1942 | Nutrition
Nutrition
Forty-two percent of U.S. white bread is enriched with B vitamins and iron, up from 30 percent last year. Louisiana and South Carolina enact laws requiring that corn staples be enriched.
British flour extraction rates rise to 85 percent to stretch wheat supplies. The higher extraction rate raises levels of vitamins and minerals in British bread (which remains unrationed; see 1917). Frederick James Marquis, Lord Woolton, 59, has been food minister since 1940 and will be credited with keeping Britain fed during Hitler's campaign to starve her out.
Dublin has an epidemic of rickets, caused by eating whole-grain bread: the phytic acid in wheat bran blocks absorption of calcium, and this, combined with the fact that so many Dubliners get little calcium to begin with, results in fully half the city's children suffering from the deficiency disease.
Metropolitan Life Insurance Company of New York issues tables of "ideal" weights, giving figures for men and women of different "frame size" classes at different heights. Actuaries have said for at least 20 years that an applicant is a much better risk if he or she weighs 20 pounds below average and a much worse risk if he weighs even 10 pounds above average. The Met Life tables have an age scale that goes up to 30, the assumption being that weight gain is inevitable in middle age, and the "ideal" weights will be found to be far too high (see 1959).