BASAL METABOLISM AND PUBERTY

In a discussion of the energy requirements of children, a recent volume on nutrition¹ remarks that the energy requirements of the body probably are better understood than any of the other specific nutritive requirements. Because energy is an old story, and because rare instances have been discovered among human beings of nutritional failure resulting from restricted choice of foods even when the total quantity was plentiful, there has been a tendency in some quarters to regard calories as of no further importance. It requires only the stress of some major calamity such as war, flood or an economic emergency, however, to revive the realization that supplying enough to eat to a population means a sufficiency of calories as well as that freedom of choice which is the everyday guaranty of quality (vitamins, minerals, amino-acids). Considerations of energy requirements start logically from a discussion of the basal metabolism, which has