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One word, nutrition.It's not just about volume, it's about quality in terms of vitamins, proteins and the bio-availability of what you eat........
Atheling is right. It is about nutrition and a more equitable distribution of food resources. Consider the Bantam Regiments-poor nutrition in an advanced society. Also some of the earlier crop yields were higher than the later ones.As a rule of thumb the stronger centralisation became the worse the mass of the population ate.
There's this on JSTOR 'Military Fitness and Civilian Health in Britain during the First World War'. Between 40-60% of British recruits malnourished according to the precis. I think the study begins with the Boer War. That was when the powers that be first became concerned.
In the ‘70’s I did an OU summer school. Part of the work was analysing the nearby Stoke-on-Trent from data and then getting a coach tour around the town, viewing each area to see if our conclusions from the data were borne out by visual evidence. Halfway through the lecturer pointed out that virtually everyone we saw over 50 was considerably shorter than average, something we hadn’t found from the data, and he was quite right. The attribution was down to both diet, availability of food and hard manual labour (Stoke being (just) a Potteries town). Additionally, our further research back at the ranch drew the conclusion that better health care post-WW2 favoured an increase in average height.
Which is to be expected, I think what we're asking is why the dip in average height for two centuries?My guess is nutrition. It's a funny thing (I apologise to all Biologists out there for butchering this), in many cases you need certain nutrients to absorb other nutrients ; to act as a bio enabler. This can also effect the switching on and off of DNA from what I've gleaned.
At the turn of the 20th century, American food producers could get away with putting just about anything in their food. And they did. Milk was full of chalk and formaldehyde. Canned food had salicylic acid, borax, and copper sulfate. Producers sold corn syrup as honey and colored lard as butter, and there were no laws or consequences to false labeling. Dr. Harvey Wiley, a chemist at the USDA, spent years researching mislabeled food, and realized that consumers had no idea what they were consuming and no one knew the long term effects of these additives. So he gathered “the Poison Squad,” a group of young men who voluntarily consumed poison so that Dr. Wiley could examine the effects. They became a pop culture sensation, inspiring poems and minstrel shows. And eventually, their work brought about the 1906 Pure Food and Drug Act, which led to the creation of the FDA.
to look back nostalgically and assume, for example, that the bread which formed the staff of life was home-baked, or, if bought, was wholesome and nutritional, is romantic nonsense. By the 1840s home baked bread had died out among the rural poor; in the small tenements of the urban masses, unequipped as these were with ovens, it never existed. In 1872 Dr. Hassall, the pioneer investigator into food adulteration and the principal reformer in this vital area of health, demonstrated that half of the bread he examined had considerable quanities of alum. Alum, while not itself poisonous, by inhibiting the digestion could lower the nutritional value of other foods.The list of poisonous additives reads like the stock list of some mad and malevolent chemist: strychnine, cocculus inculus (both are hallucinogens) and copperas in rum and beer; sulphate of copper in pickles, bottled fruit, wine, and preserves; lead chromate in mustard and snuff; sulphate of iron in tea and beer; ferric ferrocynanide, lime sulphate, and turmeric in chinese tea; copper carbonate, lead sulphate, bisulphate of mercury, and Venetian lead in sugar confectionery and chocolate; lead in wine and cider; all were extensively used and were accumulative in effect, resulting, over a long period, in chronic gastritis, and, indeed, often fatal food poisoning. Red lead gave Gloucester cheese its 'healthy' red hue, flour and arrowroot a rich thickness to cream, and tea leaves were 'dried, dyed, and recycled again.'As late as 1877 the Local Government Board found that approximately a quarter of the milk it examined contained excessive water, or chalk, and ten per cent of all the butter, over eight per cent of the bread, and 50 per cent of the gin had copper in them to heighten the color.
Mother's milk provides the infant with immunity to micro-organisms to which the mother has already been exposed and which the infant is likely to encounter, and modern research has shown that 'feeding infants with human milk reduces the incidence of gastro-intestinal infections,' infections which. . . were a major cause of infant mortality throughout the nineteenth century. Cow's milk, on the other hand, was perhaps the most widely adulterated food in Victorian Britain. In 1877 a quarter of all the milk examined by the Local Government Board was seriously adulterated; in 1882 one-fifth of the 20,000 milk analyses made by the 52 county and 172 borough analysts was adulterated. Not until 1894 was the Local Government Board able to report that adulterated milk accounted for less than ten per cent of all samples.
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April 29, 2024, 02:10:10 AM
