Danger in “Preserved” Foods
The experiment conducted for nearly two years by Dr. Wiley, chief chemist of the Department of Agriculture, to determine the effect of the stale preserved foods on human health, has been brought to a conclusion. The report is not yet published, but the conclusions are given out. They are adverse to the use of preservatives in all kinds of canned and preserved foods. The results obtained from the experiments show that even in doses not exceeding a half gram (seven and one-half grains) a day, boric acid and borax as preservatives are prejudicial to health when consumed for a long time; that the only safe rule is to exclude them from foods for general consumption. When mixed with food, they are absorbed into the circulation from the intestinal canal. Even a half grain a day will cause periods of loss of appetite and bad feeling. With larger doses these symptoms are more rapidly developed. They also tend to diminish slightly the weight of the body; and when the doses are increased to three grams a day, there is a slight clouding of the mental processes. A year ago last August twenty young men of good health in the government employ were selected, who agreed to enter on a systematic diet which embraced suspected preserved foods. A civil service cook was engaged; everything eaten was weighed, and all the excrements, fluid and solid, were analyzed day and night. Some of the young men were so affected by the consumption of boracic preservatives that the physicians employed to watch the subjects recommended that they be withdrawn from the contest. Experiments are still going on in regard to salicylic acid. Between the microbes and the chemicals we are between the deep sea and the personified embodiment of pernicious activity. Meanwhile the food experts are declaring that peanuts are the best conveyors into the human system of proteid muscle-making food, and fruit and eggs are all that we need. The report says: “It is undoubtedly true that no patent effects may be produced in persons of good health by the occasional use of preservatives of this kind in small quantities, but the young, the debilitated, and the sick must not be forgotten, and the safe rule to follow is to exclude these preservatives from foods for general consumption.” It also demands that all foods preserved by borax shall be honestly labeled, so that the consumer may know what he is getting. . . . We venture the remark that within two months a multitude of well-paid and plausible experts in the employ of the purveyors of the things condemned, will be sending forth publications, plausible and persuasive, stating that borax is a prolonger of human life, or if they can not do that, that they have found an antidote to the damaging effects of borax, which at the same time allows the use of the borax as a preservative.—New York Christian Advocate.