Cancer And Diet

A Theory From Tahiti

From Our Own Correspondent PAPEETE. March 10.

RATIONING and the enforced return to a normal and more balanced diet, are improving the health of our Tahitian people. I have decided views on the relation of diet with the incidence of cancer—which would take too much paper to expose in detail. We never had cancer here until the island diet was corrupted by over-refined and processed European foods.

Editorial Note

Beware —you are on dangerous ground!

Here is the experience of another

journalist.

Twenty years ago, being then domi ciled in Fleet Street, London, I became interested in this subject, and I delved and dug among statistics. I produced some tables and a couple of graphs to show that there appeared to be a very close relationship between the growing incidence of cancer, and the ever increasing use of foodstuffs which have been de-natured in various ways (can ned, frozen, chemically treated, and so on), to permit of their being carried to ever-wider distribution. I practically convinced myself; and then, by means of articles and letters in London news papers, I tried to convince others.

I was attacked, driven into the dust, derided and danced upon, by three classes of people—by medical men, who baffled me with science; by health experts and dietitians, who saw in my argument an insidious challenge to the official OK they had given to various forms of food manufacture preservation; and bv all the numerous merchants interested in the preservation of food, pnd the wide distribution of preserved food. I was swamped by the avalanche — and left the subject severely alone, ever afterwards.

But, on a later occasion, at a confer ence of scientific men, I heard an illustrated address by a little professor, which restored some of mv confidence.

He said he had produced cancers in mice, practically at will, by using certain of the chemicals to which the alimentary tract of man is subjected, when man has to depend unon some kinds of preserved

food,-

R.W.R.