Diabetes was considered not so long ago to be an incurable and inevitably fatal disease. Thanks, however, to the labours of Claude Bernard, Germain See, and Pavy, the cause of this mysterious wasting disease has been discovered to be an inability on the part of the economy to assimilate starch and sugar, and, in the severer cases, in the morbid production of sugar from the tissues themselves. Hence diet and the rigid exclusion of starch and sugar from the food become the most important factors in the treatment of diabetes. The value of starch as a food, and its behaviour in the body, are as follows.