet in these. 97 pages the com- mittee has presented an irrefutable case for a national and international nutrition policy whose results, if it were carried out, would be little short of revolutionary. For. the report is directed, through the League of Nations, to the Governments of the world ; if they do not choose to adopt its recommendations, it is because the world is too concerned with self-destruc- tion to be able to recognise the proper solution for some of its most serious problems.
The basis for the report is provided by the scientific discoveries which, in the last 30 years, have estab- lished the connexion between deficiencies in diet and deficiencies in health. " Malnutrition is manifest in the presence of rickets, scurvy, poor musculature, teeth of poor structure, anaemia, chronic' fatigue, poor condition of - the skin and subnormal growth and weight '! ; and it is believed that much general ill-health is also attributable to ill-feeding. Dr. M'Gonigle, in his recent book, Poverty and Public Health, has shown how far this is true in Great Britain ; Sir John Orr that ten per cent. of the population lives on a diet which is lacking in every constituent> necessary to health. The report gives other evidence. In 1933, among children in London Schools, between 60 per cent. and 90 per cent. were suffering from various diseases known to come from malnutrition ; in the poor quarters of Paris 20-30 per -cent. of the children are undernourished, in certain parts of Poland 25 per cent., and seven per -cent. threatened with tuberculosis ; in 1933, in the U.S.A., according to the Secretary of Agriculture, seven and a half million' children were undernourished; in 1917 nearly all the negro children in New York were suffering from rickets. These figures are merely illustrations from the evidence which has led the committee to the. " suspicion that a large part, possibly the greater part, of humanity may be ill fed or underfed." That suspicion is indeed well-founded ; it may offer some explanation why much of human life is cruel, diseased and ugly. But the same enquiries which have exposed this condition may also be used to cure it. For the diseases and physical de- ficiencies due to malnutrition are known to be caused by a lack of certain foods which have been classed as " protective foods " because they contain the chemical elements necessary if ill-health is to be avoided. They are eggs, fresh vegetables, cheese, butter, fruit and, above all, milk, which is unique in the degree to which it unites all the constituents necessary to health. And especially these foods are necessary to children and to mothers ; for it is in childhood and the pre-natal period that lack of a proper and sufficient diet produces its worst effects. It is by ensuring an adequate supply of the protective foods, especially milk, to all children and pregnant and nursing mothers that we can avoid a vast amount of preventable disease and produce a nation which shall be vigorous and healthy.
With this knowledge it would be possible to carry out a nutrition policy for the nation. Equally, it is impossible to do so as long as we and other coun- tries pursue our present agricultural policies. The recent debate in the House of Commons emphasised the pitiful inconsistency between" the Government's pious hopes of improved nutrition and its policy of agricultural protection. For the conditions for carrying out an adequate nutrition policy are a large increase in domestic production of fresh foods, milk, eggs and vegetables, dependence on imports for other foods, such as wheat, sugar, and meat, an increase in international trade, and a large addition to the consuming power of the poor. It must be noticed that such a policy is to the interest as much of the farmer as of the consumer ; and that, in fact, the creation of an agricultural economy devoted to the production of fresh foods is, for the Western industrial countries, the only sane method of achieving agricultural prosperity. Such an economy, however, demands a standard of life which allows everyone to buy and consume its products : the problem of malnutrition, like that of agriculture, is finally a problem of poverty. Both problems must remain unsolved so long as Governments, our own included, continue to hold the fantastic belief that the world's evils are due to over-production. There is, as the report points out, no doubt that agriculture is capable of that vast increase in 'production which is necessary if the nutrition policy is to be realised. And from such a policy we can expect health, sanity and peace : the policy of scarcity,- which we and all other *countries -are now following, promises us only poverty, ill-health- and war.
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