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Children as Special Patients
Children and their diets
I
magine being completely unable to help yourself and relying on others
for your welfare. Suppose those in charge of you pumped you full of
noxious foods that poisoned you (in effect) and made you feel sickly,
irritable, fretful and dazed. Then they blamed you for misbehaving and being
‘naughty’ when all the time you were unable even to think straight. You tried
to refuse some of these foods but were made to eat them because those
who controlled you insisted mistakenly that you must eat them because they
were ‘good for you.’ You would get pretty fed up with this state of affairs,
wouldn’t you?
Well, of course you would; yet this is the lot of many children
with food allergies and intolerance. A large number of children are made
to eat things they would be better not to because of ignorance or myths
concerning the value of certain foods.
One of the common errors is that milk is necessary for calcium
for bones and teeth. This is nothing more than propaganda of the milk
marketing authorities, aided and abetted by ignorant doctors and foolish
dieticians. The truth is that, far from being essential, it is one of the most
pernicious foods known, and many people avoid it all their lives and only
feel ill if they take it.
Another fallacy is that sugar provides energy: in fact, it saps it faster
than any substance you can eat – it only appears to give energy because it
creates the lethargic feeling in the first place. There are many others which
I need not list here. And all the while cunning advertising sales campaigns
are busy daily adding falsehoods and misinformation to the confusing pile
of ‘facts,’ and the poor, besieged housewife has to cope with in trying to
feed her family well.