28 страница. A report just received from the Bureau of Home Economics, Department of Agriculture, Washington, presents figures for the average amount of the various foods

A report just received from the Bureau of Home Economics, Department of Agriculture, Washington, presents figures for the average amount of the various foods used in different income groups in different parts of the United States. These showed that in general about one-third of the income up to $2500 was spent for food per family; further, that the total flour equivalent ranged from 0.39 to 0.50 pound per capita per day. These quantities will furnish about 829 to 1063 calories per day, per capita. It will be seen at once that this provides a large number of the calories required for growing children and sedentary adults per day. With this number of calories derived from refined flour products there is no adequate provision for a normal amount of such body-building materials as minerals and vitamins. These have been removed, largely, in the milling process, and are largely denied to our modern civilization insofar as the cereal foods are concerned. This includes vitamin E, so essential for the functioning of the pituitary gland, the master governor of the body.

One of the most important lessons we may learn from the primitive cultures is the detail of their procedures for preventing dental caries. Since I have devoted an entire chapter (Chapter 16) to this I will make only a brief comment here. Simply stated, the practical application of the primitive wisdom for accomplishing this would involve returning to the use of natural foods which provide the entire assortment of bodybuilding and repairing food factors. This means the recognition of the fact that all forms of animal life are the product of the food environments that have produced them. Therefore, we cannot distort and rob the foods without serious injury. Nature has put these foods up in packages containing the combinations of minerals and other factors that are essential for nourishing the various organs. Some of the simpler animal forms are able to synthesize in their bodies some of the food elements which we humans also require, but cannot create ourselves. Our modern process of robbing the natural foods for convenience or gain completely thwarts Nature's inviolable program. I have shown how the robbing of the wheat in the making of white flour reduced the minerals and other chemicals in the grains, so as to make them sources of energy without normal body-building and repairing qualities. Our appetites have been distorted so that hunger appeals only for energy with no conscious need for body-building and repairing chemicals.

A first requisite for the control of tooth decay is to have provided an adequate intake of the body-building and repairing factors by the time the hunger appeal for energy has been satisfied. A sufficient variety of foods must be used to supply the body's demand for those elements which it needs in large quantities, that is, calcium and phosphorus, and the other elements which it needs in smaller quantities, though just as imperatively. One of the serious human deficiencies is the inability to synthesize certain of the activators which include the known vitamins. This makes necessary the reinforcement of the nutrition with definite amounts of special foods to supply these organic catalysts, especially the fat-soluble activators, including the known vitamins, which are particularly difficult to provide in adequate quantities. I have shown that the primitive races studied were dependent upon one of three sources for some of these fat-soluble factors, namely, sea foods, organs of animals or dairy products. These are all of animal origin. I have indicated in Chapter 16 the nutritional programs that have proved in clinical testing adequate for providing the body with nutrition that will not only prevent tooth decay, but check it when it is active. The stress periods of life, namely, active growth in children and motherhood, do not constitute overloads among most of the primitive races because the factor of safety provided by them in the selection of foods is sufficiently high to protect them against all stresses. I have indicated the type of nutrition that is especially needed for these stress periods in our modern civilization. Also, that it is not necessary to adopt the foods of any particular racial stock, but only to make our nutrition adequate in all its nutritive factors to the primitive nutritions. Tooth decay is not only unnecessary, but an indication of our divergence from Nature's fundamental laws of life and health. (See Chapter 16 for primitive menus.) The responsibility of our modern processed foods of commerce as contributing factors in the cause of tooth decay is strikingly demonstrated by the rapid development of tooth decay among the growing children on the Pacific Islands during the time trader ships made calls for dried copra when its price was high for several months. This was paid for in 90 per cent white flour and refined sugar and not over 10 per cent in cloth and clothing. When the price of copra reduced from $400 a ton to $4 a ton, the trader ships stopped calling and tooth decay stopped when the people went back to their native diet. I saw many such individuals with teeth with open cavities in which the tooth decay had ceased to be active.

In undertaking to make practical application of primitive wisdom to our modern problems, the field is so broad that only a limited number of items may be included. It is important to emphasize the difference between the procedures used in the preparation of boys and girls for life in many of the primitive groups, and in our modern social organization. Few people will realize the remarkable training given the primitive children, with the fathers and mothers as tutors. To illustrate, among the Indians of the far North in Canada near the Arctic Circle, the girls rather than the boys select a companion for life. This is done with the help of her parents. Before a boy is considered worthy of consideration he must demonstrate that he can build the winter cabin, provide the firewood for maintaining the home of the parents, and all of the provisions of wild game, during the trial period of several weeks. After an adequate demonstration of bravery as well as of skill, in which the boy must kill a grizzly bear, he is accepted into the home for a period of trial marriage. The girl has the privilege of making her choice by trial, but when the choice is made there is complete faithfulness on the part of both. Girls are prepared for life's duties by being taught to make clothing, prepare food, care for children and assist in the maintenance of the home. I have seldom, if ever, seen such happy people as these forest Indians of the far North.

In Chapter 10, in discussing the Australian Aborigines, I have similarly described the preparation of boys for the responsibility of manhood. No modern college graduate has to win his spurs under more exacting examinations and tests than do those boys.

In Africa several specialties call for special training. The medicine men spend several years under the training of a tutor. Each boy must provide a specified number of cattle per year which are eaten by the group.

Probably the most indelible impression that is left by my investigations among primitive races, is that which came from examining 1,276 skulls of the people who had been buried hundreds of years ago along the Pacific Coast of Peru and in the high Andean Plateau, without finding a single skull with the typical marked narrowing of the face and dental arches, that afflicts a considerable proportion not only of the residents in modernized districts in Peru, but in most of the United States and many communities of Europe today. I know of no problem so important to our modern civilization as the finding of the reason for this, and the elimination of the cause of error. Perhaps few will recognize the significance of this important point. This may be the reason why the prospect is not encouraging.

One of the important lessons we should learn from the primitive races is that of the need for maintaining a balance beween soil productivity, plant growth and human babies. Even in a country with so low a fertility as obtains in the greater part of Australia, the Aborigines for a very long period were able to maintain this balance. Their system of birth control was very efficient and exacting.

A survey made by a committee appointed by the League of Nations indicates the need per capita of approximately one-half acre of land for wheat, two acres for dairy products, and ten acres for beef producing pasture for the supply of meat. When we realize that Ohio has been occupied by our modern civilization for only one hundred fifty years and that it is estimated that during that time approximately half of the topsoil has been lost through water and wind erosion we realize that Nature's accumulated vegetable enrichment has been greatly reduced in this area within a short time from this one source alone. In Chapter 20 I have shown that there is only enough phosphorus in the top seven inches of agricultural land for approximately fifty crops of high-yield wheat or one hundred crops of moderate-yield. Other grains make similar drafts upon the land. I have given data indicating a relationship between progressive soil depletion and progressive increase in heart disease.

It is apparent that the present and past one or two generations have taken more than their share of the minerals that were available in the soil in most of the United States, and have done so without returning them. Thus, they have handicapped, to a serious extent, the succeeding generations, since it is so difficult to replenish the minerals, and since it is practically impossible to accumulate another layer of topsoil, in less than a period of many hundreds of years. This constitutes, accordingly, one of the serious dilemmas, since human beings are dependent upon soil for their animal and plant foods, for body-building. The minerals are in turn dependent upon the nutritive factors in the soil for establishing their quality. The vitamin and protein content of plants has been shown to be directly related to availability of soil minerals and other nutriments. A program that does not include maintaining this balance between population and soil productivity must inevitably lead to disastrous degeneration. Over-population means strife and wars. The history of the rise and fall of many of the past civilizations has recorded a progressive rise, while civilizations were using the accumulated nutrition in the topsoil, forest, shrubbery and grass, followed by a progressive decline, while the same civilizations were reaping the results of the destruction of these essential ultimate sources of life. Their cycle of rise and degeneration are strikingly duplicated in our present American culture.

Various therapeutic measures in use today have come to us from primitive peoples. One of the greatest scourges of the world is malaria fever. Everywhere it has been fought successfully with quinine. Indeed, many parts of the world would not have been tenantable for whites without it. Yet few people realize that quinine was the gift of the ancient Peruvian Indians.

In Chapter 15 I presented data regarding the treatment used by several primitive races for preventing and correcting serious disturbances in the digestive tract. This consisted in the use of clay or aluminum silicate which modern science has learned has the important quality of being able to adsorb and thus collect toxic substances and other products. Important new light is now thrown on the probable role of this substance in the primitive diet and its possible application in our modern problems of sensitization reactions or allergies. In the first volume of my work on "Dental Infections," I presented data relating toxic sensitization reactions to dental infections. These were shown in both animals and human beings. I discussed the relation of these reactions to histamine and emphasized their similarity to the effect produced by inocculation with histamine. An important new chapter has recently. been added to this problem by the work of Dr. C. F. Code for which he has received an award by the American Association for the Advancement of Science. He reported his findings before the Association meeting at Richmond, Virginia, in December, 1938. Dr. Code has apparently discovered that histamine is the actual product responsible for the symptoms of the various allergies. Its excess accumulation in the blood is the actual cause of the symptoms whether expressed as asthma, hay fever or skin eruptions such as produced by pollens, various foods, dust and other sensitizing agents. He has shown that the eosinophils, a type of white blood cell, are the source of excess histamine in the blood. It is accordingly indicated that the primitive treatment by the use of kaolin, aluminum silicate, as an adsorbent was used directly for controlling such symptoms. It is now further indicated that this treatment can be helpful for the prevention of modern allergies. Previous investigations have shown that histamine is produced in the alimentary tract as a putrefaction product of proteins by the action of certain micro-organisms of the colon group.

Modern science boasts the discovery of vitamin C, lack of which took its toll of thousands of the white mariners through hundreds of years with scurvy. The first recorded cure of that disease was made by the Indians in Canada when the British soldiers were dying in large numbers. The Indians taught them to use a tea made from the steeped tips of the shoots of the spruce. When I was among the Indians of the far north I asked a chief why the Indians did not get scurvy. He then proceeded, as I have related in Chapter 15, to explain to me how the Indians prevented scurvy by the use of special organs in the animals. While it is true that we have come to associate the absence of vitamin C as the causative factor in scurvy, we do not know how many other affections may be due to its absence in adequate quantity in our foods. Almost weekly, new diseases are being associated with vitamin deficiencies in our modern dietaries.

One of our modern tendencies is to select the foods we like, particularly those that satisfy our hunger without our having to eat much, and, another is to think in terms of the few known vitamins and their effects. The primitive tendency seems to have been to provide an adequate factor of safety for all emergencies by the selection of a sufficient variety and quantity of the various natural foods to prevent entirely most of our modern affections. Their success demonstrates that their program is superior to ours. An important advance in modern international relationships provides for exchange of professorships and, thus, interchanges of wisdom. We have shown a most laudable and sympathetic interest in carrying our culture to the remnants of these primitive races. Would it not be fortunate to accept in exchange lessons from their inherited knowledge? It may be not only our greatest opportunity, but our best hope for stemming the tide of our progressive breakdown and also for our return to harmony with Nature's laws, since life in its fullness is Nature obeyed.

As I have sojourned among members of primitive racial stocks in several parts of the world, I have been deeply impressed with their fine personalities, and strong characters. I have never felt the slightest fear in being among them; I have never found that my trust in them was misplaced. As soon as they had learned that I was visiting them in their interest, their kindness and devotion was very remarkable. Fundamentally they are spiritual and have a devout reverence for an all-powerful, all-pervading power which not only protects and provides for them, but accepts them as a part of that great encompassing soul if they obey Nature's laws.

Ernest Thompson Seton has beautifully expressed the spirit of the Indian in the opening paragraph of his little book "The Gospel of the Red Man":

The culture and civilization of the White man are essentially material; his measure of success is, "How much property have I acquired for myself?" The culture of the Red man is fundamentally spiritual; his measure of success is, "How much service have I rendered to my people?"

The civilization of the White man is a failure; it is visibly crumbling around us. It has failed at every crucial test. No one who measures things by results can question this fundamental statement.

The faith of the primitive in the all-pervading power of which he is a part includes a belief in immortality. He lives in communion with the great unseen Spirit, of which he is a part, always in humility and reverence. Elizabeth Odell in the following lines seems to express the spirit of the primitives,

Flat outstretched upon a mound
Of earth I lie; I press my ear
Against its surface and I hear
Far off and deep, the measured sound
Of heart that beats within the ground.
And with it pounds in harmony
The swift, familiar heart in me.
They pulse as one, together swell,
Together fall; I cannot tell
My sound from earth's, for I am part
Of rhythmic, universal heart.

REFERENCES

1. JACOBSON, A. C. Genius (Some Revaluations). New York, Greenburg, 1926.

2. BRASH, J. C. The etiology of irregularity and malocclusion of the teeth. Dental Board of United Kingdom, London, 1930.

3. Waverly researches in the pathology of the feeble-minded (Research series, cases XI to XX). Mem. Am. Acad. Arts & Sci., 14:131, 1921.

4. DRUMMOND, J. C. The Medical Aspects of Decline of Population. J.A.M.A., 110:908, 1938.

5. BREHM, W. Potential dangers of viosterol during pregnancy with observations of calcification of placentae. Ohio S. M. J., 33:990, 1937.

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