The Redwood gazette. [volume] (Redwood Falls, Minn.) 1873-1940, 1881-09-08
Milk rs an Aliment.

worth, of the ROYAL College of Physi-
clans, has recently put forth an impor-
tant paper in the Practitioner on the
insufficient use of milk as diet. and
shows the. serious effect of the neglect
of this indispensable nutriment on ma
tional health. His warning is most
timely in an age when so many artiti-
cial viands tend to destroy the appetite
for natures simple and normal food
supply. An eminent psychologist has
pointed out that while s'all other mat
tiers appropriated by animals rs food
exist for themselves or for the use of
the vegetable or animal OF which they
form a constituent part, milk is de-
signed and prepared by nature express
throughout the range of organization
that is SO prepared" Pure milk in
sufficient quantity is as necessary for
the body as pure air, but, as DR.. Duck
worth shows, its use even among those
who can afford to buy it has so de-
creased even in the rural districts of
Great Britain as to amount almost to a
milk starvation. The minimum guam
THY required for the preservation of
health. he calculates. is live quarts per
diem to family of ten, ana not less
than quart daily to each child. IF
this, or anything approaching this,
were the rule instead of the exception"
he is confident that the disease of
ricketts," in its manifold phases,
would be completely banished from this
country, and q much higher standard
of health and robustness would unQues-
tionably prevail"
If this conclusion holds at all true for
Great Britain it will hold much more so
for the United States. The humidity
of the British Isles insures COMPARE
lively equable climate, which makes
few heavy drains on the human system,
while in America, especially in the
West and Northwest, the ceaseless and
extreme alterations of temperature
and the aridity of the atmosphere,
which induces great waste of the body
by evaporation, make heavy demands
upon its store of energy. That store
can only be kept up by good nutrition,
which milk, combining as it does the
four great staminal principles of human
aliment. is SO admirably fitted to sup
ply. The prejudice which some enter.
tain against it, or the fancy that it dis
agrees with them, may be removed in
many cases by adding to the milk lit
tie carbonate Of soda or of lime water,
which will enhance its digestibility, and
when drunk for health purposes in large
quantities it is rectified by adding q lit.
tie pepsin.
There can be no question that large
number of men and women, inclined Ia
strumous and scrofulous habit, anemia,
catarrh and consumption, would be
saved from premature decrepitude O,
wasting disease by resorting to a gen.
erous milk diet. The increasing amount
of food adulteration, through the mul.
duplication of glucose and oleomarga-
rine factories, ought to have the effect
of popularizing dietetic article which
nature has provided, and which cannoa
be tempered with without exposing the
fraud to easy detection. Bone and sin.
ew will not make nation, but the
grave nutritional loss growing out OF
the disuse of this elementary article of
food will ultimately make a hardy race
. nation of dwarfs, aud it is we'll known
that the hardest race on the globe, the
Kirghiz of Central Asia, under the most
terrible climatic extremes, have little
else to live ON but the milk of their
herds. IN y. Herald.