About Accessory Factors in food

There are some forty-odd important known minerals, vitamins, enzymes, hormones and other accessory factors which the body needs from the diet.   A few it can store; but  many  must  constantly  be  replaced.

These latter, like vitamin C, often occur in those fragile food constituents that are lost through  indifferent handling,  excessive processing, and poor cooking.

To retain as many of them as possible please follow the cooking suggestions given in the chapters on vegetables, meats, fish, eggs and cereals.

While we have printed below the average daily caloric needs, and we have discussed their approximate distribution, we have still to assure ourselves a practical way of including optimal amounts of accessory factors.

If you check prime sources of minerals and vitamins you will find that foods rich in one vitamin or mineral may also be rich in others.  It happens too that some foods heavily weighted with biologic values   yield   the   best   quality   proteins.

Many of the foods rich in accessory values also have bulk, a factor to be considered in planning the daily intake so as to include more high- than low-residue foods.

A few accessory factors the body can store- such as the fat soluble vitamins A, D, E and K. Some, like the water-soluble C and B-complex, must be replenished constantly.

Here is a shopping guide for accessory factors, Fill your market basket so that it holds a minimum of 2 fruits and 3 vegetables daily. Concentrate on salad materials, especially the lively green ones, and on green and yellow vegetables.

Cultivate the cabbage family, root vegetables, pota!j toes and especially sweet potatoes, tomatoes, peppers an avocados. Include in the fruits apricots, peaches and melons, as well as plenty of citrus types.

Be on your guard in distinguishing genuine fruit juices from the so-called "juice drinks," for many of the latter are higher in carbohydrate values than anything else, and their C-vitamin values are frequently low.

Prime choices in the protein budget are milk, cheese and eggs, fish and fish roe, organ meats such as liver, kidneys, heart and brains, lean-muscle cuts of beef, pork and lamb, dried peas and beans, especially soybeans and peanuts.

See triple-rich Cornell Flour Formula. Include also 1 tablespoon daily of butter or fortified fat or oil, and 1 pint of milk or equivalent milk products. Bake with whole grains and flavor with brown sugar, molasses, wheat germ and butter.

Don't forget the cheapest of all accessory factors, outdoor exercise, to whet your appetite, tone your muscles and get you out where you absorb the sunlight vitamin D.

Other incidentals to bear in mind are to drink seven or eight glasses of fluid a day, see About Water and to use iodized salt, see About Salt if you live in a region that calls for it.

The schedule outlined above is not nesessarily a costly one. It is nearly always possible to substitute cheaper but equally nutritious items from the same food groups. Vegetables of similar accessory value, for example, may be differently priced.

Seasonal foods, which automatically give us menu variations, are usually higher in food value and lower in cost.

Whole-grain cereals are no more costly than highly processed ones. Fresh fruits are frequently less expensive than canned fruits loaded with sugar.