Abstract

                                I have chosen to speak on Nutrition, believing that for no country in the world has this Science a greater importance than for India; and for no part of India a greater importance than for the Madras Presidency. No country. has more need to profit by the newer knowledge of Nutrition, and none more opportunity to add to it. Millions of the Indian people are living on restricted diets which are either incapable of maintaining them in a state of normal nutrition and health, or capable only of sustaining them at a low level of physical efficiency. Malnutritional diseases are rife, while the great scourges of the Tropics-malaria, cholera, dysentery, leprosy-exact an immense toll from India's malnourished multitudes. In this Presidency alone deficiency diseases' of almost every kind abound, and the level of physical efficiency of the masses is, in general, low. But while this is so in certain parts of the Peninsula there are others where the inhabitants are unsurpassed by any race of mankind in physique and capacity for endurance and hard work. Nowhere is the composition of human dietaries more influenced by racial, religious, economic and climatic considerations and nowhere have foods and food-habits remained more consistently the same from one generation to another. So it is that the diverse races, comprising the population of India, afford an unrivalled, and almost wholly unexplored, source of information regarding the effects of diet on the physical efficiency of human beings. India has thus not only much to do in applying the newer knowledge of Nutrition and in surveying, in the light of this knowledge, the foods available for the use of her immense populations, but much to learn regarding their nutritional needs, and much-by such learning-to teach the rest of the world.

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