Perhaps you have heard of the little girl who caught cold easily, and whose mother for that reason kept her home from school on rainy days.

She went one day to a playmate’s birthday party at a neighbor’s home. Set before the children was a great frosted cake with lighted candles: ice cream bricks striped with red, white, green, and brown; candies of seven hues, and a riotous assortment of goodies that struggled with each other in a debauch of color to catch the attention of greedy little eyes.

The little merry-makers were transported by the rainbow sweets before them. Angel cake and wafers were consumed without end.

That night the tired but happy little darling was tucked away in her warm little bed by a little mother who was happy too.

In her sleep she fretted and tossed a bit. The next day she did not seem well enough to be sent to school. Toward evening, a slight fever developed.

The mother called it an “upset.”

The fever continued into the second day, and the doctor was called. He felt her pulse, looked at her tongue, and asked what she had been eating.

When the party was described, he smiled and said, “She has eaten too much.” . . .

He did not know that the ice cream, sent in from a store, was stiffened with a modifier made of commercial gelatin, more truthfully classified as carpenter’s glue, which the Bureau of Chemistry at Washington has found to contain as many as 6,000,000,000 organisms to the gram, of which there are 29 in a single ounce.

He did not know that that glue, containing sulphites, copper, and arsenic, was originally intended as wall paper sizing or for use in the paper box factory or furniture shop, but that through the cupidity of the wholesale bakers’ supply houses it had been appropriated for use in confectionery, ice cream, and cake.

He did not know that the marshmallows consumed by the child consisted of glue, sugar, and a coal tar dye.

He did not know that the colored candies were made chiefly of glucose, sweetened with 10-15% of sugar flavored with ethereal extracts and ornamented with ribbon dyes.

He did not know that the soft drinks and pop, consumed by the child, were sweetened with saccharine, contained soap bark for “suds,” were colored with dye, preserved with salicylic acid, benzoic acid or formic acid, and flavored with esters, ethers, and aldehydes.

He did not know that small town ‘pop’ as well as big city ‘pop’ contains as a rule not a single ingredient recognized as food.

He did not know the destructive action of refined glucose and refined sugars when excessively consumed.

He did not know that on such a diet bees are quickly killed, though it has been generally supposed that an abundance of table syrup and granulated sugar is good food for the child.

He had read something of the high calorie value of sugar and glucose, but had not stopped to consider that alcohol and gasoline have a much higher calorie value.

He did not know that “high calories” (although a scientific phrase) is not only meaningless but dangerous when applied to food as it is being applied today. . . .

The significance of the little birthday party lay in the fact that the delicacies served to the romping children were merely typical, under other forms, of the refined foods so generously incorporated in the every day diet of the American people.

We are to learn why our little girl caught cold so easily and which it seems difficult to cure colds, and why she had so many periodical “upsets.”

Of what did her breakfast consist?

There was, of course, the usual coffee which no child should ever consume, and the usual rolls, toast or pancakes with glucose syrup, with one of the many popular breakfast foods served with the milk produced by cows fed on brewers grain, beef pulp, distillery waste, cotton seed meal, and gluten feed, a by-product of the glucose factory, compounded black strap feeds, containing ground corn cob, oat hulls, peanut shells, buckwheat hulls, cottonseed hulls, rice hulls, cocoa shells, chaff, elevator screenings, shredded straw, plant refuse, dirt, and sand.

“Is not this the breakfast of millions?” you ask.

Of what did the breakfast food consist?

Breakfast foods made from wheat, corn, barley, and rice must “keep”; they must “look nice.”

The corn flakes, the farina served under trade names in fancy packages at high prices but purchasable in bulk with the names at half price, and the puffed rice are merely other forms of fairy cake and wafer without the sugar and eggs.

They represent but the starchy part of the grain from which the many wonderful substances we are about to describe have been removed for commercial reasons.

At noon, as father did not come home for lunch, mother fried the potatoes from last evening’s meal and perhaps added a bit of bologna. . . .

White bread and margarine, with syrup, were present in abundance. They were always present.

Our little girl likes white bread or biscuits, deluged with table syrup for lunch. Her mother did not know what life-sustaining substances had been removed from the bread and the biscuits or what had been taken out of the hydrolyzed corn starch that produced the syrup.

She also liked jam purchased from the store with its 10% of fruit and 10% of apple juice, made from the sulphured skins and cores of dried apple industry; with its 70% glucose, sweetened with 10% sugar held together with sufficient phosphoric acid to supply the jellying quality, and preserved with the classic 1/20 of 1% benzoate of soda to prevent the mass from disintegrating.

You did not think such jam as this is to be found in America.

Examine the fine print on the labels of the 30 lb. pails sold as “pie filler” and “cake filler” to the baker. More than 70% of all commercial jam is exactly like this.

Our little victim liked the bright strawberry hue of the sweetish stuff. This hue had been contributed through legal use of coal tar dye known as amaranth.

Only 1/10 of 1% of benzoate of soda was declared in the fine print on the label, and her mother had never noticed even that.

Before the war, when benzoate of soda did not cost $5 a pound, the presence of as much as 5/10 of 1% in many foods was determined by the Commissioner of Agriculture of the State of Georgia. The facts were reported to the state chemist in serial No. 58.

Today formic acid and other less costly preservatives are secretly employed.

The little girl’s doctor did not know this; moreover he was not worried by the presence of a little benzoate in her jam.

She was also fond of pickles, hardened with a bath of alum, the astringency of which prevents the softening of the tissues. . . .

The evening meal was well suited to the father’s needs. It consisted of chops or pot roast or sausages or baked beans and ham, or liver and bacon, or kidney stew, with vegetables and bakery pie, or a home-made pudding, white with corn starch and milk, or brown with corn starch and chocolate, or pink with ribbon dye.

The ever present white bread and something that resembled butter was, of course, consumed in abundance. It was the average American meal as you shall see from authority much higher than mine (government authority) and it is the average American meal with which we are concerned.

During the afternoon, a candy shop down the street received many of the pennies of the little girl. It had existence for the purpose of attracting those pennies. At least twenty-million such pennies are spent each day in the United States by school children.

Thus she feasted between meals on dye glucose and chemical flavors, with an occasional ice cream soda to add romance to her little life.

Delicate always, anemic, and “nervous,” she had been treated by the family physician for tonsillitis, acute chorea, and anemia. At the age of 6 she underwent an operation for adenoids. Every year among children there are more than 200,000 such operations in the United States.

Her teeth, like those of millions of children, were decayed. Mother was anxious about her, and at times would say, “I wonder if we feed Helen properly?” but Aunt Jennie always answered, “Her ills are natural to childhood and are to be expected. The sooner she has them all, the sooner she will be done with them.”

Moreover, the neighbors told mother that the less attention she paid to her child’s food, the better, because people who were always worrying about food had the toughest luck. Here and there a “plump” child was pointed out as a model of what eating “anything and everything” would produce.

The neighbors did not know that water-logged tissues are frequently mistaken for plumpness, or that plumpness has nothing to do with muscle tone, with normal functioning of the glands, with vitality, or resistance to disease.

The neighbors did not know that the “plump” child, fed on “anything and everything,” succumbs more quickly than the well-fed, muscular but thin child.

Grandmothers and mothers had fed children for ages, and surely they must know a little about their business, so little Helen’s mother felt that the child would eventually outgrow her poor health. She just wasn’t strong but would grow strong. It was a comforting thought.

A few weeks later after the little party, as Helen was going home from school, she was caught in a rainstorm. Mother changed her clothing promptly upon her arrival and gave her a hot lemonade.

There was another fever and the doctor was called. When he came he uttered one word, “pneumonia.”

We now know, for the Census Director at Washington has told us, that every year in the United States 400,000 children under 10 years of age are buried, as little Helen was buried.

Such are the facts. They cannot be disputed.

The apparent cause of the child’s death was pneumonia; the real cause was malnutrition, followed by a low resistance and inability to fight off the pneumococci.

Dear parents, let us reason from cause to effect, and spare our children and ourselves many an ill by learning temperance priciples and healthy self-denial.