Housekeeping in the Tropics

Conducted by “Dorothea”

NOWHERE, perhaps, is the problem of the child’s health so complex as in the tropics. The climatic conditions make for lassitude, but I have seen many wise—and some unwise—parents who realised the absolute necessity of teaching their little ones the nobility of work, and the futility of idleness.

It is a known fact that a great deal of unrest and unhappiness among young people is due to the fact that they have little liking for work! Most of them regard it as a necessary evil.

It is impossible to attain success in any career without a pride in one’s work, and it will almost always be found that the good worker is usually fairly contented in mind and healthy in body. Leisure hours are enjoyed because they are a contrast —and contrast is necessary to a happy life.

“All work and no play” is a very true adage.

It is quite easy to teach children to get the right feeling about work—and this teaching should begin with the child, and not left until the adolescent stage is reached.

They can be given small tasks, and taught to take pride in them. Do not expect a child to take the interest in work in general that you do yourself. Give them some responsibility at an early age, just one little job which need not involve a lot of work. Even if you only give the child your needlecase, tell her to mind it for you, and keep it in some chosen place, so that when you want a needle she will be able to get it for you.

Quite a number of little responsibilities can be found which will begin the training of the small boy and girl, and you will find that they feel quite important in their own mind.

In encouraging children to have the right ideas about work, parents are giving them something they will value more and more as they grow up and take their own places in the world.

Keeping Fit in the Tropics

Without being a faddist, one must realise the absolute necessity of vital component parts in our dietary if we wish to keep fit.

Nowhere is this so necessary as in the tropics, where it is difficult to obtain fresh foods containing the required vitamins.

Happily, science has, during the last decade, made astounding discoveries, and to those of our readers who are mostly dependent on tinned foods, we will endeavour from time to time to give them substitutes containing the vitamins for both child and adult; and I know of no more palatable, useful and health giving one as “Marmite.”

Marmite has been called “the most marvellous food in the world” —chiefly because Marmite is a pure vegetable extract, the richest known source of vitamin B. The discovery of food vitamins is one of the most important of modern times. In vitamins, the modern physician possesses the most powerful therapeutic weapon in the scientific control of diet ever placed in his hands.

Vitamins are used by nature wherever there is growth, new life, and reproduction.

They are in the germ of seeds, in the yolk of eggs, in milk, in sprouting grains in yeast, the most rapidly reproducing of all vegetation. Each teaspoonful of Marmite

is made from many millions of these tiny yeast cells, Marmite, like milk, is a whole food, containing the rarer nutritive elements for which our bodies hunger. Marmite, this pure vegetable extract, this vitamin concentrate, should be used by every family every day. The principal cause of disease in modern life lies in the absence from our artificial food of just those elements contained in Marmite. Marmite restores those elements; supplements other foods and aids them to deliver all their goodness to the system.

Marmite puts vitality into the nerves and muscles by feeding them; it counteracts acidity, gas and fermentation of the stomach and normalises the action of the bowels.

Altogether apart from its value to health, Marmite is a particularly appetising food.

It makes the most delicious and savoury of all sandwich pastes. A level teaspoonful of Marmite dissolved in a cup of boiling water with a little milk added, is a most refreshing drink of equal benefit to adult and child, athlete and invalid.

Marmite is immensely popular in the kitchen; it raises the value of inexpensive foodstuffs to the standard of the highest, and vastly improves their flavour.