Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 51.djvu/672

656 cent; fresh fish, about 16 per cent; salt cod, 27·6 per cent; rolled oats, 16 per cent; wheat flour, 12 per cent; Graham flour, 14 per cent; beans, 22·2 per cent; while such vegetables as beets, cabbage, corn, celery, lettuce, potatoes, tomatoes, squash, etc., contain on an average not more than 1·5 per cent of foods that nourish the brain. Pie, pudding, cake, cookies, and crackers contain at the outside not over six to seven per cent, even when these are so cooked that the little substance they contain may be extracted in digestion. The writer has ascertained the bills of fare of many school children by direct observation and by having them write out the customary articles of diet with mode of cooking, and he has found, what is doubtless already well known, that in many homes the children live quite largely upon vegetables, white bread, and pastry and cakes of various kinds. Parents are ofttimes satisfied if their children eat a large amount of such things, thinking it is primarily the quantity, not the quality, which is to be considered in securing nutrition. As a consequence, those children that live largely upon a starchy diet are in a more or less constant state of brain exhaustion, and they will be liable to manifest all the evidences of fatigue which have been described in preceding paragraphs.

It happens frequently in the homes of the well-to-do, where the expense can have nothing to do with the matter, that the children are permitted to live almost wholly upon those foods which seem to delight the palate, as cookies and cakes in a variety of forms, but which contain relatively little nutrition, the principal ingredient being starch in the form of wheat flour. It is the practice often to begin in the early months of a child's life to feed it highly seasoned and sweet foods, thus establishing an appetite which later is not satisfied with the simple nourishing meats, grains, and milk. In the poorer homes, in our cities particularly, many are unwise in the expenditure of what money they can spare for food, purchasing mainly starchy foods, which, although of relatively little value anyway, are yet more suited for the adult engaged in out-of-door labor than for a child at mental work in school. Usually in such homes children eat the same food that