Milk, man's first and oldest beverage, has taken on a new form that puts it in the front ranks of concentrated protective foods. I refer to dry skim milk—the new process powdered milk—an inexpensive, readily digested, high-protein food that is handy to use and short on calories.

Unfortunately, the old roller-processed milk, dried and ground between hot rollers, had a slightly brown cast and settled out when made into beverages. It was unsatisfactory except for baking. Its taste—its smell, too—was somewhat remote from that of fresh milk. As a result, the term "pow­dered milk" may cause some persons to turn up their noses and protest, "That's not for me!"

But the new spray-processed skim milk is an entirely differ­ent and wholly satisfactory product. Liquid milk is dried by being sprayed into compressed air; and the milk solids come out with the fine, smooth texture of face powder. The color is beautifully white with a faint greenish cast caused by the high-concentration of riboflavin. The flavor of the new dry skim milk is mild and delicate, and its faint smell resembles that of sweet dried coconut.

I must confess to taking a few liberties with history when I say that dried milk is "new." Actually, long before the birth of Christ the ancient Egyptians prepared a concentrated milk by drying it in the sun. And the sturdy Mongol horsemen who made up the invading armies of the conqueror Genghis Khan were supplied with sun-dried milk as a concentrated marching ration that would assure them the full nourishment necessary for their strenuous campaigns. So we're a few centuries late in learning that dried milk is a wonderfully concentrated food. If everyone in this country were to use this economical food in their daily diet, it could overcome the widespread de­ficiencies of protein, calcium and riboflavin which afflict thousands upon thousands of persons, causing them to fall ready victims to aging diseases.

Did you know that the addition of even so little as a table-spoonful of powdered skim milk to your daily servings of food would be a worthwhile contribution to your Eat-and-Grow-Younger program?

Did you know that less than one-half cup of powdered skim milk contains all the nutrients found in a quart of fresh skim milk?

Did you know that powdered skim milk contributes far more to your health than either whole fresh milk or cream because it is so highly concentrated?

Did you know that powdered skim milk is tolerated by persons who find whole fresh milk hard to digest?

Did you know that the highly concentrated amounts of protein, calcium and riboflavin in dry skim milk can help prolong your "prime of life," and aid you in retaining a sexual youthfulness?

Did you know that there are no nutritional values in yogurt over ordinary buttermilk or sour milk? If you like yogurt for its distinctive taste, then by all means use it, for it's a good milk product. But if you find its price a little above your pocketbook, then ordinary buttermilk or soured fresh milk will give you the same nutritional benefits, par­ticularly lactic acid, as the more expensive yogurt. Also, dry skim milk made into a liquid, with lemon juice added to sour it, makes a sour milk that is good to drink and excellent for cooking.

These milk facts should be known to everybody, since milk is one food about which much myth and misconception has been built up throughout years of propagandizing by the dairy industry.

Milk, we have been told repeatedly for decades, is a "per­fect food," and a "complete food." Like much other propa­gandizing, these statements are but half-truths. Sweet milk is not a "perfect food" for anyone who cannot digest it properly. Nor is sweet milk a perfect food when taken at mealtime by persons whose digestive juices are not acid enough to properly digest the protein foods eaten. Because sweet milk has an alkaline reaction in the stomach, when taken by the glassful at mealtime it tends to counteract the natural acidity of the hydrochloric acid in our digestive juices. Many persons who had thought they suffered from "chronic dyspepsia" have discovered that their symptoms vanished completely after they ceased drinking sweet milk with their meals. If you like the flavor of fresh sweet milk— and it does not lie in your stomach like a handful of putty— then by all means enjoy it, but between meals, and never at mealtime, especially if you have long since celebrated your thirtieth birthday.

Buttermilk as a mealtime beverage is quite a different matter, because its high lactic acid content actually promotes the digestion of proteins and iron-containing foods.

If you'll only stop to think for a minute, you'll realize that nature provided sweet milk for the suckling young animal, unable as yet to masticate solid foods. Nowhere in nature do you find any animal, except man, mixing fresh sweet milk with solid protein foods.

Another mistaken belief popularly held about fresh milk is that the "richer the milk, the better." Nothing could be farther from the truth. The protein, minerals and vitamin B-complex (riboflavin and thiamin mainly) are all contained in the skim milk, not in the cream.

Many mothers, for instance, make the mistake of purchas­ing the richest milk they can find for their children. Yet, in­stead of gaining in weight and health, their children actually lose weight and have little appetite. The reason for this is that the cream in the rich milk satisfies their appetites too quickly, taking away the desire for larger quantities o£ other foods containing richer sources o£ protein, minerals and vitamins. However, i£ the children were given a less rich milk, not only would they drink more of it, but they would eat more heartily o£ the protective foods. The same holds true for any age.

In many persons the undigested £at in too rich milk com­bines with calcium, thereby preventing this vital mineral from reaching the bloodstream. When this happens, a serious calcium deficiency, with all its aging discomforts and ail­ments, is likely to result—despite the most earnest of efforts to "drink plenty of milk for calcium."

And, to make matters worse, the combination of fat-and-calcium forms a sort of hard soap in the intestines, causing a hard-to-overcome type of constipation. Perhaps you are one of the many persons who find rich whole milk "binding." I£ so, that is the explanation.

Regardless of whether or not your weight is normal, dry skim milk is the best sweet milk for you.

If you want to gain weight, dry skim milk, used liberally, will provide extra amounts of the protein, minerals and vitamins, lack of which probably caused you to be under­weight in the first place.

If, on the other hand, overweight is your problem, and yours should be a reducing diet, then dry skim milk is equally good. Liberal amounts of this powered skim milk can be used without making your calorie count jump up like the thermometer on a hot day. This milk can be incorporated into your reducing menu in a number of flavorful and appetite-satisfying ways. Moreover, the highly concentrated protein in this type of milk is a valuable aid to a high-pro­tein reducing diet, since the more protein you eat (without adding calories) the more quickly your sluggish thyroid gland can be prodded into taking over and bringing your body weight back to normal.

Then again you may not like the taste of either sweet milk or buttermilk well enough to drink it. If so, dry skim milk makes it possible for you to obtain all the health-protective values in this protein food without offending your sense of taste. Incorporate at least one-half cup of the milk powder into your food each day, and you'll get all the benefits of a quart of fresh liquid milk. (The menus in Part II do this "incorpor­ating" for you.) I'm not going to lecture you, listing "ten good reasons" why you should drink milk. I don't drink sweet milk myself simply because it doesn't agree with me despite the fact that my general health is A-i in all respects. But, since dried milk has become available in this new, flavorful powder, I have found it possible to increase my daily milk ration— over and above drinking buttermilk—by having dry skim milk incorporated into as many foods as possible at each meal.

For instance, a tablespoonful of skim milk powder thor­oughly mixed into the beaten egg makes wonderful scrambled eggs for breakfast—an excellent high-protein dish with which to start off the day. At lunch, dry skim milk can be added to soups or to the egg sauce served over vegetables such as asparagus or cauliflower. The whole-grain and seed-meal bread in my occasional luncheon sandwich is made with liberal amounts of powdered skim milk sifted in with the flour, in addition to the normal amount of liquid called for in the recipe, thereby making a richer, more high-protein bread than ordinarily would be produced. At dinner, the fruit pudding or egg custard served for dessert likewise con­tains a tablespoonful or more of dry skim milk in addition to the liquid milk specified in the recipe.

If you wish to economize and simplify your marketing, you may omit buying fresh sweet milk altogether, and stock your cupboard with the inexpensive, long-keeping dry skim milk powder, to be made up into liquid milk with a few flips of the eggbeater or a wire whisk by merely adding it to cold water. And this reconstructed liquid milk that you your­self make from skim milk powder can be as diluted or as concentrated as you wish. I£ there is more water in it than usual, it will be because you, and not the dairyman, put it there.

From the standpoint of economy and convenience alone, housewives tell me they would not be without dry skim milk after once using it. Yet economy and convenience are but two o£ the advantages that all health-conscious persons have gained by the advent o£ this new dry skim milk.

I don't wish to bore you with statistics. Yet there are cer­tain briefly worded facts about dry skim milk which you should know to better appreciate the necessity for adding this youth-protecting food to your Eat-and-Grow-Younger diet.

So concentrated is dry skim milk that it contains eleven times more high-grade protein, minerals, B-vitamins and lactose than fresh whole milk. This means that eleven pounds of fresh milk are used to prepare 1 pound of dry skim milk.

Powdered skim milk is 36.5 per cent protein, as compared to 19.7 per cent protein found in an equal weight o£ lean beef. So concentrated is this milk powder that when you use it you are providing your body with a food that is more than one-third pure protein of the type classed as complete by biochem­ists. In its powdered form, less than two cups of dry skim milk yields 200 grams of protein—a safe margin over the recom­mended daily minimum protein requirement of 100 to 150 grams for adults. You can begin to see now why I have added dry skim milk so liberally to the foods in your Eat-and-Grow-Younger menus in Part II. Where else could you get so much concentrated pure protein at so low a cost?

An analysis of skim milk powder shows it to be approxi­mately 8 per cent minerals. This is a remarkably high con­centration of minerals, since most foods contain less than 1 per cent.

All the important minerals necessary for human health are found in dry skim milk. It is especially rich in calcium and phosphorus. In fact, it is recognized as a richer source of calcium than any other natural food. Three-quarters of a cup of dry skim milk will supply more than your normal daily need for calcium, and about two-thirds of your phos­phorus requirements for a day.

Potassium is another essential food mineral generously present in dry skim milk. In fact, the high calcium-phos­phorus-potassium concentration in dry skim milk makes it a wonderful nerve, brain and heart re-conditioner for the past-forty body. When combined with phosphorus, potassium helps keep your nervous system strong enough to withstand the tenseness which so often afflicts men and women alike immediately before, during and after their climacteric. Milk, not alcohol or tobacco, will calm your nerves and take away that tenseness which frequently leads to neurotic symptoms— sure signs of age anywhere along the calendar.

Potassium, in combination with calcium, is vital to the youthful action of your older heart. Calcium salts contract the heart muscles, while the potassium salts act to relax them. It is this continual interchange of equalized contraction and relaxation that enables your heart to keep on beating normally, sending out an uninterrupted supply of life-sus­taining blood to every cell in your body.

Except for iron and copper (and it does contain small completely usable amounts of these two minerals), dry skim milk is rich in all the important minerals recognized at this time as essential to your health. In addition to those already mentioned, this new powdered milk contains sulphur, chlo­rine, sodium, magnesium, manganese, iodine, cobalt and zinc.

Dry skim milk is also a particularly rich source of the youth-promoting vitamins in the B-complex group—thiamin, ribo¯ flavin, choline, inositol, niacin, pyridoxine, pantothenic acid, para-aminobenzoic acid, biotin, folic acid and the lately rec­ognized vitamin B-12.

More than merely "containing" these B-vitamins, dry skim milk provides them in a natural balance, along with its proteins, minerals and carbohydrate. The closer you can stay to a natural concentrated food (or to a scientifically combined diet supplement), the more likely you are to obtain a food with all its nutrients in balance.

As mentioned earlier, dry skim milk is one of the most concentrated sources of riboflavin as yet discovered. I won't go into detail here on all the ways in which riboflavin helps you to feel and look younger. The riboflavin story is fully told in Chapters 13 and 14. But I will warn you right here that if you are not getting enough riboflavin in your everyday diet—and few adult persons do—then you might as well re­concile yourself to feeling and looking much older than you are because, in doing nothing to correct this riboflavin de­ficiency, you are laying your entire body open to a general speeding up in the aging process.

The age-fighting thiamin, which your nervous system re­quires in increasingly large amounts after your fortieth birthday, is also present in dry skim milk. One cupful of powdered skim milk will supply more than 25 per cent of your daily requirement for this important B-vitamin. Like ribo­flavin, thiamin is imperative to a mind and body that stands the years well.

If millet meal is not available to you at this time, you may still provide your body with this age-fighting vitamin by cooking your breakfast corn meal mush, oatmeal or any other whole-grain cooked cereal in liquefied dry skim milk. Then add a balanced vitamin concentrate, containing thia­min, to your daily health regimen.

Running quickly down the list of the other B-vitamins found in dry skim milk, there is pyridoxine, necessary, among other functions, to aid in keeping your nerves young; panto-thenic acid which, when seriously lacking in the diet, brings on these alarming signs of age: gastro-intestinal lesions, withered testicles, disordered adrenal glands, fatty deposits in the liver and kidneys and gray thinning hair; choline and inositol which are now recognized as valuable in helping curb hardening of the arteries (see Chapter 9) which causes more deaths among the past-forty group than any other disease; para-aminobenzoic acid, now believed to be the real anti-gray hair factor in the B-complex group; biotin, vital to complete nutrition of your body; folk acid and vitamin B~i2 known to be specifics in the treatment or prevention of anemia.

Although dry skim milk does not contain an appreciable amount of niacin, it does provide tryptophane, the amino acid from which your body can manufacture its own niacin.

Dry skim milk is 52 per cent carbohydrate. But don't jump to conclusions that I've been advocating a high-carbo­hydrate food in this chapter, after having denounced high-starch foods earlier in the book. Let me explain—the carbohydrate in dry skim milk is lactose, commonly known as "milk sugar."

No ordinary carbohydrate is lactose. While other carbo­hydrates, such as those found in white flour, white sugar, white rice, spaghetti, alcohol and devitalized foods, raise merry hell in your gastrointestinal tract, lactose is a well-behaved little carbohydrate. Lactose does not ferment, caus­ing gas and after-meal distress, nor does it irritate the stomach membrane as the other artificial carbohydrates are likely to do.

Lactose is one of the few carbohydrates that actually does several beneficial things for your body. It acts as a choline-sparer, that is, it makes a little choline do the work of more; it promotes the building up of riboflavin, pyridoxine and niacin in the intestine; it also promotes your body's absorp­tion of calcium and phosphorus. And, very important, lactose aids the growth of the highly desirable acidophilus bacteria in your intestinal tract—bacteria which help keep it in good working order, preventing the growth of unwanted fungi and bacteria among fermenting food residues.

Lactose is a youth-promoter, too, because it provides a quick, readily usable source of energy for older bodies that need every iota of energy they can muster to counteract a slowing down of the nervous system and the vital organs.

It has long been known that some foods stimulate the sex glands. Among the more commonly recognized of such foods are eggs, oysters and red meats. There is another that should be added to the list—milk.

Mahatma Gandhi, world-famous holy man of India, in later years after taking his vow of continence sought to repress his normal sexual desires. As part of his self-imposed ascetic life, he also limited his diet to fruits and nuts. But after a while he discovered that this extremely limited diet did not provide the strength he needed to carry on his vigorous campaigns of non-resistance among his countrymen (resulting in long imprisonments for himself), so he was obliged to add milk to his daily meals.

Now, while he had been subsisting on nothing except fruits and nuts, the Mahatma reported experiencing no diffi­culty in maintaining his vow of abstinence from sex. But, almost as soon as he started drinking milk each day, he noticed that his sexual desires became increasingly stronger. The Mahatma's experience with milk and sex has been borne out by many past-forty persons who report strengthened sexual powers after adding liberal amounts of high-protein foods to their everyday diet.

Milk, like other high-protein foods, contains factors of great importance to the human organs of reproduction.

We know that protein, calcium, riboflavin and thiamin exert an important influence on the continued youthfulness of the sex glands in men and women alike. Laboratory re­search has demonstrated that liberal amounts of these four nutrients in the daily diet can prolong sexual desires. Pow­dered milk was the food used in the experiment to provide the added quantities of these four nutrition elements.

It was learned that the laboratory animal could be nour­ished well enough to remain alive and active on a diet of five parts of whole wheat to one part of milk powder. But when the milk powder was increased from one-fifth to one-third of the entire mixture, not only was there a definite increase in sexual powers, but in general health and longevity as well.

A British scientist advocated not long ago that all married couples, whatever their ages, should look to their diets if they wished to achieve a congenial marital partnership. The quar­relsome mate is quite likely to be one whose nerves are starved for protein, calcium and the B-vitamins, especially thiamin. The "frigid" wife, or the sexually indifferent hus­band, is probably one whose sex organs are too undernour­ished because of improper diet to be capable of their full powers.

This thought-provoking fact is brought before you at this point because it has long been my belief that the lopsided, artificial, woefully devitalized diets of a great majority of American families create the real causes underlying so much unhappy married life. The love and harmony of marriage are severely strained by "on-edge" nerves, and an irregular, indifferent sex life. Many marriages grow old sexually long before the husband or the wife. And the partner to a sexless marriage, whether he or she will admit it openly, has a feel­ing of lost youth that turns the joy of living to bitterest gall.

So whatever you can do to retain the sexual youthfulness of your marriage is an important step toward guarding your own self against premature aging in mind and body alike.

Certainly I don't want to give the impression that pow­dered milk is going to cure all the ills of your marriage. But I do want you to consider the logic of safeguarding your mar­ital happiness by making certain that your nervous system and your sexual glands are well fortified by protective foods so you can retain the youthfulness necessary for a prolonged period of normal sex enjoyment.

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