[Report 1939] / Medical Officer of Health, Cork County Borough.

  • Cork (Ireland). County Borough Council.
Date:
1939
Catalogue details

Licence: Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0)

Credit: [Report 1939] / Medical Officer of Health, Cork County Borough. Source: Wellcome Collection.

    180/200 (page 158)
    differences of prices in different places. Income does not, of course, tell us that the child is well nourished, but only whether it can be. Nor does a good diet tell us that its consumer is necessarily healthy. The diet and income, however, are basic items in the sociological background of the child’s condition. Any such enquiry must, of necessity, be both onerous and arduous and is one which could not possibly be ordinarily undertaken by the staff of a public health department but, as has been the case, in other areas might be allocated to a committee specially convened for the purpose. In this connection the question of family allowances naturally arises, a problem of far- reaching extent and one scarcely capable of adequate treatment at such a juncture as this. Let it suffice therefore to barely touch upon the subject by explaining that in some countries, notably France, Belgium, Italy, Germany and New South Wales, some such system has been introduced, while in England some individual firms have adopted voluntary schemes under which employees receive additions to their basic wage after the birth of the second or third child in order to help the parents to maintain the same standard of family nutrition which prevailed when the first and second child only had to be provided for. The case for family allowances have been ably stated by Mr. S. S. Amery, and his views have been set forth in the Report of the B.M.A. Conference of April, 1939, already alluded to. Nutrition and Diet. Any discussion on the subject of malnutrition would be incomplete without some reference to the question of diet. It must be remembered that more important than the quantity of the food is its quality. We have already seen how it is possible that gross malnutrition may be found among the children of the well-to-do and generally such cases are due to the consumption of excessive quantities of rich, sweetened carbohydrate foodstuffs. It is, hoAVever, naturally amongst the rank and file of the children of the poor that we expect to find the greatest proportion of malnutrition and , in actual fact, it is amongst them that such cases are found. Cereals are the cheapest form of food and constitute the staple article of diet of the poor in practically all parts of the world, in the East rice is the grain favoured and in the West, wheat, both cereals, unfortunately, being utterly denatured before reaching the consumer, to his great detriment. For the vast majority of the poorer classes in this country (and that is to say for a large majority of the population) bread constitutes the chief article of diet. It is a matter of profound importance therefore that it should not only be wholesome in quality but that it should afford the maximum of nutriment as w'ell. This, unhappily, we know is far from being the case due to the almost universal substitution of white flour for wholemeal. This matter of the relative value of white bread and wholemeal bread is, in reality, one of profound importance in the nutrition of the poor. If it can be shown that the nutritive value of one is in any way appreciably superior to the other, then it is of the utmost importance to secure that it should be made more accessible to people whose earning capacity precludes a wide choice in the selection of foodstuffs. The question has been threshed out fairly frequently in the past and has been renewed