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Experiment with Chickens for Boys and Girls
Excerpt from the book The Science of Eating, 1919.
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When school teachers manifest an interest in the definition of the word “food” the school children will begin to learn something about themselves not now taught through any text books.
They will learn that the school girls of to-day are destined to be the mothers of the race ten or twenty years hence and they will understand why the school room is the place to study foods in their relationship to health and disease.
In the basement or on the roof there will be ten cages divided into two groups of five each.
There will be four chickens in each cage of the first group. The cages of the second group will be empty. The school children will feed the chickens.
The chickens in cage No. 1 will be fed whole corn, whole oats, natural brown rice, whole wheat, unpearled barley, grass or greens of any kind, and water. The children will note that on this diet the chickens in cage No. 1 will be proud and spirited. Their feathers will be brilliant, their flesh firm, and their bodies well developed.
The same children will feed the chickens in cage No. 2 with simple mixtures of whole grains and denatured grains, the remainder of the diet being the same as that of cage No. 1. They will note that at the end of a period of six months there will be a marked superiority in the appearance of the chickens in cage No. 1.
The same children will feed the chickens in cage No. 3 with pearled barley, polished rice, processed oats, degerminated corn meal, and dough balls made of white flour and water with the same quantity of greens fed to the chickens in cages No. 1 and No. 2.
In a few months the marked physical degeneracy of the health of these chickens will teach the children its own lesson.
The same children will feed the chickens in cage No. 4 with beet pulp, from which some of the mineral salts have been extracted by leaching in distilled water. In addition to this they will feed the chickens with soda crackers, white biscuits, gingerbread, gingersnaps, white bread, pie crust, and candy, plus water, with the usual quantity of gravel and greens.
The conditions of the chickens in a few months will be eloquently suggestive.
The same children will feed the chickens in cage No. 5 with white bread, white biscuits, white crackers and cakes, cream of wheat, farina, macaroni, corn flakes, caramels, soda water, and other fancy drinks.
As the feathers of these chickens begin to droop and the chickens begin to huddle in the corners of their cages, seeking for the darkness, miserable even unto death, the lesson of the relationship of food to animal life will be taught.
At this stage of the experiment the healthy chickens in cage No. 1 will be transferred to cage No. 6 and there they will be fed on the diet of cage No. 5 until they, too, begin to show the same symptoms of dissolution and disease.
The chickens of cages No. 2, No. 3, No. 4, and No. 5 will then be transferred to cages No. 7, No. 8, No. 9, and No. 10, where they will be fed on the natural, undebased, impoverished, undenatured diet of cage No. 1. The school children will see the sick chickens recover rapidly, and they will go through life with a lesson thoroughly learned. When they assume the responsibility of home life for themselves they will know that to abandon the laws of nature in the pursuit of some capricious food ornament will be at the expense of the health, happiness, and welfare of those dependent upon them.
What the Children Will Learn
Having become familiar with the chicken-feeding experiments, the children will learn that it is possible to alter the resistance of animals at will, and to overcome the effects of one diet by combining it with another.
They will learn that the resistance of animals as determined by Hunt, even to certain poisons, differs greatly according to the character of their diet.
They will learn that Bulletin 69, Hygienic Laboratory, United States Treasury Department, declares “that in extreme cases mice after having been fed on certain diets, may recover from forty times the dose of acetonitrile fatal to mice fed on other diets.”
They will learn that a diet of oats or oat meal usually leads to a marked resistance, and that the administration of certain iodine compounds with such a diet further increases an abnormal resistance.
They will learn that the experiments reported by the Government show that as far as resistance to acetonitrile is concerned, iodine exerts its action through the thyroid gland, and the resistance caused by an oat diet is in part an effect exerted upon the thyroid.
The result achieved with iodine in the Rotunda Hospital, Dublin; the thyroid researches of Victor Hoarsely and the discovery of thyroidine by Bauman, have led more than one pathologist to the conviction that iodine is a potent factor in the neutralisation of the toxic substances formed in the human body.
They will learn something of the most amazing developments of the war in the 1918 report from the British government laboratories at Cambridge, Glasgow and London, and various factories and hospitals in which government war bread experiments were conducted.
They may ask the question in the presence of that report, “Is it not strange that after a nation-wide campaign to discourage the use of whole grain bread in the United States, a campaign that received the backing of the Food Administration itself, there should come from the British government a declaration that it finds bread composed of whole wheat flour mixed with 20 per cent of other cereals not only suited to all ages and digestion, but also yielding a higher percentage of energy?”
They will learn that the British loaves used in the experiment were baked from flour milled under the personal supervision of A. F. Humphreys, president of the National Association of British and Irish Millers.
They will learn that no precaution was omitted to make the experiments complete, and that every result was worked out in a series of tables.
They will learn that at one factory in Yorkshire the tests were applied to a group of men, women and children, whose sole bread supply for two months was whole wheat bread.
They will learn that although under medical supervision throughout their experience, in no case did the whole wheat bread cause digestive troubles, but that the health of the subjects improved during its use.
They will learn that the people of New York City, now consuming more than 100,000 loaves of 100 per cent whole wheat bread every week, could have told the British government this and much more several years ago.
“When the whole wheat bread was tried on various sufferers from tuberculosis,” declares the British report, “most of them gained weight. The main fact established is that the human body can make better use of the parts of the wheat grain which have hitherto been discarded, than pigs and poultry to which these rich and nutritive by-products of milling have been given in the past. The country has gained enormously in food and energy from the compulsory inclusion in the loaf of these rejected by-products.”
Well may the children ask, “What did the millers, the profiteers and the Food Administration officials say when this British report was made public?”
In the meantime they will learn, from such hints as these, that man is guilty of sin, when he knowingly and deliberately removes from his food supply, in order to make it commercially profitable, those profoundly active and indispensable substances that God has compounded not for the benefit of the food manufacturer, but for the benefit of little children, and the fathers and mothers who lovingly, anxiously, and in pain watch over them.
They will learn that all through nature are exhibited subtle hints that the fixed laws under which all unjuggled food comes to man’s hands were intended with the co-operation of man’s intelligence to serve his needs.
They will learn that nature demands of man that he shall accept her dispensations not as accidents, but as exquisitely rhythmical processes, as profound in their operation as they are benevolent in their functions.