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99  'Good Food' to One Human
     May Half-Starve Another
     The Washington Post, Saturday, May 25, 1968

     Everyone knows that human well-being depends on good food.  Just
what good food consists of is a subtle question, however, and becomes
more so the closer we look at it from a scientific point of view.

     Nutritional science has, of course, gone a long way in spite of
its place as the homeliest aspect of biochemistry.  We know that man
is very close to the rat and the pig in his dietary needs; therefore,
many more sophisticated studies can be done in the laboratory than
would be possible by clinical experimentation.

     The diet can be classified roughly into four categories of
nutrients: calories, amino acids for building body proteins, vitamins
needed in trace amounts and minerals like iron, calcium or iodine which
play special roles in body metabolism.

     Calories are simply fuel, and can be furnished interchangeably
from many different nutrients, usually starches, fats or protein by-
products.  The first problem of human nutrients is, simply, to
distribute enough calories, but the disease this remedies is sheer
starvation, not the malnutrition that may hobble a third or more of
the world's population.  The more closely we look at our urban
populations, the less complacent we can be about malnutrition in our
citizenry.

     As opposed to starvation, malnutrition refers to a deficit or
imbalance among another two dozen specific nutrients, various amino
acids, vitamins and minerals.  These are not interchangeable at all;
a diet superb in every other respect but deficient in thiamin is
just as lethal as if it were loaded with arsenic, and it will do no
good at all to add more riboflavin or lysine to it.

     To evaluate specific human needs for each of these many
substances is obviously an intricate task, and has attracted an
enormous amount of scientific effort.  The official answers are
labeled "Recommended Dietary Allowances", and the footnotes caution
that these are arbitrary judgments that include a rule of thumb 
overage intended to cover incomplete knowledge and some range of
special personal circumstances.  Even so, the allowances are intended
to cover the needs of healthy "reference" adults and we have little
more than guesswork about the special quantities needed by young
children or pregnant or nursing mothers.

     One important difficulty is to define the purpose of a diet.  The
recommended allowances are based on the nutrients needed to maintain
an adult in good health over short periods of close observation.  Thus
it is still controversial whether histidine is a required amino acid.
Adults can dispense with it during experimental periods, but possibly
by virtue of rather large reserves stored in muscle.  We can also
define the nutrients needed to maintain rapid growth in body weight
of infants, but this is almost certainly a poor criterion for over-all
development.

     Is there a specific nutrient we might regard as a "brain food"?
There is no scientific support for the folklore on the subject 
(except for special cases like fish as a source of iodine in goiter
country), but present day science can say almost nothing about special
needs of children for the optimum growth and effectiveness of their
brains.  Many adults believe that caffeine is a brain stimulant; we
know little enough about the truth of that, and less still what it
would do for, or against, children.

     Another unexplored territory is the range of individual variation
in nutritional needs.  Some sharp biochemical differences could be
dragged into this discussion, but they are usually regarded as rare
diseases.  Recent discoveries that most nonwhite adults (Negroes
and Orientals) do not digest milk sugar, however, should wither
any complacency we might have about the most elementary possibilities
of individual or racial differences in nutrition.  It should be
obvious how urgent is further research along these lines in order
to restore equal opportunity to racial minorities which are under
irresistible pressure to conform to white standards of nutrition.

     Answering these questions demands an unremitting concentration
of scientific and social-minded learning from many fields.  Congress
has been greatly exercised lately about the disruption of learning
by student demonstrations, and, of course, I am, too.  But its
current bloodletting in the budgets for science and education is a
quiet violence to national needs that far exceeds what any radical
student sit-in could dream of accomplishing toward destroying
the universities.

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