Cancer of the Breast
The next great social reform will be a national food policy to make a diet adequate for health available to every family, and increased production in this country of foodstuffs needed to bring diets up to the required standard would bring prosperity to agriculture and the retail food trade.
Abstract
as fat, bread, or oatmeal. All the available evidence, the speaker continued, indicated that deficiency diseases like rickets would disappear, and that infant mortality rates would be reduced to less than one-half of what they were at present if every family in the country enjoyed a diet on such standards. Public health departments were doing much to improve the diet of the poor by providing free or cheap meals in nacessitous cases, and this helped to prevent the grossest forms of malnutrition. A further step in the right direction was the milk-in-schools scheme, which provided a third of a pint of milk for one halfpenny, but the amount required by the children was a pint and a half daily. National schemes concerning food had unfortunately been dominated by economic interests, and this was largely due to ignorance of the extent to which the health of the nation could be improved by better feeding. The Government could not move in advance of public opinion, and what was most needed at the present time was further enlightenment of the public. The country had now dealt with education, and there was a national scheme designed to provide a decent house for every family, but the next great social reform shcwld be a national food policy to make a diet adequate for health available to every family. Increased production in this country of foodstuffs needed to bring diets up to the required standard would bring prosperity to agriculture and the retail food trade, as well as furnish the permanent national asset of improved health and physique.