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gain in active tissue, there will be a loss in body fat stored around
the heart and between the muscle fibres.
Maintenance of a balanced diet is essential for successful weight
control but, with children, this needs parental understanding,
support and encouragement. Young children learn eating habits
from their parents who, in general, have little knowledge of and
scant regard for the dietetic values of food and to many of whom
a balanced diet seems beyond comprehension. Over-indulgent
grand-parents and well intentioned neighbours are also factors
to be reckoned with in the struggle for a suitable regimen.
Is there a treatment for obesity?
Any diet, however, bizarre, provided it supplies insufficient
energy for metabolic needs will lead to weight reduction. But,
by and large, fad diets are bad diets because not only are they
usually nutritionally unsound but they are so markedly different
from the normal eating habits that their use tends to be
ephemeral.
Adherence to an appropriate intelligent diet is effective even
though results may be prolonged. Success brings its own reward
but many become discouraged too easily. The secret is to continue
to eat the foods you like, balanced to provide good nutrition, but
in only half the quantities you would normally take. This is not
a dramatic solution but such a diet will be pleasant and bearable
and the chances of its early abandonment will be considerably
lessened. Weight reduction will be slow but sure and the spectre of
those frightening degenerative diseases in middle and old age will
disappear.
Respiratory Diseases
With the control of pulmonary tuberculosis obtained in recent
years by chemotherapy has come an assumption by many that the
menace of respiratory disease has been eliminated.
Nothing is further from the truth. Respiratory diseases are
responsible for 20% of all deaths occurring in England and Wales
as can be seen in the national mortality figures for 1968 listed
below :—
Lung Cancer 28,826 deaths
Pneumonia 41,039
Bronchitis 31,002 „
Respiratory Tuberculosis 1,458 „
Other Respiratory Diseases 12,703 „
115,028