What's to Eat?

The popular, "common sense" notion that well-fed people are most likely to keep healthy is not necessarily true. Recent research shows that the common diseases of childhood are no more prevalent among poorly fed children than among children stuffed with spinach, fruit and fish-oil vitamins. Research also shows that well-fed adults suffer as much as anyone else from the common cold and influenza.

In the current Bacteriological Reviews, Dr. Paul F. Clark of the University of Wisconsin's Medical School and five fellow bacteriologists summarize all that is known today, mostly based on experiments with animals, about the effect of diet on infectious disease. Their summation: sometimes diet helps, sometimes not.

The researchers noted that certain infections (e.g., the minute protozoa which cause sleeping sickness) thrive in a well-fed patient, but languish where some supposedly vital food factor is missing. Rats whose diet was lacking in the vitamin B complex survived sleeping sickness better than better-fed rodents. Ill-fed rats infested with an intestinal parasite were not helped by a pantothenic acid (vitamin) preparation in their diet; instead, the parasites flourished on it. So did the parasites in chickens infected with bird malaria.

Among the viruses (which cause such familiar diseases as measles, chickenpox, colds, influenza and mumps) are many which prove more damaging to a healthy body. Sick chickens are more resistant to cancer than healthy ones. Undernourished guinea pigs are better able to ward off foot-and-mouth disease.

In humans, the most baffling virus is that of poliomyelitis. It has been noted for years that the disease seems to attack better-nourished children. In mice experiments, if the animals' diet was deficient in thiamin (vitamin B1), the incubation period was prolonged, and the paralysis and mortality rates were cut down. It was also found that if thiamin was added to the diet of infected animals, the polio often developed quickly into paralysis. But the picture was not all dark. In many cases, vitamins proved to be a shield against disease. One dramatic example: pigeons deprived of vitamin B got sleeping sickness--to which they are normally immune. The doctors, cautious as usual, wanted to give the whole subject further study. Meanwhile, they were in favor of eating--and a well-balanced diet at that.

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