Word: calcium
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Dates: during 1930-1939
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...Essential for the prevention of rickets in children, Vitamin D regulates the amount of calcium and phosphorus which the body uses for building bones and teeth. Only vitamin which does not originate in plant tissue, vitamin D occurs most abundantly in oily fish livers, is generated in the body by ultraviolet rays of the sun. Normal U. S. adults get all the vitamin D they need when they bask on beaches, and, if they drink plenty of milk, need not worry about calcium regulation. But to make best use of the calcium in their diet, pregnant women and children need...
Said Dr. Martin, warming to his subject, a mother's emotions have great influence upon her child's teeth, even before the baby is born. A woman who is anxious, apprehensive or resentful during pregnancy may not bother to eat tooth-forming foods (calcium, phosphorus and vitamins). After the child is born, she must be the thermostat to the "emotional climate of the home." A mother who pampers her child never lets him get his teeth into anything. Consider the Eskimos, said Dr. Martin. They "use their teeth for everything, including softening frozen leather," and Eskimos rarely suffer...
...Though completion of the New Deal's dam program will not harness all this, experts foresee a big surplus over municipal and irrigation power needs. They also claim they know how to mop it up-build electrochemical factories near damsites, with hungry electricity-eaters like furnaces to produce calcium carbide (from limestone and coal electrically heated to 4,000° F.), acetylene, alcohol, acetone, fertilizers, insecticides, plastics. One modern, three-electrode calcium carbide furnace requires 225,000 amperes-enough current to light a million and a half household lamps...
Another explanation for tooth decay was offered by Dr. E. F. Briggs of Bangor, Me. The parathyroids (small bean-shaped glands surrounding the thyroid) regulate the amount of calcium absorbed by the body. Emotions, claimed imaginative Dentist Briggs, influence the parathyroids. "If a young man is disappointed in love, his teeth may decay in a few months." he said. "The emotions that cause decay are those that depress. . . . Middle-aged patients who suddenly present caries (tooth decay) . . . invariably have . . . passed through a period in which they had extra work, deep anxiety or added responsibility...
...this medical mystery. The patient was a "hypochondriac," he said, "and obsessed by his evacuations." Every morning for 35 years he had taken one teaspoon of Carlsbad salts as a laxative. Carlsbad salts "are mainly composed of sodium sulfate and sodium bicarbonate, and presumably a certain amount of calcium of the food was transformed in the intestine into insoluble calcium sulfate which was then evacuated." The result was "a calcium deficiency of the skeletal system." When the patient was deprived of Carlsbad salts his disease was checked. Although still short and top-heavy he can now move about free...