What is the diet, now, that gives pellagra? What is it? It is an excessive carbohydrate diet in which the protein element and the mineral element are deficient. Now, what do you propose to do by this law? You propose to legalize mixing a flour which renders it more strongly carbohydrate and sending it down to the people who are suffering from a supracarbohydrate diet and giving them more of the stuff which is now injuring their health. Do you want to do that? Do you want to go down there among those poor mill workers and make their condition any worse than it is to-day? No. You want to safeguard their diet. You want to see at least that if they eat wheat flour they get wheat flour and not something that is more deficient in the food values which they need. Three years ago, when I was on the circuit, as I am constantly, I I went to Ames, Iowa. Being a farmer and interested in farming and farming operations, I asked to see their feeding of their live stock. The professor of animal husbandry went with me to show me his feeding experiments. The first thing we came to was a pen of pigs. I have some at home just like them. I said: "Those pigs have the mange." They were slender; they were built on the Gothic style of architecture; their hair had dropped off largely, and they were miserable-looking creatures. "No." he said; "they have not the mange." I said: "What have they?" He said: "They have corn; they have corn." I said: "I thought corn was good for them; was good for hogs." He said: "It is good for hogs, but it is deadly for pigs. These pigs were taken away from their mother when they were 3 weeks old, and they have had nothing but corn since then, and some of them are dead, and all of them are going to die." Now, I believe in corn and corn for human food; I have preached it. I preached it in Vienna at a great convention of scientific men. After I had told the virtues of corn bread and its use in this country, more than one distinguished man asked me in all seriousness whether it was true that the corn bread is a diet in the United States. He could hardly believe it, although I had assured them that it was. But corn is a diet on which children can not grow. If you feed your children nothing but corn bread, they will die, even the whole corn, too. And how much more quickly will children die if you take out of the corn you feed them about all that is suitable for food and then feed them the starchy remainder? I tell you, gentlemen, it is a threat against the children of the South which you gentlemen ought not to permit. Here are the documents which show that what I am speaking about is actually true, has been demonstrated by experiment, that an excessive carbohydrate diet is the cause of pellagra as well as many other diseases. Mr. FORDNEY. May I ask what your documents are? Dr. WILEY. They are from the Public Health Service; they are just issued-new from the press. That is my creed as it was 20 years ago, and as it is to-day. The people of this country must have a balanced diet; they must not have any too much starch, and especially are those who are in strained circumstances likely to have too much starch. Starch is the cheapest food that we can buy. The starchier foods are always the cheaper. I will say this about one starchy food, namely, the potato: That the potato starch does not have the same bad effects on nutrition that the starch of cereals has, and the reason of that is that the potato starch carries with it always more minerals. The potato starch is what we call a basic food; when it is digested it gives alkalinity to the blood, and the blood must be kept alkaline if we want to live. One of the most serious diseases we have is a diminution of the alkalinity of the blood, producing that condition which is known as acidosis, and hence the foods which do not maintain the alkalinity of the body are those which will injure health and speedily make one a prey to every waiting disease that wants to put its fangs into you, because it is well known that the undernourished body is the one on which the disease fastens first of all. Therefore any course of diet which tends to diminish the vitality of the body, that tends in any way to interfere with the development of all the tissues of the body, is a diatetic crime, and one which should not be sanctioned by the Congress of the United States. And therefore I say that if we allow the staff of life to be attacked-and that is what we regard wheat bread in this countrythe staff of life-if we allow the staff of life to be attacked in this way we threaten the whole State. Now, you have heard a great deal about preparedness, and I am one of the preachers of that gospel; I am one of those who believe, with our President, that this country should be prepared. But what is the greatest element that we should have in preparedness? I will tell you what it is. Healthy men and healthy women. What is the use of calling us to arms if we are unable to bear arms? If we are not able to do the duties which as citizens of our country we should do in a crisis that may come upon us, whose fault is it? And how many of us are able to do it; how many men of military age in the United States, if they were called to the colors to-day, do you suppose would be excluded? I do not know how many would be excluded finally, but I know how many are excluded now. You only have to look at the reports of the Army and the Navy as to enlistment to see what a small percentage of those who volunteer are accepted. Look further and you will see that most of them are rejected; oh, 85 per cent of those who are rejected as unfit for military service are rejected for physical reasons. We are not building up in this country a citizenry which has the fiber to do its duty when a crisis comes, and a law of this kind will do a great deal toward diminishing still more the vitality of our people. Now, Mr. Chairman, I have been in this fight for 40 years, a fight for the purity of foods. I have studied as well as I could all the laws of dietetics, and I want to warn you here, as one who knows something of this question, that the introduction of starch into the flour of this country is a threat to the very efficiency and welfare of the Nation, as well as the undevelopedness and the lack of resistance of each individual who eats this product. And if it is not to be eaten, if there is no market for it, there is no use of going to the trouble of making a law about it. You may rest assured that there are plenty of people in this country who will eat this adulterated article, and in eating it they will suffer just to that extent in the building up of their bodies. You may feed a child a shipload of starch, it will never build a single iota of any tissue except fat. It will never make a fragment of tooth or bone or nerve or muscle or brain particle or skin or hair or nail. It may make fat, if you have enough of other food to keep up your body long enough for the fat to be stored. But you will never get anything out of it but heat and energy and fat. Starch is an excellent food for a man at hard labor, a man who goes out and cuts logs in the winter or a man who breaks stone in the street, a man who follows the plow, or does any other hard labor can eat a lot of starch and sugar, and use it up in heat and energy, but the man who does not have hard labor, the man who is sedentary or sits at a desk in the office, eats starch and sugar to a great extent at his peril. The life insurance companies have statistics-and they are the best handlers of statistics that I know of, and it is not much comfort to me, this knowledge which they have given me. They have told me that if I weigh 40 pounds above what I should weigh, being 6 feet high, that I will die five years before I otherwise would. And I am 40 pounds overweight. I ought to weigh 200, and I weigh 240. So five years of my life are taken away by eating too much starch and sugar before I learned it was not good for me. I am not getting any stouter now; I am getting a little thinner. But, as I say, to unbalance the people's diet threatens the vitality of the Nation. People must have their proteins. They have to have a certain amount of mineral substance, a certain amount of phosphoric acid and lime. And of all people the children are the ones that in the first instance must be protected against the danger I speak of, and unless we give the children of this country the nourishment which adulterated flour will not give, we will not achieve a manhood worthy of the country. Now, I appeal to you on these two great points. I do not want to elaborate it any further. I would only make my argument weaker by trying to bolster it up with further illustrations. All I say is do not take a step which will mean adulteration of one of your principal foods; do not take a step which will threaten the life of the people of this country. Mr. HILL. Do you believe the German nation to-day is any worse off because of the executive order to mix wheat and potato flour? Dr. WILEY. Yes; they are not as well nourished as if they had wheat flour alone; but they are a great deal better off than if they had corn flour. Mr. HILL. Do you know the proportion that is used? Dr. WILEY. No. Mr. HILL. I understand nobody is allowed to use the pure wheat flour in Germany to-day. Dr. WILEY. I so understand. Mr. HILL. Neither the Kaiser nor anybody else. Dr. WILEY. It is not because the wheat flour is not good. Mr. FORDNEY. It is because they can not get it. Dr. WILEY. Yes; because they can not get it. Mr. HILL. Do you think they have made the best adulteration they could? Dr. WILEY. The best substitute they could in the way of starch. Potatoes are much more wholesome than cornstarch. Mr. HILL. Is it not true that they made the adulteration with that of which they had the most? Dr. WILEY. They had the potatoes; yes. Potatoes are a good article of food for a soldier. He is in active life all the time, and potatoes are an excellent article of food for him. Mr. MOORE. Would you kindly explain the difference in the nutritive qualities of 12-ounce loaves of bread, one made of mixed flour and one of pure wheat flour. Dr. WILEY. I would be glad to do so. The proteins in cereals are not alike. There is no gluten at all, so far as I know, in Indian corn. Proteins, when they are used for food, make different kinds of material which are used for the nutrition of the body. The protein of Indian corn is zein; that is the principal protein of Indian corn. Zein alone will not cause growth. If you take the zein out of the Indian corn and feed it to young animals, the young animals will stop growing at once. If you take the protein out of wheat and feed it to a young animal he will continue to grow. Zein is not a growth promoter. It furnishes material for the grown individual but does not furnish material for the child. Therefore the protein in wheat is a better article of nutrition by far than the protein of Indian corn. If you want it in corn, use milk with it. Then you supply the missing protein which the Indian corn does not have. Wheat will support you without milk. I do not mean by that that wheat alone is a proper food, but you can live a long time on wheat alone and drink no milk; and a child would grow on wheat alone, not as well as he ought to, but he would grow without milk; but he would not grow on Indian corn without milk or some other food which contains the building stone which is necessary. Now, zein does not furnish that necessary ingredient to promote growth. Indian corn does not furnish the building stones necessary in the nourishment of a growing child, but it does furnish material for repairing waste in grown-up persons, and therefore it is valuable for the hard-working man. It is a valuable food for children with milk. That makes a balanced ration. If you put the corn flour, as such, with the gluten in the wheat you diminish its nutritive value. If you put starch in, you take away just that much nutritive power for building tissue, and you put in simply materials that make heat and energy; that is, things you do not need except when you are at work. Hence the mixture of either corn flour or corn starch with wheat flour deteriorates the strength and value of the food. Mr. LONGWORTH. There has been some evidence here that corn has as much, or practically as much, gluten in it as wheat. Dr. WILEY. It has none in it at all. Mr. LONGWORTH. We are furnished by the Corn Products Co.whatever it is called-with a list of comparisons of the amounts of gluten contained in pure flour made of winter wheat, "A,” and in flour made of 80 per cent wheat and 20 per cent corn, and the amount of gluten is said to be the same in each case. Dr. WILEY. You could take an extraordinarily rich wheat flour, one containing 13 per cent of protein, and mix a 20 per cent cornstarch flour with it, and the amount of protein would be the same as in a wheat with 10 or 11 per cent of material; but you would have an unbalanced ration there by introducing the starch. Now, I imagine that the Corn Products Co. use the word "protein" as a synonym of gluten. I think so. Mr. MOORE. Do you think the passage of this repealer would have any effect upon the progress that has thus far been made in harmonizing the pure-food laws of the States with those of the Nation? 25718-16- -24 Dr. WILEY. Many of the pure-food provisions of the United States laws have been adopted by the States. Others of the States have adopted the regulations for carrying out the national pure-food law. The repeal of any of them would affect all the States which have adopted the definitions of the national law, and thus it would tend to produce in a State the same condition within the State which this makes in interstate commerce. Mr. MOORE. May I have permission to insert a letter which I have here, Mr. Chairman? Mr. CHAIRMAN. Without objection, it may go in the record. Hon. J. HAMPTON MOORE, House of Representatives, Washington, D. C. MIXED-FLOUR HEARING. SIR: We send herewith copy of "Digest of National and State Food Laws," referred to in Mr. Rockwood's argument before your committee Tuesday morning, February 1. The substantive provisions of the national law are quoted in full in black type on pages 5, 8, and 11. The national statute has been taken as a standard and the book indicates in what respects, if any, the various State statutes differ from the standard. You may readily see what marvelous progress has been made in securing uniformity between the national and the 48 State food laws, which is so essential to the production and distribution of interstate commodities at reasonable cost to the consumer. If the State laws are conflicting, different labels must be made for each State having a conflicting law, and the composition of the product is likewise affected. The enactment of House bill 9409 in its present form, i. e., containing special provisions relating to a particular food product, will disrupt the existing uniformity between the national food law and practically all the 48 State food laws. The theory of the food and drugs act of June 30, 1906, is to prohibit by adequate general rules all adulteration and misbranding, and leaves to scientific administration officials the duty of prescribing standards for the numberless food products. Under that statute any food product whatever which is labeled in such a manner as to be false or misleading in any particular is condemned. Under its broad provisions mixed flour, mixed sirup, or any other mixed commodity would be misbranded if the label failed to indicate what the contents actually consisted of. While it is true that the national statute does not require a statement of percentages, it is submitted that such a requirement would work injustice to a merchant who had invented a meritorious product by compelling him to disclose his trade formula to his competitors. While such a requirement would work injustice on the one hand, it would have no compensating benefit to the consumer. As a practical matter the average consumer when purchasing would pay no more attention to percentages stated than to the color of the label. We therefore respectfully recommend that H. R. 9409 be confined to the repeal of the mixed-flour statute and that all other provisions amending the food law be eliminated from the bill. If this be done, it is our opinion that the consumer would be fully protected under the United States food and drugs act of June 30, 1906, in its present form. Respectfully, BREED, ABBOTT & MORGAN. Mr. SLOAN. Will you explain the difference between protein and gluten-because there is evidence here that corn is fairly charged with gluten? Dr. WILEY. Of course, that is only due to the fact of the wrong use of terms. I should like to explain to the committee the true use of the name. There is no gluten in wheat, even. There are, however, two elements in wheat, one of which is called glutinin and the other |