Abstract
THE War accentuated the difficulties of food production and the maintenance of an adequate diet for human wise. Actual destruction and the diversion of human activity to destructive aims, mass movements of the population to avoid or assist military operations, and the natural increase of the population, which in spite of these disturbances continued with very little check, have brought peace-time problems of great urgency : how to maintain or raise the standard of nutrition, and at the same time make provision for the increasing population or alternatively how to control the rate of increase. Nutrition and fertility are therefore socially and economically related as well as causally connected. The emphasis of the Conference held by the Nutrition Society on March 5 was on the causal connexions, but many experiences were drawn from the social and economic spheres. Thus, Dr. G. I. M. Swyer directed attention to the apparent paradox that in the East (China, India, etc.) a high birth-rate and expanding population is associated with poverty and under-nourishment, whereas in the West adequate nourishment is associated with a stationary or declining population. Prof. A. St. G. Huggett, on the other hand, instanced the effects of starvation or near starvation on the depression of the conceptual-rate, birth-rate and birth-weight, and increase in abortion-rate and prematurity-rate, in the populations of Stalingrad and Holland during the worst periods of the War. Dr. J. Edwards showed that data collected from animal artificial insemination centres primarily concerned with increasing the milk production could be analysed to give valuable information on the effect of seasonal nutrition on bovine fertility. Dr. J. Hammond and Dr. S. J. Folley both drew inferences on the effects of nutrition on fertility from agricultural practice, and Prof. Huggett and Dr. Swyer from clinical medicine.
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WALTON, A. Nutrition and Fertility. Nature 163, 593–594 (1949). https://doi.org/10.1038/163593a0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/163593a0