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change in habit may increase in weight to some extent and then stabilise themselves
at a new and heavier level. Most healthy people in this country can
consciously control the amount of food they take or do not take. Hence if
you are sufficiently interested and determined, your weight, so to speak, is in
your own hands.
Body Constituents.
The body is made up of four main groups of tissues: (1) the cell mass—
muscles, liver, kidneys, pancreas, brain, etc.; (2) the extracellular fluid—blood,
lymph; (3) the bone or skeleton; (4) the fat—under skin, in the abdomen, round
the kidneys and heart. In true undernutrition there is a decrease in the cell
mass and an increase in the extracellular fluid. In overnutrition the main
change is a large increase in fat. Of course, the proportions of the four constituents
vary in different people and there is no exact proportion which is
ideal for everybody. In severe malnutrition, the muscles will waste away to
provide the necessary ingredients to maintain the composition of the internal
organs such as the heart, brain and kidney. As tissues are used up fluid takes
their place, so the extracellular fluid increases. In undernutrition the compensatory
mechanism is remarkable, so that a person can be severely malnourished
without appearing to be so. In children, if the malnutrition is not
too severe, the mechanism is changed so as to preserve as much as possible the
cell mass at the expense of growth, so that growth may be delayed for months
or years and the child remains at a standstill. This effect is probably due to
the presence in children of a growth hormone, one of whose effects is to spare
the consumption of proteins as much as possible.
Development.
Overweight and obese women tend to have large babies, and conversely
undernourished women tend to have small babies. Both very large babies
and very small babies have less chance of survival than an average-size baby
of 6½ to 1½ lbs. The baby of an undernourished mother is generally premature,
even if born at full term, because the development of the baby has been delayed.
In conditions of undernutrition in young animals and children, growth is delayed
so that a child aged, say, seven may be only the stature of a child aged five.
However, if such a child is provided with abundance of the right food, in time
he will catch up and come level with the other children who are average in
his own age. On the other hand, in growing animals, the slow growth rate
prolongs the life of the animal so that it takes longer for the animal to become
mature, and its whole life processes are spread over a longer period. If the
growth rate of children is slower than normal and prolonged beyond the age
of about eighteen or nineteen, then the growing ends of the bones become
united to the shafts and the adolescents remain permanently at a stature
less than they could have done. We have often noticed the differences in
stature between children of the same age in different schools, one from a rich
area and another from a poor area, and the same applies to their parents.
I know cause may be effect and vice versa.
Maturity.
It seems that nature likes to have her plants animals and human beings
as near perfection as possible by the time they reach the early adult stage of
life when they are ready for the propagation of their species. Nature has
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