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VICTORY GARDENS ARE NEEDED
Tests Show Need of More Vegetables and Fruits
The statistics on consumption, however, do not prove the need of
more vegetables and fruits so convincingly as do actual tests on human
beings themselves. Such tests in Pennsylvania, conducted by the Ellen H.
Richards Institute of The Pennsylvania State College on more than 7000
persons ordinarily considered to be healthy or at least not definitely
ill, representing a wide range of family income, education, racial
descent, and geographical distribution within the State, show in general
that it is an understatement to say that one-third of the population is
ill-fed. Measurements of such characteristics of nutritional state as
weight, skeletal maturity in children, and bone mineralization in
persons of all ages, red coloring matter in the blood, night blindness,
and the amounts of various minerals and vitamins in the blood, have
shown that faulty nutrition is more extensive than has been supposed.
Much fewer than two-thirds of the population, as judged by these
studies, are in optimum nutrition in the various respects for which
objective tests have been devised. As a matter of fact, there are but
few of us whose condition could not be improved by improvements in diet.
The items in the dietary in which the greatest deficiencies occur
are those supplied by vegetables and fruits. In Pennsylvania, which is
not lower in fruit and vegetable consumption than other parts of the
country, it has been shown concretely in the investigations under
discussion that the population needs at least twice the present
vegetable and fruit consumption for the optimum nutritional status of
its sons and daughters.
Dietary deficiencies occur, it is true, in factors which are
supplied by foods other than vegetables and fruits, such as meats,
butter, milk, and eggs. These factors, however, are supplied also in
vegetables and fruits; in fact, there is no dietary factor required by
human beings which is not to be found in or derived from the leaves of
green plants, the ultimate basis of all animal life.
The studies under discussion have been carried on during the past
nine years in the Ellen H. Richards Institute at The Pennsylvania State
College—for the past eight years co-operatively with the Department of
Health, Commonwealth of Pennsylvania. Representative people in many
parts of Pennsylvania have been studied. For the past three years the
Pennsylvania Mass Nutrition Studies have been conducted in Philadelphia
with the collaboration of the Vitamin Research Laboratory, Children's
Hospital of Philadelphia, School of Medicine, University of
Pennsylvania, and under the auspices of the Philadelphia Child Health
Society. Some of the findings of these studies as they relate to the
subject under discussion are given on pages 15 to 18.
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click for larger photo
Victory Gardens
Handbook of the
Victory Garden Committee
War Services, Pennsylvania
State Council of Defense
April, 1944
TABLE OF CONTENTS
page v
page vi
page vii
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