area are 82 percent in favor of the repeal of these laws; that the polls show overwhelming majorities that the vote of the membership of the House shows it, the attitude of the commentators and the commentators on the radio show that I would say the people of the United States are going to be rid of these laws. We talked about the State situation, which is a further example of public attitude. There were at the time this fight started some 23 States which had prohibitions on the manufacture and sale of margarine. Since these discussions have started, there are very few State legislatures in session. New Jersey has repealed the laws. Massachusetts' repealer is in conference now, and there is no indication that it will not be passed and signed. Maryland has eliminated it by judicial interpretation, and so we are down to the point when the Massachusetts law is signed, there will be 20 or 19 States still maintaining those prohibitions.

We are very confident that when most of the State legislatures meet next year that these prohibitions are going, because the public is insisting that it has a right to buy food as cheap as possible, and it has a right to buy healthful food and raise its children in the most healthful way possible without paying any tax to any section or any special industry.

I think this thing ought to be emphasized further, that in the House we had a very unprecedented circumstance, of course, when the Agriculture Committee over there closed the door on any margarine legislation for the year, refusing to consider any bills for the duration of the session, as of that day there were only 70 names on the discharge petition, and all of them from the one party. But in almost record time that discharge petition was filled up with the 218 signatures and some 10 or 12 other Members were standing in line waiting to sign. Despite the attitude of anyone in the House, the Members of the House in sufficient number went up and signed that discharge petition, and when the roll was called they voted to eliminate these taxes, lock, stock, and barrel.

And so, gentlemen, to conclude my remarks, I would simply like to state that on the part of the majority of the Members of the House, we think these taxes are un-American. We think they are unjust. We think that no one can defend them in any way, shape, or form. We think they are repugnant to our enterprise system, and that they ought to be repealed, both on the Federal and State levels, in the least possible time.

The CHAIRMAN. Thank you very much, Congressman.

Mr. CORBETT. Thank you.

The CHAIRMAN. The next witness is Dr. Carlson, of the University of Chicago.

STATEMENT OF ANTON J. CARLSON, DEPARTMENT OF PHYSIOLOGY, THE UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO, CHICAGO, ILL.

Dr. CARLSON. My name is Anton J. Carlson. I am professor emeritus of the University of Chicago, department of physiology and medicine.

Without attempting to set forth all of my qualifications, let me cover them briefly and mention particularly some of them which may be of interest to you in connection with the bill under consideration.

I received my graduate training at Stanford University in California, where I received my Ph. D. in physiology. After teaching at certain universities, I joined the faculty of the University of Chicago in 1904, spending the greater part of my time there in charge of the department of physiology and where for 10 years or so I had one of the 10 distinguished research professorships.

I am a member of medical and biological research organizations in this country too numerous to relate. They include societies devoted to nutrition and similar fields, as well as a much broader field. I am a member of the American Academy of Pediatrics, the American Institution of Nutrition, the American Medical Association, and so forth. In many of these I have held responsible positions. I have been the president of the American Association for the Advancement of Education, the oldest and largest organization embracing all of the sciences in the United States, and of the Society for Experimental Biology and Medicine. I am a member of the medical and biological organizations, as a foreign member, in Argentina and France, China and Sweden.

In World War I, I served under the Surgeon General, coming out as a lieutenant colonel, and worked primarily on the problem of food and nutrition for the armed forces, and spent time in France in such activities. After the armistice I was drafted by the American Relief Administration under Mr. Hoover. I served with headquarters in Paris, serving and feeding, or attempting to feed, particularly the children in the war-devastated areas of Europe.

I have been a consultant to the United States Food and Drug Administration for 30-odd years, and am still a consultant for them. I have also been a consultant in connection with food and drugs for the Federal Trade Commission. I have been chairman of two committees of the National Academy of Sciences; I have been chairman of one of the committees of the United States Public Health Service; I was a member of the Public Advisory Committee of the United States Public Health Service. I am a member of the National Academy of Sciences.

I am a member of two scientific and analytical committees, of the National Foundation of Infantile Paralysis.

I have published some 200 research reports in my field, as well as several books, one of them, The Machinery of the Body, having been purchased by the Government for our soldiers, that is, 30,000 copies. I have been a member of one of the committees of the Office of Scientific Research and Development dealing with the rehabilitation of our wounded soldiers.

Perhaps this recital of just some of my work in the past will indicate to you that I have and should have a real interest in the subject matter of the bill now being considered by this committee.

For many years I have been giving my personal attention to the value of oleomargarine as a food and to the laws dealing with the manufacture and sale of oleomargarine.

I want to state that, based upon scientific knowledge, together with considerations of human nutrition, there is absolutely no justification whatsoever for imposing these various taxes and license fees on oleomargarine as now found in the Federal oleomargarine laws.

While many years ago there was a lack of knowledge as to the nutritive aspects of margarine, and some doubts, today we have facts. We have facts based upon good and sound scientific experiments.

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 experi

ments 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.

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