Spencer Heath Archive

Item 216

Penned and titled by Heath on lined notepad paper.

No date

POPULATION

     Food supply stimulates the growth, development and over-all bodily functioning. It contributes to the biologi­cal security and permanence of the single organism — the individual, to the extent of its capacity to ingest, digest and assimilate. Food acts only through and upon the somatic system, and any increase above what the system normally requires and can employ does not increase the bodily welfare or functioning. On the contrary, any excess of food above normal tends to diminish and depress, inhibiting both bodily and mental activity and storing up non-functioning and often deleterious excesses of fatty tissue.

     In situations of deficient food supply the organism reacts with every possible economy and efficiency. In so doing it gives preference to those bodily structures and functions that under the conditions are of greatest importance and necessity for continuance of the life. Appetite falls away, digestion diminishes and the muscular structure is consumed, all the vital organs, such as the heart and the lungs can be to the last maintained — and, last but not least, the reproductive is maintained intact and even stimulated, as has been noted often in the case of tubercular or other­wise undernourished persons and populations. And where the perpetuation of the race is strongly involved, as in under­nourished pregnancy even the maternal bones are in large part forfeit to the fetal necessity. Such is the economy of Nature that first the individual but above all the race shall be maintained. When food becomes insufficient her first care is that the most essential vital functions for the individual shall be least impaired and that the last physiological reserves, even to the life of the parent, shall be drawn upon for preservation of the race. Where food becomes insufficient nature’s first care is that what is most vital to the individual be maintained

     Except during pregnancy, the reproductive system normally draws but lightly upon the vital energy of the whole. The somatic system must be far in decline before the genetic requisite of vital energy is seriously imperiled or impaired.

     Both the somatic and the genetic systems together require only such optimum supply of food as is requisite for their maintenance and normal functioning. Under any given set of conditions, the ingesting of more than this optimum tends not to increase but to diminish the functioning at both levels. Such excess does not give any increase of bodily energy nor does it stimulate the reproductive function. It is sheer waste and tends to inhibit both.

But a deficiency of food, while it diminishes the powers of the soma, acts in a wholly contrary manner with respect to the genetic system. Nature’s first care is preservation of the race. Her prudence allows no deficiency here. Hence out of the over-all vital deficiency she gives highest priority to the reproductive system, second to the circula­tory, the respiratory and perforce to the alimentary and, last of all, the muscular and the skeletal. The most extreme and contrary effects from a chronic insufficiency of food are to be seen in the high average fertility and the low average muscular energy of many populations who suffer this dietary distress.