234 Diet and Health
In this crisis Hindhede decided that a drastic reduction in the livestock must be
made. So some four-fifths of the pigs were killed and about one-sixth of the cattle. Their
grain food was given to the Danes, and it was given ... as wholemeal bread with the
extra coarse bran that is not put into ordinary wholemeal bread, incorporated.
In addition to this bread, or Kleiebrot, which was made official for the whole coun-
try, the Danes ate porridge, green vegetables, potatoes and other root vegetables, milk,
butter, and fruit. No grain or potatoes were allowed for the distillation of spirits, so there
were no spirits. Half the previous quantity of beer was permitted.
As some pigs were left, the people on the farms got meat; the people in the cities- 40 per cent of the population – got very little meat. Only the rich could afford beef.
The food regulations were begun in March 1917 and were made stringent from
October 1917 to October 1918.
The result of this enforced national diet was a remarkable lowering of the deathrate.
The deathrate, which had been 12.5 in 1914, now fell to 10.4 per thousand, ‘which is
the lowest mortality figure that has been registered in any European country at any
time’. (Hindhede.)
Hindhede puts this impressive result in another way. Taking the average from 1900
to 1916 as 160, in the October to October year it was 66. Even in men over 65 the
figure fell to 76.
Hindhede attributes this extraordinarily rapid and marked change to two things:
(1) less meat, (2) less alcohol. He regards the bran as having largely filled the gap of the
scanty or absent meat, bran having a good proportion of vegetable meat or protein. He
regards the experiment as a triumph for his previous teaching. ‘The reader knows,’ he
writes in the Deutsche Medizinische Wochenschrift of March 1920, ‘how sharply I have
emphasized the advantages of a lacto-vegetarian diet. I am not in principle a vegetarian,
but I believe I have shown that a diet containing a large amount of meat and eggs is
dangerous to health.’
And yet we have only to turn to another Danish possession (ironically enough) to
find a refutation of this rather narrow view.
The north-west coast of Greenland, where the Polar Eskimos live, is within the Arctic
Circle. It is the most isolated and the least affected by civilization of these three posses-
sions of Denmark.
Some attempts at gardening have been introduced by the Danes, but previously the
only vegetable food the Eskimos got was from the profuse but, in species, limited veg-
etation of the Arctic summer. Otherwise they lived mainly on sea animals and sea birds.
There was no offal. They ate everything that could be eaten. When it was frozen they
often ate it raw. The thick, heavy skin of the narwhal is particularly favoured. The mil-
lions of sea birds which visit their coast supply a winter store of meat and eggs.
The Eskimos are also exceptionally healthy. ‘The fact that the Eskimos of this polar
tribe have such excellent physique, hair, and teeth, and such superb health without any
trace of scurvy, rickets, or other evidence of malnutrition,’ write McCollum and Sim-
monds, ‘is interesting in the light of their restricted and simple diet.’