Anyone who wants to learn these facts in an unbiased way has ready access to them. Because of such facts, you will find unprejudiced scientific organizations and scientists writing and saying that margarine, as it is made and sold in this country today is a fine, wholesome, nutritious product; and, if you compare it with butter, margarine, and butter are nutritionally equivalent.

Just to mention a few outstanding scientific organizations, I could refer to the published statements of the American Medical Association, the Food and Nutrition Board of the National Research Council, and the Committee of Public Health Relations of the New York Academy of Medicine. All these organizations attest to the nutritional value of margarine.

The United States Federal Security Agency, during the war years, in its attempt to popularize nutrition, understanding of nutrition, in other words, emphasized the need of seven basic food classes. It included butter and fortified margarine in the same group, attributing equal value to each.

Margarine is a fat food, its basic function being to furnish energy and to increase the palatability of foods. Like butter, it has a minimum of 80 percent fat, and the balance consists of skimmed milk, vitamin A, and other ingredients added to increase its efficiency and to meet the needs and desires of the consumers. It has been established, and no one informed would even dare to deny this, that margarine and butter are equal in caloric value and digestibility, which are the two major considerations for a fat food.

When you consider the fat soluble vitamins, vitamins A and D, fortified margarine regularly contains a minimum of 15,000 units of vitamin A per pound, while butter varies from a figure higher than this to a figure much lower than this, with an average throughout the year of 15,000 units per pound. Fortified margarine and butter, that is, unfortified butter, are essentially the same with respect to vitamin D values. When you consider other possible nutritive values, such as the unsaturated fatty acids, vitamin E, and the milk minerals and proteins, the two products are essentially the same. While margarine may have a slight edge in such respects, it is not significant nutritionally.

From time to time during the past several years we find that some worker here or there comes up with the claim that there is some factor in butter, of nutritional value, which is not present in margarine. The latest of these claims deal with a substance known as vaccenic acid. However these various claims have been clearly disproven by the work done by Dr. H. J. Deuel, Jr., and his coworkers at the school of medicine, University of Southern California, and by other very competent research people both in this country and abroad.

Dr. Deuel and his co-workers performed a series of very carefully prepared and controlled experiments seeking to ascertain whether any nutritive differences did exist between margarine and butter. Dr. Deuel's experiments were made on rats, and I may add here that about 80 percent of what we have learned about nutrition in food in the last 50 years has come principally and originally from experiments on rats.

I only wish I could take the time to explain to you each and every one of these experiments, since they cover the field so well and since, to a scientist at least, they are so authoritative. I have here, and am

glad to leave with the committee, to be made part of the record, several copies of each of the Deuel reports as published in the Journal of Nutrition, and I hope you will have the time to read at least a few of these.

The CHAIRMAN. They will be made available to the members of the committee.

Dr. CARLSON. Thank you. Most of them appeared in the Journal of Nutrition.

Deuel and his co-workers attempted to ascertain whether any differences can be demonstrated between vegetable fats including margarine fat, and butterfat with respect to growth, lactation, reproduction, and so forth. In other words, all of the essential factors in healthy life. They even tested rats which were weaned prematurely to see if any differences would result under such abnormal feeding conditions. By use of a growth hormone, they caused increased growth in rats and tested such animals to see if any differences would result because of the abnormally increased needs of such animals, in other words, more than normal growth, canned meat, and so forth, those needs, as well as butter.

In attempting to ascertain whether any differences resulted, Deuel and his co-workers not only weighed the rats, but also measured growth of bones and assayed the make-up, chemical make-up of the bodies of the animals to see whether any differences came about in the utilization of the fats.

As a result of all of these very carefully conducted experiments, it was found that there were just no nutritional differences between butter on the one hand and today's margarine on the other. I had the privilege of being associated with these experiments and planning some of them, and not only reviewed the work, but also the resulting data. If there was any substance in butterfat of nutritive value, whether known or unknown to man, it would have shown up in the Deuel experiments.

Then, in order to take care of the possibility of a very slight difference which might perhaps not show up for a generation, the Deuel group has conducted experiments which today have continued for over 20 generations, again experiments on rats. This is an outstanding piece of scientific work. The twenty-first generation of animals has maintained its vigor and its growth rate similar to that of the original group, and no failures have occurred in pregnancy or lactation. It definitely appears that the animals could very well continue on the margarine in place of butter diet indefinitely. Other scientists both in this country and abroad have published results confirming the Deuel work.

Let me explain that such tests are conducted on rats because of the limitations that such an experiment would have if we attempted to perform it on man. Obviously it would be impossible to so limit the diet of man over a considerable period of time. When you figure that a generation in man covers about 30 to 33 years the Deuel experiments over 20 generations would, translated into tests on humans, represent a maintenance of normal function over a period exceeding 600 years, with the fat in the diet being almost completely of vegetable margarine fat.

Vaccenic acid itself is really not important, but I feel I must mention it because I have noticed that some of the butter protagonists have

been referring to it as making butter superior nutritionally to margarine. There is simply nothing to this. Deuel has very comprehensively tested this substance and his work has recently been published in the March issue of the Journal of Nutrition. No beneficial effect whatsoever resulted when pure vaccenic acid was added to the diet. When animals were fed cottonseed oil they did not improve in any way when vaccenic acid was added to the diet.

A few years ago I published a pamphlet which I called Legislation Which Renders It More Difficult To Secure Adequate Nutrition. These contain quotations from institutions and research investigations of note, and I am glad to submit for the members of the committee sufficient number of copies of that publication.

The CHAIRMAN. They will be made available to the members of the committee.

Dr. CARLSON. The meaning of the title is this, that the taxes render it more difficult for the financially less fortunate members of our citizens to secure an adequate diet.

This contains facts about the nutritive value of margarine which, because they are facts, are unanswerable. In order to shorten my oral testimony I am submitting to the committee copies of my pamphlet as part of the record.

Finally I would like to refer to an experiment conducted by Drs. Harry Leichenger and George Eisenberg, of the University of Illinois College of Medicine, Department of Pediatrics, and myself, the results of which were published in the February 7, 1948, issue of the Journal of the American Medical Association. The published article really speaks for itself, and again to save time, I am submitting for the record copies of this article.

And I leave here with you a sufficient number of reprints for your

committee.

The CHAIRMAN. They will be made available to the committee. Dr. CARLSON. I hope that you will have a chance to read it. I think it is written in the language so that laymen can grasp it.

In this experiment over 200 children were used; and since they were in the growing stage we tested them for increase in weight, increase in growth, illness, condition of the blood, all of the measures that can be applied to the living, growing child. The diets of the two groups in the two institutions were essentially the same, good diets for children, except in one case for cooking or table spread butter was used, for the other group standard margarine. At the end of 2 years there was no difference. Two years is a short time.

Senator HAWKES. May I interrupt to ask you this? I had a letter written to me 3 or 4 weeks ago, in which they stated in that letter that certain experiments similar to the ones you have just recited were made of some two or three hundred children in an orphanage some place, and they were fed on oleo, and similar number in another place were fed on butter, and that the health of the children who had the oleo was better than those who had butter. You simply say that it is practically the same.

Dr. CARLSON. I know of no experiment, Senator, similar to this anywhere as yet.

Senator HAWKES. They may have referred to this very experiment of yours.

76269-48-8

tion, which has promulgated a standard for it under od, Drug, and Cosmetic Act.

ly today, with the high cost of living, when so many of hard-pressed to make both ends meet, and with it bein or large numbers of our population to secure an adequ mit to you gentlemen that there is no justification wh continuing these taxes and that, in the interests of g od nutrition, and plain American fair play, these ta repealed.

■f no parallel to this type of Federal interference with re and sale of a good food product. And I have been n every State for more than 70 years. Of course, it is v often conceded by the antimargarine group that the F rine taxes were not primarily enacted for the sake of rais The 10-cents-per-pound tax on yellow margarine obviou rich the Treasury Department but exists for the purpo ing the consumer from getting margarine the way th na pleasing yellow color.

more, as far as I can see, this margarine situation is ht between the dairy farmer and the margarine produc t really waged by the butter manufacturer against m is carried on for purely selfish purposes in an attempt gislation, competitive advantages which are abhorrent rican principle of free and fair competition.

margarine lobby has for years been attempting to convi hat, if margarine were sold yellow, wholesale fraud wo ed. To me this is preposterous, and yet, to date, this arge has stood in the way of adequate nutrition for a go -consuming public.

part of my professional life has been spent in the study ods for man. No one food has any exclusive claim to a color. Foods have a large variety of natural colors, a he score are artificially colored. This is recognized in ood, Drug, and Cosmetic Act when it merely requires t added to food it be declared on the label. As you kno al legislative enactment, butter is excepted from this le