How Much Shall We Eat?
CHAPTER XXIV
The question of how much to eat has engaged the attention of many able men and women, but the question has not been answered. The so-called scientists have figured out our requirements in calories. This I have already shown to be a fallacy. Most people advocate eating all the appetite calls for. But appetite is a creature of habit and can be trained to be satisfied with little food or to demand enormous quantities. The business of creating gluttonous appetites begins in infancy when infants are stuffed day and night. Dr. Page proved that an infant may be taught to guzzle day and night, or to content itself with two to four meals a day.
Dr. Clendening tells about how the scientists discovered how much food one requires. He then says that the discovery of these things did not alter the amount of food a given individual of given age, dimensions, and activity eats, and then he adds: "That amount is regulated very delicately by the individual's appetite and some curious, inner instinctive mechanism about which we understand very little."
If he understood very much about it he would know that the whole statement is false. Appetite is largely a creature of habit and the eating habits of individuals vary much more than do the shapes of their noses. There are many more peoples who over-eat than Dr. Clendening's statement would indicate. On the other hand the doctor himself remarks that "few diatribes on overeating point out the harmful consequences of under-eating. Yet these are quite real." It would really seem that perhaps appetite and the "curious, inner instinctive mechanism" fail to work at times.
TWO MEALS A DAY
Major Austin says: "Truly, popular tastes and prejudices are rooted more in social habits than in basic physiological demands." It should be known that the three-meals-a-day custom is really a modern one, and is not universally practiced even today. So far as history records none of the nations of antiquity practiced it. At the period of their greatest power, the Greeks and Romans ate only one meal a day. Dr. Oswald says: "For more than a thousand years the one-meal system was the rule in two countries that could raise armies of men every one of whom would have made his fortune as a modern athlete--men who marched for days under a load of iron (besides clothes and provisions) that would stagger a modern porter." He also says, "The Romans of the Republican age broke their fast with a biscuit and a fig or two, and took their principle meal in the cool of the evening." Among the many things that have been offered as an explanation for their physical, mental and moral decline has been their sensuous indulgence in food which came with power and riches. Whatever other factors may have contributed to bring about their decline (and certain it is there were many factors) there can be no doubt that their excessive indulgence in the pleasures of the palate contributed its fair share.
Herodotus records that the invading hosts (over five millions) of the Persian general Xerxes, had to be fed by the conquered cities along their lines of march. He states as a fortunate circumstance the fact that the Persians, including even the Monarch and his courtiers, ate one meal a day.
The Jews from Moses until Jesus ate but one meal a day. They sometimes added a lunch of fruit. We recall reading once in the Hebrew scriptures these words (quoting from memory): "Woe unto the nation whose princes eat in the morning." If this has any reference to dietetic practices it would indicate that the Jews were not addicted to what Dr. Dewey called the "vulgar habit" of eating breakfast. In the oriental world today extreme moderation, as compared to the American standard, is practiced.
Dr. Felix Oswald says that "during the zenith period of Grecian and Roman civilization monogamy was not as firmly established as the rule that a health-loving man should content himself with one meal a day, and never eat till he had leisure to digest, i.e., not till the day's work was wholly done. For more than a thousand years the one meal plan was the established rule among the civilized nations inhabiting the coast-lands of the Mediterranean. The evening repast--call it supper or dinner--was a kind of domestic festival, the reward of the day's toil, an enjoyment which rich and poor refrained from marring by premature gratifications of their appetites."
A sixteenth century proverb says, "To rise at six, dine at ten, sup at six and go to bed at ten, makes a man live ten times ten."
Katherine Anthony informs us that the average English family adopted the habit of eating three meals a day during the reign of Queen Elizabeth. Andrew Borde, a physician who lived during the reign of Henry VIII, wrote that: "Two meals a day is sufficient for a rest man; and a laborer may eat three times a day; and he that doth eate ofter lyveth a Beestly lyfe." Salzman's English Life in the Middle Ages, tells us that: "Breakfast as a regular meal is little heard of, though probably most men started the day with a draught of ale and some bread."
"Barely two centuries ago," says Major Austin, "the first meal of the day in England was taken about noon. Breakfast was an unrecognized meal and it originated in the practice of ladies taking an early dish of chocolate before rising. The ancient Greeks--the finest of people, physically and mentally, that ever lived--ate but two meals a day. The same was true of the ancient Hebrews and it is the custom of some of the best fighting races in India today."
The Countess of Landsfeld, writing in 1858, describes the eating habits of the English upper class of that time in these words: "After this meal comes the long fast from nine in the morning till five or six in the afternoon, when dinner is served." This would indicate that the two-meals-a-day plan had survived in England up to that time.
The adoption of three meals a day, in England, came along with the increasing prosperity of that country. Indeed it may be stated, as a general rule, that the quantity of food eaten in any country in all ages, has depended more upon their economic environment than upon their nutritional needs. Wealth and plenty have brought increased food consumption. In Ancient Rome these factors resulted in the eating of many meals a day, the eater taking an emetic immediately after finishing his gustatory enjoyment and then repairing to the vomitorium, after which he had another meal.
Plutarch must have had such practice in mind when he wrote: "Medicinal vomits and purges, which are the bitter reliefs of gluttony are not to be attempted without great necessity. The manner of many is to fill themselves because they are empty, and again, because they are full, to empty themselves contrary to nature, being no less tormented with being full than being empty; or rather they are troubled at their fullness, as being a hindrance of their appetite and are always emptying themselves, that they may make room for new enjoyment."
A former patient of mine, who spent two years among a tribe of Indians in South America, informed me that these people ate their first meal of the day, after the hunters returned from the hunt. They would leave for the hunt about nine o'clock in the morning and return when they had secured enough game for the tribe. If the hunt failed, as it sometimes did, they had no meal in the morning. Dr. Oswald quotes a Rev. Moffat as saying that the Gonaque Hottentots are nowadays incommoded by a five day's fast, and get along or an average of four meals a week.
Major Austin says: "Experience has shown that in the past, two meals a day met the demands of appetite in all fully grown individuals--men and women, including expectant mothers."
THE DAY'S HEAVY MEAL
I do not agree with those who insist that the morning meal should be the chief meal of the day. If digestion is to proceed normally almost the entire attention of the system must be given to the work. Blood is rushed to the digestive organs in large quantities. There is a dilatation of the blood vessels in the organs to accommodate the extra supply of blood. There must be a consequent constriction of the blood vessels in other parts of the body in order to force the blood into the digestive organs and to compensate for their own loss of blood.
But if the brain and muscles are to work they, too, require an increased blood supply. In order to supply them there is a dilatation of the blood vessels in the brain or muscles and a contraction of the blood vessels in the viscera. Every part of the body cannot be supplied with extra blood at the same time. If one part gets an extra supply some other part must get less.
The same is true of the nervous energies. Organs that are working must be supplied with nerve force. If one is engaged in mental or physical effort his nervous energies are diverted from the digestive organs and digestion suffers.
The animal in a natural state lays down and takes a rest, perhaps some sleep, after eating a meal. Some years ago an experiment was made by feeding a dog his usual meal of meat and then taking him for a fox hunt for a few hours. The dog was then killed and the stomach opened. The meat was found to be in the same condition as when eaten. Another dog fed at the same time and left at home to rest had completely digested his meal.
The dog in the chase was using all his blood and nervous energies in running. Digestion simply had to wait. In spite of the fact that this principle is well known, there are still many, who pose as diet experts, who advise that the heartiest meal of the day be taken in the morning. The reasons given are (1) The body after a night of sleep is better able to digest the meal than in the evening after the day's work is done, and, (2) The food eaten at this time will supply energy for the day's work.
It is true that we have more energy after the night's rest than after the day's work. It is not true, however, that the digestive organs have rested during the night. It is also true that real hunger is not produced by a night of restful repose and to eat a heavy meal in the absence of hunger would be contrary to the first law of trophology. All of this aside, the digestion of a meal eaten in the morning would have to wait upon the other work. We can force our mind and muscles to act and thereby withdraw the blood from the stomach but the stomach cannot force these other organs to cease their activities and permit the blood and nerve force to be sent to it.
If food supplies energy, it can do so only after it is digested and absorbed. Under normal conditions the digestion of a meal in both the stomach and intestine requires from ten to sixteen hours. If one is working, either mentally or physically much longer time is required. Food taken in the morning could not, therefore, supply any energy for the day's work. On the contrary if the food is to be digested, that part of the energy required to do the work of digesting it is taken from the day's work. Anyone who will test this out may soon satisfy himself of the correctness of this principle. Let him give up the morning meal for a few weeks and note the results.
The morning meal is best omitted altogether. At most it should consist of an orange or unsweetened grape fruit. The noon meal should be very light. The evening meal should be the heaviest meal and should be taken only after one has rested a little from his day's toil.
During sleep the blood is withdrawn from the brain and muscles. So, also, nerve force is withdrawn from the muscles. The viscera receive the blood and much of the nerve force. Digestion may proceed without hindrance. If one is sleeping there are no fears, worries, anxieties, etc., to interfere with the work of digestion.
Of course, if one has had a full meal for breakfast and a full meal for noon he has already had too much food and will be very uncomfortable if another full meal is taken in the evening. Three dinners in one day are two too many. But this is the popular practice, especially among the laboring classes. As a result, they become old and stiff and worn out early in life.
HURRIED EATING
If one goes into a restaurant in the early morning in any one of the larger cities and observes the clerical and professional world breakfasting he at once discovers one of the reasons why there is so much inefficiency, weakness and disease among this class. They may be seen in large numbers eating a breakfast of eggs and toast or rolls, with coffee. No time is taken to properly masticate the food. It is washed down with coffee, while the "eater" nervously fingers the pages of the morning paper.
After a breakfast of this kind they rush off to their work and get through the morning some way. It is from this class that we get most of our patients.
Eating should be done when there is leisure to digest. Any other plan is unnatural and contrary to all the laws of physiology.
GLUTTONY
"No man ever ate too little," declared Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes. Surfeiting has destroyed more lives than starving. For everyone who suffers from underfeeding there are ninety and nine who suffer from gluttony. The markets of the world are glutted with foods of all kinds, as they never were before in the world's history. Their abundance, tempting variety and comparative cheapness, coupled with the many means employed to whip up an over-stimulated and sated appetite to "fresh indulgence in the tempting, but life-withering concoctions of extravagant cooking, with its embalmed preserves, alcoholized liquids, crystallized fruits, frozen creams, aniline dyed dainties, and the constantly increasing nondescript menaces known as pies, puddings and French pastries--there is certainly a tremendous need for instructing the people in what not to eat."
Many people are like clams--mostly liver and stomach; or, perhaps I should say they are like worms--all gut. Dr. E. E. Keeler says in Here's How Health Happens: "The stomach according to the clam and some other people, is a bag of an indefinite expansive capacity useful to hold any old thing that the palate may enjoy and as much of the commodity as may be obtained." We are lured to our doom by our appetites; yet, surely we cannot take every appetite and any and every association for normal. "Accustom your appetite to obey reason with willingness," advised Plutarch.
The philosophers of antiquity prided themselves on their frugal habits, which ranked, next to godliness in their estimation. Lycurgus, the Spartan, was more fearful of excess in the quantity rather than excess in the quality of the food of his countrymen.
Here in this country intemperate eating is one of our universal faults. Almost all of us are guilty of it, not merely occasionally, but habitually and almost uniformly, from the cradle to the grave. Even the sick are urged to eat, in many instances to gorge themselves, in spite of the loudest warnings and strongest protests of nature.
Habits of eating are usually acquired in infancy and are cultivated, nourished and developed throughout childhood and youth. They do not tend to correct themselves spontaneously. They continue with us as imperious masters, calling as loudly as ever for gratification. A dyspeptic, eating three to six rneals a day, is always craving food; though overeating he is literally starving to death. It would be an astounding revelation to many doctors and dyspeptics to watch a fast in such cases and see how quickly the abnormal appetite rights itself and how rapidly the nutritive processes improve.
We teach, hire, bribe, coax, tempt and coerce our children into overeating from the very day of their birth. Helpless infants are stuffed until nature is compelled to get rid of the excess by drooling, vomiting, diarrhea, excessive urination and, finally by febrile and eruptive processes. We coax them to eat more and more and deliberately cultivate gluttony in them. At school they are fed milk and candy between meals. The result is that we are among the greatest eaters in the world. Wm. J. Bryan is our national idol.
Gluttonous indulgence in reckless food-mixtures has produced more disease and suffering than strong drink. The immediate effects of gluttony may be masked by a good digestion, but ultimately it is fatal to strength and manhood and results in premature death. Many are lured to their doom by their appetites.
Gluttony, especially the common overindulgence in incongruous food mixtures, leads to gastro-intestinal fermentation and putrefaction, with the resulting poisoning from this source. This leads to the destruction of the body's reserves which are designed for the preservation of health and strength until a ripe old age is attained.
Temperate eaters have good digestion and are never aware that they have stomachs, while heavy eaters are always faint, thirsty, bloated, troubled with acidity, eruptions, diarrhea, constipation or some other disorder of the digestive system. Hoggishness causes all kinds of disorders that we attempt to remedy by various kinds of magic, but continue to practice the hoggish eating.
I strongly suspect John F. Flood, Secretary of the Pittsburgh Health Club, of being the author of the statement that "A man makes a perambulating sewer of himself and regularly carries about with him a mass of putrefying flesh and fermenting starches, etc., and then when he gets the jim-jams, we talk about mental attitude. Gosh! It's thrilling to hear them spout! * * * Unfortunately, they will do anything but give up their physical bad habits, especially those of atrocious eating. * * * Now let us go into the silence, place our hands on our knees, be still and believe ourselves well. That vicious mixture of meat, potatoes, bread, butter, coffee, pie, candy will then sweetly digest. Keep a sweet disposition, Pollyanna yourself and everything will come out all right in the best of all worlds. * * *
"Someone whispers: 'Oh, I don't care, the going into the silence and accompanying bunk, pardon me, the accompanying soothing syrups, help me.'"
I am convinced that the habit of eating denatured foods is a chief cause of over eating. These foods do not completely nourish the body and, therefore, do not satisfy the demands of hunger, unless consumed in large quantities. Great variety at a meal also overstimulates the sense of taste and leads to over eating. Spices and condiments have the same effect. It is really difficult to overeat when one is eating unseasoned foods.
"Sunk into the degenerating grip of gluttony, their mental attitudes become transposed into its corresponding physical attitude--that of the groveling swine. Every individual who is a slave under his appetite,--be he vegetarian, fruitarian or carnivorian--who eats for the mere sake of appetite and sensuous indulgence, is a glutton in his nature, an egotist in his motive and a swine in his attitude.
"While gluttony may give rise to an appearance of health and strength in the rounded out tissues, it will never produce the firm, strong, wiry, enduring energies of the individual who submits his system to the strengthening and beautifying discipline of self-control and refined dietetic reserve."
It is time for us to learn that we are not "in tune with the Infinite" so long as we are regularly transgressing any of the laws of life. Nature does not sanction any form of intemperance. A league of temperate eaters would certainly find a large field for reform.
Health and serviceability demand that an organism shall possess all that is necessary but no more. Redundancy beyond a reasonable reserve for emergency, is unwholesome and becomes an impediment to physiological efficiency. Moderation is a symbiotic virtue. Ruskin stressed his contention that the increase of both honor and beauty is habitually on the side of restraint. This goes for restraint in eating too.
Exuberance of nutriment, as of many other good things, is more often a curse than a blessing. Overfeeding on "rich" foods wears out the vital powers through over-stimulation, overworking the digestive organs, the heart, the endocrine system, and the emunctories, by the strain placed on them and gives rise to intoxication through the poisons which these foods generate.
Much poisoning in infusorians has been found to be due to intensive nourishment. It needs only a short fast to restore the animals to youth. In higher animals, also, "brief hunger has a beneficial effect." Bees easily become debauched by a surfeit of food and render themselves liable to "disease." A reduction of surfeit is essential to the most vigorous manifestations of vitality.
The fact that the organism is unable to exist without the vital purifier, the cortex of the suparenal glands, should convince us of the harmfulness of overeating with its resulting intoxication. Excess is fatal to healthy action.
Over-feeding of invalids in an effort to give them health and strength is still a popular procedure. How often do we see this fail. How frequently, indeed, do we see increases of strength and gains in weight follow upon a reduction of surfeit. Many invalids will be killed outright by over-feeding who would recover if fed barely enough food to sustain the most essential vital activities while resting. I nave watched more than one invalid, whose life was despaired of, gradually grow stronger and finally recover, while being fed a starvation diet. Overfeeding of such patients accounts for many needless deaths each year.
NOTED GLUTTONS
Noted gluttons are many; only a few of them can be noticed her. Samuel Pepys lists as his typical dinner: "a dish of marrow bone, a leg of mutton, a loin of veal, three pullets, two dozen larks, a great tart, a neat's tongue, anchovies, prawns and some cheese."
Charles V was a glutton of no small capacity. An historian of the time tells us that he would breakfast at 5 A.M. on an entire fowl stewed in milk. He had dinner at noon with at least twenty dishes. Two suppers were eaten--one at 5 P.M., the other at midnight. Although he suffered persistently with gout and indigestion he insisted on a feast for and with all the visiting nobles.
Samuel Johnson, literary man and dictionary maker, who lived in the eighteenth century, was a notorious glutton and food drunkard. Queen Elizabeth is said to have begun her day with enormous helpings of mutton stew, beef, veal, and chicken.
The French kings and nobility were as gluttonous as the English. They were wedded to the ancient philosophy of Epicurus: "eat, drink and be merry, for tomorrow we die." Even after the kings had passed, we find Napoleon possessed of an appetite that knew little bounds. Though, as one authority puts it, "he frequently stupefied himself with food," there were times when he was abstemious.
In Colonial America the upper classes--the landed gentry and the aristocracy--regarded "good feeding" as an evidence of physical prowess. A Frenchman who visited a Virginia home describes a "simple" luncheon of "corned beef, stewed goose and leg mutton; with vegetables of every kind--all washed down with generous libations of hard cider."
"He aged," writes Frank Parker Stockbridge, of Bryan, in Current History, for Sept. 1925, "but he retained * * * his gargantuan appetite until the last. A teetotaler by conviction, he was the most intemperate of feeders. To see Bryan devour a large platter of sour kraut and frankfurters, served originally for four men, and call for another helping, as I saw him do one hot day in St. Louis, was a liberal education in gastronomies."
Bryan was a food inebriate. He had been food poisoned for many years. His advocacy of temperance did not extend to food and eating. Sloane Gordon, a newspaper correspondent, who accompanied Mr. Bryan on all his great campaign tours and on many other lesser excursions, says of him: "It is probable that few more intemperate men ever lived. Not in drinking but in eating." Writing in the Chicago Herald and Examiner. After Mr. Bryan's death, Mr. Gordon describes a "breakfast--a breakfast mind you--" as follows:
"Cantaloupe was first served. Bryan ate a whole one--an immense yellow-meated melon. It was in the Fall season--early Fall--and quail were on the bill of fare. Bryan ate two. Virginia ham and eggs followed. Bryan ate almost ravenously of this delicious ham in large portions and consumed not less than six eggs, * * * when batter cakes were served, * * * the commoner disposed of a plateful, swimming in butter and then accepted a second helping and got away with that.
"Numerous cups of coffee, potatoes and side dishes of various kinds accompanied the cantaloupe and the ham and eggs and the rest of it. * * *"
Tom L. Johnson, the celebrated single-taxer, himself a hearty eater, once remarked, "I guess I'm a glutton, but if I am one, William J. Bryan is two of them."
There has been much wasted speculation about what killed Bryan. The true cause of his death is so patent that everyone, who is not wilfully blind, may see it. Bryan dug his grave with his teeth. He shoveled in enormous quantities of food in the most reckless combinations. He may never have taken a drink of alcohol in his life, but he manufactured it in great quantities.
Bryan had diabetes. Professor Scopes tells us that at a banquet, attended by both the prosecution and the defense of the great Tennessee side-show, Bryan refused all sweet foods, all foods containing sugar, because of his diabetes, but ate more potatoes than an Irish paddy. He ate a very hearty meal an hour or so before his death.
He had hardening of the arteries. I do not know whether he died of "heart failure" or of "apoplexy"; but I do know that, whichever of those was given as the cause of death, he was killed by gluttony. He worked his body to death with intemperate eating. He poisoned himself with alcohol and other toxins generated in his stomach and intestine. He ate enormous quantities of denatured, acid-forming foods in combinations that made digestion impossible. His reserves were consumed, his tissues weakened and his organs impaired.
Graham began his career as a temperance lecturer in Pennsylvania, in 1830. He soon discovered that temperance should not be limited to drink. For, even the most thirsty could not live by drink alone. He saw that intemperance in food was as potent to make men gross and diseased as drink. Indeed, it was his thought that if drunkenness had slain its thousands, gluttony had certainly slain as many more.
It would be difficult to estimate the extent to which the people of Graham's day over ate, but gormandizing was certainly one of the favorite indoor sports. Were Graham living now he would probably think that most of our people are temperate eaters by comparison. Over-indulgence in meats and starches was very common then, even as it is now. The "old timers" had a capacity for roasts and barbecues. An old cook book warned husbands that should they bring home some of their gentlemen friends for dinner, unannounced, not more than two or three kinds of meat could be expected. It is not certain how many meats were served if the company was properly announced, but the menus of ceremonial banquets shows that it was not unusual to serve as many as thirty or more kinds of meat, including fish, at one occasion.
Leisurely pre-civil war gentlemen sometimes sat at the table for as much as seven hours at a stretch imbibing meats and wines, to be followed by gout and other of the ills that were considered as the marks of "good living." In contrast to this, ancient philosophers prided themselves on their frugal habits, which ranked next to godliness in their esteem.
Physical workers think they must eat an abundance of food, especially of the kinds that are said to "stick to the ribs," in order to produce and maintain the strength and endurance required in their work. Most athletes hold to the same view.
That all of these ideas are false has been demonstrated over and over again. Overeating by athletes and physical workers is one of the chief causes of premature ageing in these classes. Perhaps the most signal demonstration in modern times of the ability of the body to build and maintain Herculean strength and great endurance on little food, was given by Prof. Gilman Low when he established the phenomenal record of lifting one million-six-thousand (1,006,000) pounds in thirty five minutes and four seconds, after a period of training on one meal a day and less. This lift was accomplished by lifting 1000 pounds 1,006 times in the time specified. This feat was accomplished after two months of training on a diet on which the average stenographer would "starve to death." For the first five weeks he ate one meal a day, almost wholly of uncooked foods, having meat only twice during this period. His diet consisted of eggs, wholewheat bread, cereals, fruits, nuts, milk and distilled water. During the last three weeks of his training period he ate only four meals a week; the last meal was consumed eleven hours before the lift. In fifty-six days of training for this lifting Low ate forty-seven meals.
Mr. Low lost five and three-quarter pounds during the thirty-five minutes. Fifteen minutes later, he lifted one ton forty-four times in four minutes. It is particularly instructive that Mr. Low had previously attempted the big feat after training on two meals daily and had been compelled to quit, after reaching a little more than the half-million mark, due to sore distress and dizziness. See, also, Vol. III. (Here, Shelton obviously means Vol. III of his Hygienic System.)
Fasting men, when active, lose an average of about one pound a day. As these fasters are consuming all (or more) water than the body demands, the loss must be regarded as true body loss. This would indicate that sixteen ounces of actual nutritive matter (food exclusive of bulk or waste) represent about the actual daily needs of the body. This does not mean sixteen ounces of dehydrated nutritive substance.
The amount of nitrogen or protein in the pound of daily loss is very small and should further confirm what has been said about our need for only a small quantity of protein. Due to mineral conservation by the fasting body, the daily mineral losses during the fast probably do not represent the actual daily need for these. Activities are rarely as great during the fast as when eating and the daily carbohydrate requirement is slightly greater than the fasting losses indicate. Nutritive redundancy, more especially a redundancy of protein, tends to overflow into reproductive channels and manifest itself either in wasteful sexual activities or in redundant and inferior multiplication.
WORKING-CLASS IDEALS
Through the ages the working classes, which have always constituted the greatest portion of any population (at least, this has been so until today, when the working class has been transformed into the shirking class), the slaves, indentured workers, serfs, and free workers have been forced to live more or less abstemious lives. Only the wealthy and the nobles were able to overindulge in food and other substances to any great extent, except, perhaps, on special occasions, when the slaves and workers were indulged. This has not been due to any essential difference between the noble hogs and the working hogs. Whatever virtue of temperance the working class has possessed has grown out of necessity, or, what is perhaps more accurate, out of the economics of scarcity that existed.
Always desirous of aping their "betters" in all things, the workers have always been discontented because they were unable to indulge in all the vices of the "upper class." When white bread was so high in price that only the well-to-do could afford it, they bemoaned their lot because they had to eat black bread. The poor fools have always wanted to emulate the famous gluttons of history.
When we read that a Roman feast would last for days, the guests reclining at a table, and thrusting a finger or feather down their throat to induce emptying of the stomach, when surfeited, so that they might begin eating all over again, we are not to understand that the Roman working class and Roman slaves ever had either the food or the leisure time to indulge in such destructive practices. Only the parasitic class could do so. It is unfortunate that the ideals and practices of the parasite tend to become the ideals and practices of the workers, so that, even, those who think they want to revolutionize the world do not want a revolution--they want only to alter conditions so that all can "enjoy" the indulgences of the parasites.
It would be a serious mistake to conclude from the examples of Charles V, Pepys, Johnson, Elizabeth and others that the British working class had an abundance of food or that they had midnight meals, or to conclude from the eating habits of the French kings and Napoleon that the French working class ate large quantities of food. Had they been able to eat in this way, the French revolution would never have occurred. Let us not think that the slaves, either white or black, and "poor white trash" of Colonial America ate luncheons such as the one described by the French visitor.
The records of the old gluttons make frequent references to huge portions of ginger, red pepper, nutmeg, cloves and other condiments, which were consumed before and during each repast. These irritants were formerly so high in price that the working class could not afford such luxuries. Today they are so abundant and so cheap that almost everybody employs them. There is little danger of a revolution so long as the working class can have these luxuries, plus beer and white bread. The Russians had only black bread before the 1918 revolution--they are now demanding and getting white bread. Russian life is "improving"! The old records also make frequent references to gastritis, peptic ulcers, gout and even gastric cancer. Napoleon died of cancer of the stomach. These are luxuries, too, that the working class has always aspired to "enjoy." Neither the workers nor their leaders know anything about what living should be. Their cry of "abundance for all" is really a demand for surfeit.
The repeal of the prohibition law in this country was not accomplished so much by the millions spent by the brewers and distillers, nor so much by any public or official opposition to gangsterism, which was falsely blamed on prohibition, nor, even, so much by the fact that women voted for repeal, as it was by the demand of the workers that they be permitted to drink if the men of wealth were to be permitted to do so. It was a rank injustice to permit the predatory groups to drink and withhold the poisonous concoctions from the workers. John L. Lewis wanted his miners to have beer. He can control them better that way. To avoid a revolution give the workers beer and circuses.
A man's value lies not so much in what he possesses in health, strength and life, as in the use he makes of these things. He may recklessly and wantonly squander his physiological reserves until like the spendthrift who soon becomes financially bankrupt, he reaches middle age in a condition of vital bankruptcy.
Hypo-Alkalinity
CHAPTER XXXIII
Acidosis is the term misapplied to a lessened alkalinity of the body fluids. The fluids of the body are normally slightly alkaline. A lowering of the alkalinity of these fluids is more properly termed hypoalkalinity. Acidosis or hypoalkalinity is defined as a condition characterized by a deficiency of fixed alkalies in the body, which leads to an increased production of ammonia in the urine and a high acidity.
Acidosis is not acid blood, for the blood never becomes acid during life. An alkaline blood and lymph is necessary to life and health and for the blood to even reach the point of neutrality would cause speedy death.
The normal ratio between the alkalies and acids of the body is approximately 80 to 20--80% alkali and 20% acid. This proportion is maintained in balance by the so-called "buffer salts"--sodium, potassium, calcium and magnesium--from which either side may draw as need arises. When this "buffer" or "balance wheel" is in normal order any excess of acids in the body is promptly neutralized. It is only when there is a deficiency of these salts that troubles may arise. A shortening of the relationship between these is wrongly termed acidosis.
The body will not tolerate any free acid for a minute, except in the stomach during the process of digestion. All acids are instantly "bound," by being combined with alkalies, to render them harmless. The body makes use of every resource at its command to preserve its alkalinity for the reason that its cells can thrive only in an alkaline medium and cannot possibly thrive in an acid medium.
Since we supply acids and alkalies to our bodies through food, the matter of a balance between acid foods and alkali or base foods is important. If an excessive amount of acid food is eaten, the blood is forced to draw upon its alkaline reserve, its "buffer salts," in order to maintain its normal alkalinity. When we have taken more acid into the body than we can "bind" without sacrificing some of the bases of the tissues, blood alkalinity falls below the normal level and we have hypoalkalinity or acidosis.
Every food eaten leaves behind it an ash after it has been used by the body. The ash is either acid or alkaline. Eating too much acid-ash food, or eating it over long periods of time, results in storing acid-ash in the cells and in depleting the body of its alkaline reserve.
Acid-ash foods are all meats, eggs, cheese, milk (in adults), all cereals and cereal products, legumes (except in the green state), nuts, and all denatured foods of all kinds. Denatured foods have been robbed of their bases.
The alkaline-ash foods are fruits (except cranberries, prunes and some plums), all green vegetables and milk (in infants). Fats and oils are classed as neutral foods.
Severe acidosis may be produced experimentally by deficient diets, but such severe states are seldom met with in life, except in famine. Maignon has repeatedly shown that an exclusive protein diet is positively toxic even in the carnivora. Whipple, Slyke, Birkner, and Berg have shown the same thing.
The medical administration of acids, such as salicylic acid, benzoic acid, boric acid, sulphuric acid, etc., leads to a dangerous loss of bases, for these acids can be rendered harmless and subsequently eliminated only after being combined with alkaline elements. Hydrochloric acid, prescribed by physicians in supposed gastric hypoacidity, also leaches the body of its bases and aids in producing acidosis.
Free acetic acid, as found in vinegar, if consumed in quantities, may lead to symptoms of acid poisoning. It is even more injurious to health than alcohol. The body is called upon to sacrifice its bases to neutralize the acid, while it has a particularly destructive effect upon the red corpuscles and may produce anaemia.
A diet poor in bases, or food that has been robbed of its bases, has the same deleterious effects. The meat diet, as used in civilized countries, is of this type. An exclusive muscle-meat diet, when fed to dogs, will not maintain health and growth. If dogs are fed on meat from which the juices have been expressed, "emaciation ensues after a time, toxic symptoms set in, death speedily follows, and postmortem examination shows in the skeleton changes characteristic of osteomalacia and osteoporosis." (Osteomalacia is softening of the bones; Osteoporosis is the rarefication--decrease in density--of bone due to enlargement of its cavities or the formation of new spaces). Cooking meat extracts much of its juices and, where these extracted juices are not eaten, the same draining of minerals from the bones and other tissues of the eater must occur.
Flesh eating animals eat the bones of their prey, for it is here that most of the calcium of the vegetables eaten by the prey is deposited. When a man eats meat he eats only the soft parts, thus he fails to secure the calcium. Carnivorous animals also supply their need for bases by drinking the blood and by eating the internal organs and cartilages. These are consumed raw and with a minimum of loss. Berg says: "It also appears that wild carnivora consume at times considerable quantities of fruits, leaves and buds; they do this especially in the autumn, whereas in the spring they live almost exclusively on animal food."
An exclusive meat diet, like an exclusive grain diet causes a great loss of bases from the body and causes "acidosis." Benedict and Roth found that the basic turn over is much less in vegetarians than in persons on a mixed diet. An excess of bases is always desirable and is necessary to the best utilization of proteins and carbohydrates.
Acids arising from decomposition of foods in the digestive tract require to be neutralized. These, like tea, coffee, cocoa and chocolate, deprive the body of bases.
The exclusive eating of fat is also a source of acidosis; for, the free fatty acids liberated by the splitting up of fat in the intestine cannot be absorbed so far as is known. This neutralization must occur, therefore, in the intestine itself, at the cost of the alkalies of the bile as well as of the food. The unabsorbed fatty acids are eliminated in the stools in the form of sodium soap, calcium soap and potassium soap, and this soap formation robs the body of these bases.
All organic acids produced in the body and all mineral acids deplete the alkali-reserves of the body. The normal processes of life produce acids in the form of waste and the body's bases are consumed in neutralizing them. There is a constant demand for bases and the conventional diet does not supply these in adequate quantities. If our foods do not maintain the normal alkalinity of the blood and tissues, disease develops; for if there is a lack of bases, the body must withhold from neutralization some of the poisonous organic and mineral acids, so that as these gradually accumulate, an acid-toxemia results.
Violent or long-continued emotional states and overwork result in the formation of acid metabolic end-products that require to be "bound" with bases.
"Acidosis" may be very mild and even transitory in its initial stages, and very severe and dangerous when fully developed. Between these two extremes a large number of intermediate stages may exist. Severe states of acidosis, as seen in certain diseases, develop only after the acid-toxemia has so greatly impaired the organs of the body that metabolism is greatly crippled. The attention of the medical profession has always been fixed upon the severe terminal forms of acidosis and they have ignored its initial stages. The clinical diagnosis of acidosis was made only after the hypo-alkalinity had reached a far advanced and dangerous stage. They looked only for the end-point of the pathological evolution resulting from a progressive acid-saturation and alkali-depletion of the tissues.
The decline of blood alkalinity, as previously pointed out, may be due to one or more of many factors. Whether we regard it as a "rising acidity" or a "lowered alkalinity" makes little practical difference so long as we know its sources and how to avoid these.
Whether an increasing acidosis--hypoalkilinity--is due to the accumulation of the acid end-products of protein metabolism, or to the binding of the too great a proportion of the body's alkalies by the development of acid fermentation in the digestive tract, or to the consumption of an excess of acid-rich and alkali-deficient foods, or to the medicinal use of acids, makes no difference. The results are the same; beginning with a lowered available alkalinity and a resulting crippling of function, proportionate to the degree of hypoalkalinity, and progressing to serious organic disease and death.
The symptoms of acidosis are fatigue, headache, loss of appetite, sleeplessness, general nervousness, acid stomach (hyperacidity), acid perspiration and frequent troubles--colds and the like--and a sour disposition.
Acidosis inhibits growth in the young, depletes the bodies of adults, and lowers vitality. It imposes a tremendous handicap upon pregnancy and lactation. It predisposes to tuberculosis, cancer, pneumonia, appendicitis, measles and other "diseases."
Chronic fatigue is often nothing more than acid-toxemia and this same acid-toxemia, if not removed, will in its extension and continuation, result in premature "old age," functional and organic disease and death. The blood robbed of its normal alkalinity can not neutralize or correct the acid "fatigue products" and these are permitted to poison the body, The health, strength, youth, growth and preservation of the body depends upon a certain fixed degree of alkalinity. Old age is a disease which has not, as yet, taken on definite organic form. It is the result of auto-intoxication, that is, of retention of acid waste.
Men who have become almost fanatical about heredity assert that diet has nothing to do with length of life--it is all a matter of heredity. But if a pair of rats are fed on a diet of meat, grain and tubers, such as potatoes and beets, they will live about one year. If milk and cabbage are added to this diet, the rats live nearly three years. Food does help to determine longevity--make no mistake about that.
The noted surgeon of Cleveland, Dr. George W. Crile, says: "There is no natural death. All so-called death from natural causes are merely the end-point in a progressive acid saturation."
The cells of the body are born, pass through their regular life-cycle and are exfoliated and replaced by new ones. Whether they are replaced by normal cells or diseased ones depends wholly upon the kinds of materials out of which the new cells are created and upon what inhibiting waste is present or absent. The body is created anew daily; but if its blood and lymph are not normal the process of renewal is imperfect.

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Building the Teeth
CHAPTER XXXVII
That man's teeth are naturally as sound and durable as those of the lower animals was shown in Vol. I. Geologists and paleontologists often unearth the skulls of peoples long dead, the teeth of which show no signs of decay and the enamel on which is often almost double the thickness and much harder than the enamel on our teeth.
Today most of the civilized portions of the race are a race of dental cripples. We are face to face with the fact that our teeth begin to decay in childhood. Indeed they sometimes have cavities in them when they erupt.
In 1913 Dr. A. Freedman Foot examined 1,694 children in six clinics and found eleven of these with normal teeth. In his report to the Second District Dental Society of New York, Dr. Foot said: "The six year molars of nearly every child was broken down wholly or in part. In many instances the molars were decayed when they came through the gums. So extensive and far advanced were the defects that corrective treatment, even if it were applied would have been of little value."
Dr. Louis Goldstein, New York City, declares: "After examining the teeth of not less than 400 school children in my home neighborhood here in Bronx, I have yet to see a perfect set of six-year molars (first four permanent teeth to appear in childhood). These teeth in nearly every instance were entirely decayed. I have never observed a perfect set of teeth in any American child and have but one adult patient showing extremely good teeth. She is a young woman."
The six year molars are the first of the permanent teeth to erupt. They should last throughout the life of the individual. Why should they decay in childhood? Why should they have cavities in them when they erupt? It is evident that such teeth cannot be saved by brushing the teeth. They must be saved before they ever come through the gums or they will not be saved. Something more fundamental than "uncleanliness" of the surface of the teeth and mouth is concerned with the production of tooth-decay. Until this is recognized by the parents of the world, there is no hope of ever saving the teeth of our children.
Hugh W. McMillan, D.D.S., M.D., of Cincinnati, says: "To a careful observer of dental conditions at the present time in clinic and private practice, it is very evident the ravages of dental caries and diseases of the gums are daily increasing, in spite of the increasing number of dentists, in spite of the multiplicity of patented and personally-designated tooth brushes, in spite of proprietary pyorrhoea cures and gum massaging pastes, in spite of acid, alkaline, neutral, mucin-dissolving and film destroying tooth pastes and mouth-washes and in spite of the type of periodontologist who aims to prevent by either applying or removing something from the tooth surface in the same manner that some unintelligent physician might expect to cure by external applications a skin disease of general origin.
"Treated by a combination of all these methods dental decay and gum diseases progressively continue, causing pain, discomfort, nervous disorders, impaired digestion and local infection, until after a losing fight the bewildered patient rests edentulous and free from organs which under the present regime may be considered physiologically superfluous."
Dr. H. J. Morris, president of the Yorkshire Branch of the British Medical Association says: "The cry that clean teeth do not decay is really absurd, because under the popular method of feeding, the teeth cannot be kept clean. Surely we have seen enough by this time to have lost our faith in the tooth brush, and it is time the people lost theirs too. The old belief should be modified by a new one.
"As a matter of fact," Dr. McMillan says: "the tooth brush does not get in between the teeth or down in the occlusal fissures or around fillings or under the gingival margins. The actual places where decay primarily occurs are not touched by the brush. As ordinarily used, about all the brush accomplishes is to polish the already self-cleansing surfaces.
"Is it sufficient to tell a patient that a clean tooth never decays, when it is often impossible to clean it with sealers? Is it right to tell a child to brush his teeth so that they will not decay, when often patients are seen who brush their teeth several times each day and still caries are rampant?"
I have seen children whose teeth were all but wholly destroyed despite the regular and frequent use of the tooth brush. The enamel was melted off their teeth down to the gum line, the teeth were "eaten" away until they were not larger than needles; along the gums they were black and often covered with tartar. It is foolish for dentists and the manufacturers of tooth brushes and toothpastes to tell these children and their parents that "a clean tooth never decays."
Parents are advised to have the dentists frequently examine the teeth of their children and repair all defective first teeth, because the jaws do not develop properly if the temporary teeth are lost and the second set of teeth will be impaired by this loss. This is a case of getting the cart before the horse. The loss of teeth does not cause the faulty development of the jaws, nor the injury to the permanent teeth. The permanent teeth suffer, the jaws fail to develop properly and the first teeth are lost due to the same common cause.
NOT CAUSES OF DECAY
Sugar and fruit acids do not injure the enamel of normal teeth. Sound teeth have been immersed in a sugar solution and in fruit acids for months without suffering any erosion. Dr. E. Howard Turison and others have proved this.
Sugar can hurt the teeth only by entering the stomach and blood and perverting metabolism. Free sugar (commercial sugar) possesses a strong affinity for calcium. When eaten in considerable quantities it leaches the tissues, including the teeth, of their calcium. Dr. Howe says, "only when general derangement follows sugar feeding does caries occur." Starches, sugars, including candies and syrups, must be eliminated from the diet in treating pyorrhoea.
Lactic acid does not injure the enamel of the teeth. No experiments have been able to show that bacteria of any type, when cultured on the teeth, are responsible for dental caries. Bacteria, even if they enter into the production of dental decay, play a very subordinate part and, in conditions which seem to be most favorable to their activity and growth, they are powerless to produce dental decay so long as the resistance of the body is normal.
Tooth decay is attributed to the action of bacteria and their acids upon the teeth. In recounting his experiments on monkeys in which dental caries was produced by a deficient diet and, incidentally, referring to the lactic acid theory of tooth decay, Dr. Howe says: "Before we examine the effects of vitamin-C deficiencies upon the teeth of monkeys, let me remind you that all of our efforts to affect these teeth by fermentation in the mouth for long periods of time by the feeding and injection of microorganisms associated with caries have been unavailing, so long as the diet was normal."
Experiments by Drs. Howe and Hatch (1917) in America, and by Sir James Mclntosh, Warwick James and Lazarus-Barlow, working together in England, in trying to produce dental caries by using acid forming bacteria all resulted negatively. Dr. Howe says that "so long as the diet is normal it has been found impossible to cause caries or pyorrhoea by maintaining fermentation in the mouth or by feeding or injecting the bacteria believed to be most actively associated with dental caries."
There is a deeper cause for tooth decay than the germs that get onto the surfaces of our teeth. That cause exerts its baneful influence upon the growth and development of the teeth. That cause reaches back into the prenatal life of the child when the tissues of the teeth are being formed and developed.
If these things are not so, why then are so many teeth plainly defective when they erupt. They are small, distorted, overlapped, notched, have cavities in them and present other evidences of faulty structure and of lack of resistance to the forces of decay. It is so common to see the six-year molars, the first permanent teeth to erupt, come through with cavities in them.
Something more fundamental than a tooth brush and a biannual dental examination is required to prevent such a condition as this. Something more than these things are essential to the preservation of such teeth.
The ocean of dental decay is so large and its causes such that it can never be coped with by cleaning and filling the teeth. No amount of scrubbing and polishing can preserve them if nutrition is inadequate. Only a radical program will avail us here.
Cleaning the teeth of tartar, which is intended to save the gums and not the teeth, avails little unless a change in food and water is made. The calcific (lime salts) and food debris deposits (tartar) collecting about the necks of teeth come from the saliva and excess lime in free use of lime water. It often collects rapidly.
TOOTH DEVELOPMENT
It is well to bear in mind that every tooth a man will ever have (except the false ones) is already formed or being formed in his jaws at birth. The teeth actually begin to be formed before any of their supporting structures in the bony alveolar process.
The anlage or germ appears as the dental ridge developing from the cells of the ectoderm, as early as the seventh week of fetal life. Out of this ridge the tooth-buds of the temporary teeth with the enamel organ's begin to be differentiated about the eighth week. These structures, invade the underlying mesoderm and together they form the "dental papilla" which becomes distinguishable during the ninth or tenth week.
The tooth-buds of all the deciduous teeth are definitely formed and the enamel organs of the permanent teeth have appeared by the fifteenth week. At about the twentieth week calcification sets in in the tip of the incisors to be followed by calcification in the canines and premolars in the twenty-fourth week.
The first permanent molars, in their origin and development, follow very closely the development of the temporary teeth. At about the fifteenth week their enamel organs first appear and this is followed two weeks later by the formation of their dental bulbs. The dental follicles of these teeth are complete and their calcification has begun by the ninth month. All of the other permanent teeth have also been laid down by this time and are calcified during early childhood.
Let us briefly review this: At birth all of the temporary teeth are definitely formed and calcification is in process; the six year molars are formed and calcification of their crowns is under way; all of the other permanent teeth have been laid down and await calcification during early childhood.
It is before birth, when these teeth are forming, that we must begin to save the teeth of child and adult. For, not only is it here that those defects are produced which are visible in so many teeth when they erupt, but here also are many of the defects initiated which are to appear later. A soft pre-tooth structure laid down in the jaws of the embryo, due to nutritional perversion of the mother, predisposes the teeth to cavities and decay. Finally calcification, due to nutritional perversions and deficiencies, injures both the temporary and the permanent teeth.
NUTRITION
A faulty diet and nutritional derangements after birth easily results in faulty tooth structure, both in the temporary and permanent teeth. The prenatal months and the pre-school years are, indeed, as they have been aptly termed, the golden age for the prevention of tooth decay. If no thought is ever given to the requirements of children's teeth until after they erupt, the chances are that, on our modern diet, the child's teeth will be defective and short lived.
Upon the mother falls the duty of feeding the teeth during the prenatal months and during the nursing months after birth. The duty and the responsibility are hers. Her duty is not merely to her child but to herself, as well. For, if she does not supply the embryo and perhaps even the suckling, with the necessary elements in her food, nature will manage to take some of these out of her own tissues. Her own teeth will suffer, and perhaps, also her blood and other tissues, due to nature's habit of safeguarding the child at the mother's expense.
Dr. Howe says that: "The deficiencies which manifest themselves in the dental apparatus of the child are generally, in part at least, results of deficiencies in the diet of the mother before the child is born and wrong feeding of the infant. It is more and more the duty of our profession to take care of the dental condition of the expectant mother. The diet which will protect the teeth against the heavy demands of this period is the very diet to supply materials for the bones and teeth of the foetus."
Mothers tend to lose their teeth during pregnancy and lactation. This is not true of animals and savages and is so in civilized mothers because their diet does not meet the demand for extra calcium during this period.
It is an old proverb among mothers, "with every child a tooth." To this may be added, "for every child several cavities." A British investigator, Dr. Ballantyne, in the study of a hundred cases in the Edinburgh Royal Maternity Clinic, found that ninety-eight per cent of the pregnant women suffered with "dental caries or infection." Ninety-three per cent of this number had had one or more extractions. More than half (53%) of these patients were under twenty-five years of age. Almost as high percentages of carious teeth have been noted in pregnant women in some of our American clinics.
On a deficient diet (experimental), growing animals show such effects as the following--dental caries, cranial caries, mandible caries, caries of other bones, distortion and malnutrition of bones--such as shortened and small ribs, smallness and deformity of the cranium, chest, pelvis, etc.--rickets, distorted and malposed teeth, crooked nose, etc. Caries is the term for decay or ulcerous inflammation of bone.
Dr. Howe placed animals on a scurvy producing diet and produced "retarded growth, warping of the body structure, lowered vitality, susceptibility to colds and more serious forms of illness." If the diet is bad enough the animals die in four weeks. If not greatly deficient "death does not come immediately or completely, as with entire deprivation (of vitamin C), but comes creeping on slowly, insiduously and progressively, until it involves all the bony tissues, including the teeth. Even the enamel, which is the hardest and perhaps the most resistant tissue in the body, is affected."
"The particular form of starvation which is scurvy dissolves the soft or organic parts of the bones and teeth. In bones there is an organic matrix or frame-work, and the mineral salts, which give stiffness and hardness, are held in this organic material. Even the enamel has such a framework, and evidence which lies before me as I write indicates that there is more circulation in the enamel than we have supposed. When the body is deprived of enough vitamin C for a long time something happens to the matrix, perhaps in tiny spots here and there through the body, and if the deprivation is sufficient, the matrix will break down."--(Howe)
Howe further says: "We have seen that, under the influence of a vitamin C deficiency which has not been sufficiently prolonged to cause recognizable signs of scurvy, the pulp of the tooth in a guinea-pig will undergo changes that are destructive for it and for the dentin. It will shrink forcibly enough to tear the odontoblastic processes out of the dental tubuli and, in the section (a picture of a set of teeth is here shown), something appearing like broken processes may be seen on the outer margin of the pulp. This tearing out of the processes probably renders it impossible for the odontoblasts to continue the functions which may be essential to the metabolism of the dentin, and soon thereafter the dentin begins to liquefy and may be extensively or completely destroyed. If similar changes occur in human teeth, is it not probable that dentin in which the functions of the odontoblasts have not been torn away, would offer less resistance to the agents of decay than the same dentin would when in good health? Our experiments show that a complete vitamin C deficiency will visibly affect the odontoblasts in about five to seven days.
"We have seen that very soon after the feeding of orange juice is begun, the pulp, though incapable of returning to its former size or form, resumes some of its functions and initiates the development of secondary dentin, which might be called dental scar tissue."
Animals fed on a deficient diet until they are ready to die, and have sustained great injury to their teeth, improve upon being given orange juice. Dr. Howe says that within twenty-four hours after the first feeding of orange juice, the pulp of the teeth begins to resume its dentin-building function. I have seen great improvement in the condition of the teeth of adults follow improved diet. Howe tells us that "when the nutritional balance is restored, the destructive process from within can be stopped and, if it has not gone too far, may be repaired. It is quite possible that you may do that with these other teeth if you will prescribe liberal quantities of fresh whole milk, unpasteurized, orange juice and green vegetables. Keep the protein in the diet low. Excess protein in the diet of experimental animals is always a disturbing factor."
Howe and others have shown that animals fed on the conventional American diet of refined cereals, pasteurized milk or cream, white sugar, meat and eggs, bread, coffee and sweets, with a deficiency of minerals and vitamins, develop rickets, scurvy, etc., and decay of the teeth. If the diet is very bad, the animals develop not only dental caries, but caries of the cranium, ribs, spine, and of the bones of the limbs.
Dr. E. A. Crostic, New York City, observes: "No one in New York City is eating the proper food these days. Foreigners who come here with a history of natural foods, behind them possess solid tissues.
"Thirty years ago when the occasion arose people could sit in a dentist's chair and have several teeth extracted without wincing. Today, so lacking in nerves, energy and vitality are our women, that almost any of them after the ordeal of one or two extractions is on the verge of collapse."
Faulty food weakens the nerves as well as the teeth and lowers resistance to pain and shock. I am sure that if people would have their teeth pulled without the use of anaesthetics, there would be far less after-suffering and no deaths from anaesthesia.
Dr. Howe was able to produce bone destruction in various parts of the body by faulty diet. He was also able to demonstrate bone regeneration following an improvement in diet. Some of the destructive changes were so like osteomalacia that they could not differentiate between the "two" conditions. The conditions are probably identical. By the same faulty diet he was able to produce dental caries; and by a change of diet he produced a degree of dental regeneration.
Each tooth is a highly specialized piece, of bone, a part of the bony system of the body, and receives its nourishment from the blood, just as do the other bones of the body. The teeth are subject to the same laws and nutritional requirements as the rest of man's bones and are affected for good or ill by whatever affects the nutrition of the body as a whole.
The teeth are leached of their salts from the inside until there is only a shell left. The decay begins on the inside. The teeth may be practically destroyed from within. Cavities form inside, then the enamel breaks through. Scrubbing the surface of the teeth cannot build sound teeth. The healthy human mouth is self-cleansing and bacteria cannot thrive therein.
Howe fed growing animals on deficient and adequate diets alternately and produced stripes of hard structure and soft structure in the teeth representing the periods of feeding. He placed guinea-pigs on a deficient diet and says: "We found that soon the teeth became decalcified, lost their hardness, could be easily penetrated by a sharp instrument, or a pin and that they were so soft they easily bend. Distinct cavities formed in some and the dentin was badly disintegrated.
"We found the alveolar process, or semi-bony structure that holds the teeth firmly in place had been gradually absorbed, so the teeth became loose and could be easily pulled out with thumb and finger whereas ordinarily they are set in very tightly, as are healthy human teeth.
"Inflammatory and degenerative changes occurred resembling pyorrhoea. In the experiments where we injected micro-organisms, into the gums of guinea pigs, no such results occurred, showing that pyorrhoea is a result rather than a cause.
"Irregularities of the teeth occurred, in one case the teeth crossed each other, making a letter X. Putting this animal back on a normal diet recalcified these teeth, set them hard in their sockets and so fixed them permanently in this abnormal position.
"We examined the jaws of some of these animals after they had died. The jaws showed that while the guinea pigs had been on a vitamin deficient diet, the bony structure of the jaw had been mined of its calcium and when the normal diet was restored, areas of calcium had been replaced, showing very definitely that the body calls on the bones for calcium when it is needed in the blood, and that the blood gives calcium back when there is an abundance of this element."
Zilva and Wells fed guinea pigs on a scorbutic diet and noted the following changes in their teeth--pronounced cellular disorganization, with disappearance of nuclei and of interstitial cement substances. The disintegrating process involved the nerves, cells, bloodvessels and odontoblasts, their places being taken by a new firm, fibrous structure devoid of cells, nuclei, or regular arrangement of constructed parts. Similar pathological changes have been observed to occur in the various organs of the body.
Let us understand, once and for all, that decay of teeth is a result of a disturbance of calcium metabolism, from whatever cause. It may be and often is due to a faulty diet; and may be and often is due to many other factors and influences that pervert metabolism. I have seen the rapid breaking down of the teeth in cases of marked chronic digestive troubles. Hyperacidity of the stomach is a frequent cause of crumbling of the teeth. Animal experimenters point out that those animals that develop caries, also develop acute gastrointestinal disturbances, diarrhea with mucus and blood in their stools. The best diet that can be fed will fail to nourish the body if it is not digested. It follows, logically, that whatever deranges digestion and perverts metabolism may be responsible for tooth decay.
Dr. C. R. Kelley, New York City, observes, "Periods of disease in children marked for general nutritional disturbances in which tooth nourishment is for a time completely shut off, leave their traces like sign-posts on developing teeth."
Defective teeth are always present in rickets. This is true in children, in dogs, in pigs and in other animals. The pig is most susceptible to rickets of all domesticated animals. At the Rowett Institute, in England, it was not found possible to produce any symptoms of rickets in any animal, under any environment, favorable or unfavorable, on a diet which contains a sufficient amount of alkaline salts. Mineral deficiency brings about rickets, and injures the teeth.
Artificial infant feeding tends to produce decay of the teeth. Children in England and Scotland show about 85% decayed teeth. American children who are breast-fed to six months or more show 42.6%, decayed teeth; if they are nursed under six months they show 42.9% decayed teeth. Children fed on sweetened condensed milk show nearly 73%, decayed teeth. The vital necessity of nursing your child is thus made manifest. But, it is also necessary that you feed yourself properly.
In certain tribes who chip their teeth off and point them in their effort to add to their beauty, so long as their broken teeth are well-nourished, they do not decay. An animal may break a tooth in a fight or otherwise, but it does not decay.
There is only one reason why civilized children cannot have as good teeth as savage children--the refusal of pregnant and nursing mothers to eat proper foods and take adequate care of themselves and their failure to properly feed their children up to the sixth year of their lives.
Fluorine starvation may often be responsible for a thinning of the enamel of the teeth. But there is no excuse for fluorine starvation. Nature certainly supplies us with abundance of this in natural foods.
Mrs. Mellanby (of England) declares, "the more cereals that are eaten, other things being equal, the worse formed are the teeth." I think this applies to all cereals and to all cereal foods, but it particularly applies to all denatured cereals. The present diet of civilized peoples is largely acid-forming, and the excess of the acid radicals in our diet makes a great demand on the alkaline bases of our bodies. White flour has been robbed of most of its alkaline salts and is much more acid-forming than whole-wheat flour. But even whole-wheat is an acid-ash food.
The mineral salts of white bread have a higher acidity than that of other cereals. It is, no doubt, for this reason that in countries that subsist largely on white flour, tooth decay is more prevalent than where other cereals (also denatured) are used.
Investigations have revealed that those races whose diets include no cereals have teeth and mouths practically free of any kind of disease, while those races whose staple diets are cereals and meat with relatively small amounts of fruits and vegetables have jaws and teeth like those so common in America. Wheat is the most damaging of all the cereals, regarded from the point of view of its acidity. Little meat and cereals and an abundance of fruits and vegetables produce teeth like those found in Polish and Irish peasantry and those of the vegetarian races of the Orient.
Chalky decomposition of the enamel of the teeth is the result of calcium and phosphorus deficiency over a period of years. It is not always possible to arrest the decomposition or to improve the teeth. Indeed I recall having seen but one case where marked improvement followed a revolution of the diet. If this condition is to be prevented in children the mother must have ample mineral-bearing food during pregnancy and lactation.
If, in the quotations from Dr. Howe, we substitute the words fresh fruits and green raw vegetables, for the term vitamin C, we have a practical working basis upon which the mother may feed herself and her child. All denatured foods rob the body of minerals. All excess of acid foods rob the body of calcium and other bases. Fruits, green vegetables and nuts are best for the teeth.
EXERCISING THE TEETH
Soft diets, which require no work of the teeth and jaws in chewing, aid in producing dental decay. No tooth can have adequate nutrition unless it is used. Mush-eating does not give the teeth proper exercise. Raw foods are best. A tough, fibrous diet not only gives the teeth and jaws needed exercise, but also cleans the teeth. The conventional, unnatural and highly refined, cooked diet leaves the mouth and teeth dirty.
IRREGULARITIES AND MALPOSITIONS
By the time a child is five or five and a half years old its baby teeth should be well spread apart in front to make room for the permanent teeth, which will soon begin to erupt. If the child's diet and care have been proper, so that his or her development has been normal, this will be so. But how often do we see it otherwise? The vault of the mouth is so often high rather than broad and flat, as it should be. There is not room in the jaws for the permanent teeth. As a result these are crowded or overlapped, malposed and irregular. They must also be defective, for the same developmental failure which resulted in a faulty dental arch, also produces defective teeth.
Dr. Howe says that: "Under favorable conditions, the child develops proper cranial and facial proportions and a broad dental arch, and at the proper age the deciduous arch voluntarily widens to form the anterior portion of the permanent dental arch" * * * "under unfavorable conditions, facial development in the child may be retarded so that when it is time for the permanent teeth to erupt the arch may not be wide enough to accommodate them and they will be malposed. Such a physical deficiency may arise from any of many causes acting either singly or together, such as poor heredity, lack of sunlight, illness, a deficient diet, and perhaps others."
Prof. E. Mellanby has shown that the structure and arrangement in the jaws of teeth of animals depend largely upon their nutrition during the period of development, so that it is now possible to produce almost any degree of imperfection of the teeth by supervising the diet of puppies.
BASIS OF SUCCESS
I have watched the failure of the efforts to stay the decay of teeth by the use of various diets and various articles of food. A quart of calcium-rich milk a day does not prevent tooth decay. Feeding phosphorus-rich foods has not prevented tooth decay. Giving vitamins C and B has failed to save the teeth. The giving of vitamin pills, calcium and phosphorus tablets, etc., has failed, equally with the diets. Giving orange juice also failed. Feeding cod liver oil does not save the teeth. The result is that many dentists are convinced that no diet can save the teeth. Yet the fact stands out like a sore thumb that people on certain diets do maintain good teeth while those on other diets have poor teeth. What is the answer? Dietary adequacy and not specific dosage with one or two or three nutritive factors. The Law of the Minimum must be satisfied.
Good teeth depend upon good health and not vice versa as the tooth-extracting fad proclaims. No cause of impaired health, however insignificant it may seem to be, should be neglected if the teeth are to be preserved. There seems to me to be no way to preserve the teeth by any plan that falls short of a complete system of health building. No one-idea plan can succeed. Soundness of the teeth will be preserved by the same mode of living that preserves soundness in all the tissues and structures of the body. We must learn to think in terms of health-building. We must learn to think in terms of health of the whole organism and cease thinking in terms of local health.
The health conditions found in the mouth are local indices of the condition of the tissues throughout the body. There is no such thing as a local tooth disease. The condition that leads to decay is always systemic. More than 75% of children presenting extensive dental caries, also have other serious troubles. Instead of the decay of the teeth being the cause of the systemic derangement and so-called local troubles elsewhere in the body, the systemic derangement is the cause of the tooth decay and other mis-construed local troubles.
So long as we view the teeth as isolated isonomies and forget their relationships with other parts of the body, we cannot hope to find the cause of tooth decay and will continue to fail in our efforts to preserve the teeth. Disease of the teeth is merely part of the disease of the body. Health of the teeth is part of the health of the body. The unsoundness dentists find in teeth which they indict as cause of disease, is merely part of the general pathology of a diseased body.
Searching for a unitary cause of tooth-decay is folly. The basis of good health is, at the same time, the basis of sound structure and normal function in all parts of the body. Teeth, like the eyes, heart, bones of the spine, etc., depend upon the whole of the elemental factors of life.
Any factor, physical, nutritional, emotional, etc., that perverts or impairs nutrition will cause the teeth to decay. Poor health, impaired nutrition, perverted metabolism, however produced, affect all the structures and functions of the body in varying degrees and any effort to preserve or restore integrity that ignores the cause of general impairment must fail.
Health is the basis of sound teeth. There can be no completely sound teeth in diseased bodies. No decay of the teeth can occur in a perfectly healthy body that is maintained in this condition by first class habits. Anything that is essential to good health is essential to good teeth. As the teeth are integral parts of the body their health depends upon the general integrity.
HEALING OF TEETH
Hygienists and others have long held that teeth will heal. Until recently dentists have denied this. There is no longer room to doubt this.
The teeth are bones. Bones do heal and regenerate under favorable conditions. Even the enamel of the teeth, it seems, is able to repair itself, as I have been able to demonstrate on a broken tooth of my own. Self-restoration of teeth with cavities in them have been reported by dentists within the last few years.
Limits must be recognized to the self-restorative powers of the teeth and regenerative conditions established as early as possible. Success cannot be expected, even then, in all cases.
Repair of the teeth depends, not alone upon a diet of fruits and vegetables, but upon a general improvement in health. Every factor that improves nutrition--sunshine, exercise, rest, etc.--will aid in repair.

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Calories
CHAPTER V
Food values continue to be measured in calories. The calorie is a unit of measurement, just as the inch or yard is a unit of measurement. The small calorie is the amount of heat required to raise the temperature of one gram (about 20 drops) of water one degree. The large calorie is the amount of heat required to raise one kilogram (equal to about two and a quarter pounds) of water one degree centigrade.
Heat and energy are considered equivalent and transformable. Thus, the orthodox scientist considers that those foods that give off most heat per pound are the best foods for human consumption. It was decided that the average individual requires about 2,500 calories a day and diets were figured out on this basis. This was worked out simply by finding out how much people do eat and using this as a right or average standard. In fact, the matter was worked out by Voit, of Germany, on the basis of an enormous compilation of what German laborers, students, etc., actually do eat. It was presumed that people eat what they ought to eat in amount and kind, an assumption that is now known to be wholly false.
This method of determining food needs resulted in the absurd proposition that everybody ought to overeat because the average person does overeat. It led also to the ruinous notion that white flour, white sugar, denatured cereals, lard, etc., being high in caloric value, are man's best foods, while, fruits and green vegetables are almost foodless. It taught people to look upon vegetarians, fruitarians, and raw food advocates as cranks and fanatics.
This system of fire-box dietetics led to such ridiculous statements as the following from Dr. Richard C. Cabot's Handbook of Medicine: "Tomatoes are ninety-four per cent water; there is hardly any nutrition in them." "Lettuce for instance, is a food practically without value--nice and pleasant to look at, and valuable so far as it has dressing (made with oil). But the dressing is the only thing that has any food value." "If we take a teaspoonful of olive oil we are getting more food than if we took a large potato, for instance, because oil is a food which produces so much heat." "A workingman who buys a can of beans ought to know that he is getting many times the food for the same money as when he buys a can of tomatoes."
A few teaspoonfuls of olive oil a day should suffice to supply a man with all the food (heat units) he requires, but everyone nowadays knows that man cannot live on such a diet. The great value of lettuce is now everywhere recognized. Fruits and vegetables, formerly almost valueless, except in the estimation of a few cranks like Graham, Trall, Densmore, Page and Tilden, are coming to be more and more recognized for what they are--man's best food. It is even asserted on experimental evidence that green foods are absolutely necessary.
The estimated calorie requirements of a resting man weighing 160 lbs., is 2200 calories. Sleeping twenty-four hours, this man would expend only 1680 calories. The calorie requirements of woman are estimated to be much lower--a seamstress requiring 1800 calories a servant 2800 calories and a wash-woman 3200 calories. The seamstress requires fewer calories than the resting man, a thing I seriously doubt. Her requirements are but 120 calories more than that of the sleeping man.
Harrow says: "The calorie is a true guide to muscular activity; it seems to be no guide to the activity of the brain." Where, then, does "mental energy" come from?
The human body is more than a mere furnace or fire box into which we must continue to shovel fuel. The fuel value of food is the least valuable thing about it. White sugar is a very high grade fuel having a fuel value of 1750 calories a pound as compared to 165 calories for buttermilk, 100 calories for tomatoes and 95 calories for spinach. Yet animals fed on white sugar and water soon die. The nutritional value of food can no more be measured in calories than the value of water in the system can be stated in pounds or quarts, or in units of steam pressure.
A man may starve to death on a high calorie diet of white bread, white sugar, white rice and refined fat. He will starve on such a diet while consuming more calories each day than the standards call for. Indeed he will die quicker on a diet of this kind than he will if he takes nothing but water.
In measuring the caloric value of foods, only the combustible portions are considered. That portion of the food that does not burn, commonly referred to by the orthodox food scientist as "ash" (meaning ashes), and which is made up of the mineral content of the food, is not even considered. By such a standard oleomargarine with 3410 calories a pound is one of the greatest of food, while lemons with 155 calories, oranges with 150 calories and strawberries with 150 calories are practically worthless. Salt pork with 3555 calories a pound is a food for the gods by this standard, while celery and lettuce with only 65 calories each a pound and skim milk with but 165 calories consume more energy in digestion than they produce when oxidized. Yet neither oleomargarine nor salt pork will sustain life, health and growth. Animals fed on such a diet soon perish.
Let us bear in mind that the caloric value of food is no index to its surplus in acid or alkali elements, although most foods that rank highest in caloric value are decidedly acid-forming and rapidly break down the body.
Osborn and Mendell fed animals on a diet of denatured starches and fats, refined sugar and refined proteins and found that when so fed they rapidly declined in health. The addition of inorganic salts to the food was found to be absolutely valueless.
When the whey of milk was added to the diet their decline in health ceased. The refined sugars, starches, fats and proteins have a very high caloric value while they possess almost no food value. The whey contains none of the fats or proteins of milk but does contain iron, phosphorus, calcium, potassium and other organic salts. These tests prove that organic mineral salts are of more importance than heat units. Indeed, it may easily be shown that those foods that are the most deficient and worthless of all are the very foods which rank highest in fuel value.
Foods that are so high in caloric value that they are estimated by thousands, when fed to animals result in early death. Add to these foods the juices of foods of low caloric value and they live and grow.
Consider white bread with 1200 calories a pound and refined corn meal with 1625 calories a pound, and then think over the fact that high as these foods are in caloric value, they not only will not sustain life but actually produce death in animals fed upon these, exclusively, quicker than starvation itself. White sugar, oleomargarine, polished rice, salt pork, etc., do the same. Animals fed on these foods, or on tapioca, corn syrup, corn grits, cream of wheat, macaroni, puffed rice, corn starch, corn flakes, and other such foods possessing a high fuel value, sicken and die.
If the fresh juices of vegetables are added to the refined foods the animals survive but do not regain their normal weight and strength nor their resistance to disease. These vegetable juices contain no fuel value. The animals are restored to normal vigor and health only after they are fed unrefined foods such as cabbage, spinach, celery, lettuce, whole grains, whole milk, etc. These foods are so low in caloric value as compared with the refined starches, sugars, proteins, etc., that orthodox scientists formerly regarded them as being practically valueless.
A pound of apples gives but 190 calories while a pound of watermelon only yields 50 calories, but either of these foods is superior to the refined high caloric foods.
McCullum's experiments have shown that some foods will sustain growth while others will not. It is assumed that those foods that sustain growth and development contain substances to which the term vitamin has been applied. These substances are found abundantly in spinach, lettuce, cauliflower, cabbage, celery and milk. All of the refined foods already mentioned are absolutely lacking in this respect. They will neither sustain nor promote growth. Grass and grass seeds, oranges, lemons, grapefruits, tomatoes, in fact all fresh fruits and green vegetables, all of which are very low in caloric value, are rich in growth promoting elements.
Cereals and pastries are high in caloric value, but eating these in excess makes one not only look tired by actually be tired. An excess of sugar makes one lazy.
As many of the important elements of food are not oxidized in the body, a diet that is based on the assumed calorie requirements of the patient or of the non-patient, is likely to have these other elements ignored. The minerals and vitamins of foods are not employed in the production of heat and energy. Proteins, though oxidizable, therefore possessing calorie value, do not serve primarily as fuels in the body, but as building materials. Knowing the caloric value of a protein will give you no index to its amino acid content. Its building value is not measured by the amount of heat it produces when burned in the laboratory.
The assimilation and final oxidation of carbohydrates, for example, depends upon the presence of adequate amounts of other food factors that are associated with the metabolism of carbohydrates. If these are lacking in your diet, as they commonly are in conventional diets, carbohydrate metabolism will be crippled. The presence of certain vitamins is essential to proper utilization of carbohydrates.
A given amount of fat will produce a given amount of heat when burned in the laboratory. In the body, fat burns best and most efficiently in the presence of sugar. Under many conditions of the body, fat is poorly oxidized so that it does not yield the amount of heat listed in the calorie tables. In diabetes, for example, fat metabolism is very much crippled.
Measuring food value by calories ignores the body's mineral and vitamin needs. It gives no attention to the relative values of the various proteins, and overlooks the acid-alkali ratio of the diet. It wholly forgets the Law of the Minimum.
In determining the fuel value of foods, not only are the growth promoting substances wholly ignored but also those elements which, though absolutely worthless from the calorific standpoint, are absolutely essential to the regulation of the specific gravity of the blood, the functioning of the blood corpuscles, the contractility of the muscles, the preservation of tissue from decomposition, the chemical reaction of the secretions, for maintaining normal alkalinity of the blood and for use in preparing the cell wastes for elimination.
Iron and manganese, which are the oxidizing agents of the blood, have no caloric value. Flourine, which forms a hard protective shell around the teeth, and calcium, which forms a large percentage of the normal composition of bone, are wholly lacking in heat producing properties. Sodium, magnesium, sulphur, potassium and other elements that are used in the processes of assimilation and elimination cannot be substituted by calories.
Calories do not build bones and teeth nor do they neutralize the acidity of the end-products of metabolism, or preserve the alkalinity of the blood and lymph. It is precisely those foods that are least fitted to perform these functions that are richest in calories. Prof. Sherman says of the calorie: "In connection with such comparisons of food value, while of primary importance, is not alone a complete measure of its nutritive value, which will depend in part upon the amounts and forms of nitrogen, phosphorus, iron and various other essential elements furnished by food." We may add that the value of any food to the individual is partly determined by its digestibility and by the individual's present nutritive needs and powers of digestion and assimilation. It is obvious that no part of food that is not digested can be of use, however high its caloric or other value. Again food eaten, when not required or when the digestive apparatus is not prepared for the work of digestion can only produce harm.
A table giving the caloric values of different foods tells us merely how much heat can be produced in the laboratory by burning these foods. Such tables are fairly accurate indexes to the fuel values of the foods listed, but they are not an index to the nutritive values these foods have for you. You must digest them, absorb them, assimilate them and then metabolize them. If you fail to digest and absorb them, you certainly cannot assimilate and metabolize them. You can produce no heat by the oxidation of foods that pass out in the stools.
The amount of heat and energy required by various individuals varies so greatly with the conditions of sex, climate, occupation, age, size, temperament, etc., that food values based on the calorie standard are of no practical value. Aside from this, most of the heat produced in the body is used in maintaining normal body temperature and not for the production of energy. If health is destroyed, if the nutritive functions are impaired, to stoke up on fuel foods is not only valueless but is positively harmful. This is easily proven when we compare the results of such treatment with those obtained by the fast or by a low calorie diet which is rich in the organic mineral elements.
The burning of food in the body is a vital or physiological process and does not take place in a dead body. Food, to be burned in the body for the production of calories, is dependent upon the condition of the tissues that do the burning, a fact that is completely overlooked in feeding the sick. If the functions of the body are impaired this process is also impaired and foods that are high in fuel value cannot be properly cared for. The digestive and assimilative powers of the individual are ignored in fire-box dietetics. If energy is low, feed up the fires by shoveling in more coal.
To declare that man requires a given number of calories a day and to feed these, all the while ignoring the individual's condition, is the height of folly. In a state of nature, demand reaches forth to supply and satisfies itself. The calorie feeders force the supply even when there is no demand or when there is lack of ability to properly care for the supply. Along with this, their standard of measuring food values wholly ignores the most important elements of the food and the further fact that not all the food elements of the food that are combustible are burned in the body. Those proteins that are used in building new tissue are not used for the production of heat and energy, even if we assume that man derives his energy from food.
It should be easily seen that a system of feeding based on the caloric or fuel value of foods must inevitably lead to mischief. And this is exactly what it has done for it invariably causes patients to be stuffed with fuel foods that are deficient in the other and more vital elements. These patients are forced to eat beyond their digestive capacity in the effort to feed them the standard amount of calories. A standardized treatment without a standardized patient is a farce and a standardized patient is an impossibility.
Hospital diets, because they are based on calorie computations, are likely to be very inadequate diets, besides being poorly prepared. Hospital diets and many other prescribed diets are still based on the supposed calorie needs of the patients. The inactive person "needs" 2000 calories a day; a moderately active person "requires" 3000 to 4000 calories a day and the vigorously active person requires 6000 calories a day. Not only is this standard based on faulty experiments, but it fails to take into account differences in individual efficiency in utilizing the food eaten.
This rule-of-thumb method of prescribing diets does not take into account individual needs and capabilities. It is as ridiculous as to say that every man at the age of twenty should be able to run a hundred yards in ten seconds. Without a standardized humanity, and we certainly do not have one, there can be no standardized diets.
It is necessary that we lose our test-tube conception of dietetics and learn to feed human beings. Man is no chemical apparatus that can be manipulated as can such a device in the laboratory. Theoretically he may need a certain amount of protein or a given number of calories, or a certain minimum of vitamins: actually, he may not be able to digest and absorb anything. Feeding must be a personal, not a rule-of-thumb affair. Formula feeding is a fallacy.
Consider for a minute the lesson of the German Raider, The Crown Prince Wilhelm. The crew was fed on a large variety of high caloric foods such as:
Breakfast: Oatmeal with condensed milk, fried potatoes, white bread, oleomargarine, coffee, white sugar and cookies.
Dinner: Beef soup, pea soup, lentil soup, potato soup, pot roast, fried steak, roast beef, salt fish, canned vegetables, potatoes, white bread, cookies, soda crackers, white sugar, oleomargarine, coffee, and condensed milk.
Supper: Fried steak, corned beef hash, cold roast beef, beef stew, white bread, potatoes, white sugar, cookies, oleomargarine, coffee and condensed milk.
Nearly every one of these foods possess a high calorie value, but every one of them is lacking in the organic minerals and growth promoting factors. After two hundred and fifty-five days on a diet like this, the ship steamed into Norfolk with many of her crew dead, 110 ill on their bunks and many others about ready to break down. Their ailment, which was similar to beriberi or pellagra, was "cured" by a diet that possessed almost no fuel value whatsoever, but was rich in organic salts and vitamins.

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Fruitarianism and Vegetarianism
CHAPTER XVII
Prior chapters have made clear the superiority of the all-plant diet over the flesh diet or over the conventional mixed diet. A few things, however, remain to be said. In nature it is obvious that in "temperate" climes, at least, animals that rely upon the surplus stores of plants for their winter food have infinitely greater chances of survival than do the predacious animals who must rely upon the kill for their sustenance. The plant feeding animals thus have a great advantage over the flesh eaters. This advantage extends to many other features of life which need not be discussed here.
I do not intend to enter into any lengthy discussion of comparative anatomy and physiology at this place, but will content myself with saying that every anatomical, physiological and embryo-logical feature of man definitely places him in the class frugivore. The number and structure of his teeth, the length and structure of his digestive tract, the position of his eyes, the character of his nails, the functions of his skin, the character of his saliva, the relative size of his liver, the number and position of the milk glands, the position and structure of the sexual organs, the character of the human placenta and many other factors all bear witness to the fact that man is constitutionally a frugivore.
As there are no pure frugivores, all frugivores eating freely of green leaves and other parts of plants, man may, also, without violating his constitutional nature, partake of green plants. These parts of plants possess certain advantages, as has been previously pointed out, in which fruits are deficient. Actual tests have shown that the addition of green vegetables to the fruit and nut diet improves the diet.
The vast majority of the human race have at all times been wholly or largely plant feeders. Human tribes that have lived exclusively upon meat and other animal foods have been exceedingly rare or non-existent. Even Eskimo tribes eat some twenty-four different kinds of mosses and lichens, including cloudberry, barberry, crowberry, reindeer moss and other plants, that grow in the arctic.
It is probable that more meat is eaten by man today than at any previous period in his history. Civilization is based on vegetarianism--on agriculture and horticulture. Tribes that depend on hunting and herding do not remain stationary and do not build civilizations.
"When I go back," says Higgins in Anacalypsis II, page 147, "to the most remote periods of antiquity which it is possible to penetrate, I find clear and positive evidence of several important facts: First, no animal food was eaten, no animals were sacrificed." Origenes has left us the record that "the Egyptians would prefer to die, rather than becomes guilty of the crime of eating any kind of flesh.
Herodotus tells us that the Egyptians subsisted on fruits and vegetables, which they ate raw. Plinius confirms this statement. Harold Whitestone, in his The Private Lives of the Romans, says: "Of the Romans it may be said that during the early Republic perhaps almost through the second century B. C., they cared little for the pleasures of the table. They lived frugally and ate sparingly. They were almost strict vegetarians, much of their food was eaten cold, and the utmost simplicity characterized the cooking and the service of their meals."
It was only after the conquest of Greece that the Romans altered their table customs and became a luxury-loving, meat eating people. Even then the poorer classes lived frugally and, as Whitestone says, "every schoolboy knows that the soldiers who won Caesar's battles for him lived on grain which they ground in their handmills and baked at their campfires."
Isis, one of the best beloved of Egyptian goddesses, was thought by them to have taught the Egyptians the art of bread making from the cereals theretofore growing wild and unused, the earlier Egyptians having lived upon fruits, roots and herbs. The worship of Isis was universal throughout Egypt and magnificent temples were dedicated to her. Her priests, consecrated to purity, were required to wear linen garments, unmixed with animal fibre, to abstain from all animal food and from those vegetables regarded as impure--beans, onions, garlic and leeks.
Island tribes have existed who had no access to flesh food and there are several peoples who abstain from meat on religious grounds. We find this so in China, India, Turkey and among the Essenses in Ancient Palestine. The Spartans were forbidden to eat meat and, like the priests of Isis, were forbidden to eat beans. There are sects in India the members of which are still forbidden to eat beans.
Hindhede has shown that on the whole health and length of life are greater among vegetarian than among meat eating peoples. McCarrison has shown that the better nourished fruit-eating Hunzas of North India are the equal in health, strength, freedom from disease and in length of life of any people on earth.
Vegetarian athletes have won honors in more than one field. Indeed where great endurance is required they almost always win. Many thousands of invalids have turned from a mixed diet to a vegetarian or fruitarian diet and have, thereby, saved their lives, even where they were unable to restore themselves to vigorous health.
A surgeon on the staff of the Bone and Joint Hospital, New York City, who has had a wide experience among vegetarians, told me that vegetarian women give birth to their babies very quickly, "drop them like animals" with but little pain, and recuperate very quickly. He added that when he gets a call to attend a childbirth in a vegetarian woman, he wastes no time, but rushes to her bedside and frequently arrives only to find the baby born before he gets there. He also stated that wounds heal more quickly in vegetarians than others. The surgeon, himself is not a vegetarian.
A surgeon here in San Antonio, who has handled deliveries for several mothers that the writer has cared for through their pregnancies, once remarked to me: "When I am called to care for a parturient woman that you have fed I know there are going to be no complications and everything will go as it should, but when I am called to care for a woman who eats in the conventional way, I never know what will happen."
Professor Richet found that fruits and vegetables do not induce serum diseases (anphylaxis), while flesh foods do and interprets his findings to mean that nature vetoes certain proteids, chiefly animal, as unsuitable. Certainly no meat, meat juice or eggs should ever be fed to a child under seven or eight years of age. It has no power to neutralize the poisons from these until this time.
Auto-intoxication and liability to infection are less in vegetarian and fruitarian than in animal feeders; many of the latter scarcely defending themselves at all, but tamely submit to parasitic imposition.
Tacitus tells us that the ancient Orientals refused to eat swine flesh because they were afraid of contracting leprosy if they consumed the animal that served them as a scavenger. Bacon is particularly resistant to the digestive secretions, its fat markedly slowing down gastric digestion.
Bouchard found that solutions prepared from the stools of meat-eaters are twice as toxic as those prepared from the stools of non-flesh eaters. Herter, of New York, observed that animals are killed quickly by solutions from the stools of carnivorous animals, but do not die of similar solutions prepared from stools of herbivorous animals.
It is quite evident that the greater toxicity of decomposed flesh foods would give rise to more severe types of diseases, should the putrefaction occur in the stomach and intestine, where absorption can occur. This perhaps accounts for the frequent development of cancer and other serious pathologies in meat eaters.
In his Presidential Address before Section 1 of the British Association, 1913, Prof. Gowland Hopkins pointed out in connection with certain important proteid reactions, that the carnivore behaves differently to the herbivore, the latter showing greater powers of synthesis and defense. As regards purity, stability and reliability, plant substances offer to man proteins and carbohydrates that are superior to those derived from flesh foods. It is known that in fruit and nut eating natives wounds heal much more rapidly than they do in flesh-eating Europeans.
There is evidence to show that vegetarians and fruitarians live longer than flesh eaters. Advocates of the flesh diet attempt to counter this evidence by pointing to the short life-span of the peoples of India. In doing so they ignore all of the other factors of life that help to determine length of life. India is a land of immense wealth and the home of one-fifth of the world's population. She possesses natural resources rivaling those of the United States. But these resources are undeveloped, the wealth is in the hands of a very few, while her millions are poverty-stricken. India is ruled by foreign exploiters who take from her a great share of what should be used to clothe, feed and house her teeming population. Ninety per cent of her people are illiterate, only thirty nine per cent of her people are well nourished while 80,000,000 of them are perpetually hungry. Besides all this, India is a land of filth--sanitation is little regarded. Under similar conditions of filth, poverty, overcrowding, ignorance, hunger and malnutrition meat eating Europe during the Middle Ages had a much shorter life span. This contrast of meat eaters with vegetarians living under similar conditions presents a brighter picture for the vegetarians.
The unfitness of certain classes of substances as foods is evident from the frequency with which anaphylactic phenomena follow their use. The more closely these substances resemble the flesh of the body the more unfit are they as foods. Thus flesh is the worst offender, eggs are next and milk is last. Cancer and anaphylaxis have much in common inasmuch as they are both due to protein poisoning. Indeed, chronic latent anaphylaxis may be the long sought cancer virus.
Although cancer is a meat-eaters disease, we do occasionally hear of a vegetarian dying of cancer. In nearly all such cases the vegetarian is descended from meat-eaters and became a vegetarian late in life. In such cases the inherited diathesis is simply too strong to be countered by the haphazard food reform so often resorted to. Many of these "vegetarians" are really so in name only, eating fish, chicken and other flesh "non-meats" regularly.
The man or woman who becomes a haphazard or a partial vegetarian and then only after some serious impairment of health has forced the change, a kind of eleventh hour repentance, will not always find salvation.
A pretty picture of how "vegetarians" are made to have cancer is presented in Dr. (M.D.) Louis Westerna Sanborn's account of cancer among the "vegetarian" Italians of Sambucci. Incidentally, in the course of his account, he makes it known that these "vegetarians" are pork-eaters and wine-bibbers--habits that have persisted since the days of ancient Rome. If the foes of vegetarianism are forced to hold up such examples of cancerous "vegetarians" in their efforts to show that vegetarians do have cancer, they are, indeed, driven into hiding.
I agree with Dr. John Round that the vegetarian argument, like the cause of temperance, has suffered from its friends. Pointing out that cancer-increase synchronises with the advance of meat eating, he says: "Amongst the Polynesians and Melanesians cancer is almost unknown, and these races are practically vegetarian; in Egypt cancer is seldom or never found amongst the black races; in South Africa the Boers and Europeans are largely meat-eaters and suffer frequently from cancer, whilst the natives who are largely vegetarians seldom so suffer."
We have been told that the meat-eating Eskimo is remarkably free from cancer and we have thought that this is due to their usually short life--they do not live long and die before the cancer stage develops. But Prof. Fibiger, writing in the Lancet (London) April 5, 1924, says that cancer affects Eskimos with approximately the same frequency as Europeans.
Much has been written about the failure of vegetarianism and it must be admitted that it has often appeared to fail. Most of the criticisms of the vegetarian diet have, however, missed the real reasons for the apparent failure.
Vegetarians are prevented from adopting a real food reform because they have the erroneous idea that the rejection of meat is all that is required to carry them into the dietetic heaven. They do not know that a vegetarian diet may be even more dangerous than a properly planned mixed diet. Indeed, the eating of most vegetarians is so abominable that one cannot blame people for not following them.
The diet of the vegetarian is often inadequate. One man who has had quite a vogue in America in recent years advocates a fat-free, starch-free, protein-free diet. His own emaciated condition speaks well for the evils of such an inadequate diet. The late Arnold Ehret advocated an inadequate diet. Others go to the opposite extreme. They accept the high-protein standard of "orthodox" medicine and consume large quantities of bread, cereals and pulses because these are rich in protein. A cereal and pulse diet with a deficiency of green foods and fresh fruits is obviously inadequate. It is deficient in alkaline elements--yields an acid-ash--and vitamins.
Plant-feeders will always consume green vegetables if they can procure them and in the green parts of plants, vitamins and minerals are present in their active state and in favorable quantities. So-called graminivorous animals become ill, breed badly, and rear fewer young, it they cannot get green leaf food in addition to grains.
Fruits and green vegetables were abundant in the diets of the Romans, Spartans and Egyptians and are plentiful in the diet of the Hunzas. Today the average Chinaman eats five times as much green foods as the average American. Green foods make up the greater part and during some seasons of the years, the whole diet of all vegetarian animals.
Dr. Densmore strongly condemned the old vegetarian diet, made up largely, as he said, of "soft, pulpy, starchy food, spoon meat," not alone because of the excess of starch and protein it contained but because they do "not involve mastication, the secretion of saliva in the mouth" is "not stimulated."
Saliva flows in response to a variety of substances--dry bread, or other dry starch, powdered dry flesh--but not in response to fresh raw flesh, moist bread or other watery substances. Mushes, boiled cereals, soups, purees, etc., do not excite the flow of saliva. There is no efficient digestion of soft, sloppy meals. The vegetarians of forty years ago consumed too much indigestible mush.
Densmore asserted the "unwholesomeness of a bread diet and cereal diet." He said "I do object to bread, cereals, pulses and starchy vegtables because of the predominant proportion of starch contained in them; but I also object to these foods; * * * * because their nitrogen is distinctly difficult of digestion, and the cause of unnecessary waste of vitality."
Wrong combinations also aid in wrecking the health of many vegetarians. Except for the absence of flesh foods, their meals are often as varied and their combinations as inharmonious as those of mixed diet eaters. Conservative cooking and correct food combining were unknown to the older vegetarians, but there is no excuse for present-day vegetarians to repeat these older mistakes.
The prejudice in the minds of many that vegetarianism means weakness is the outgrowth of the fact that with rare exceptions, only invalids of some sort take up vegetarianism. They are people whose stock has suffered through the indulgence of their ancestors and through their own indulgence and who now turn to vegetarianism as a means of saving their lives. They are people who have been made thoughtful through suffering and are only beginning to mend.
Vegetarianism has not failed. On the contrary, it is the one outstanding success of human and animal history. Meat eating is the great arch-type of failure as the same history testifies.

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Under-Nutrition
CHAPTER XXXII
Malnutrition, (Innutrition, Undernutrition) is simply poor or inadequate or defective nutrition--slow starvation. The child is undernourished or is not well nourished. Such a person may be overfed. The cases of malnutrition in those who actually do not eat a sufficient bulk of food are comparatively very rare.
Almost the whole of the American population is suffering from undernutrition. The discovery during the war that so many of the young men in this country are such miserable specimens of physical manhood occasioned a temporary interest in the subject of malnutrition, just as a similar interest in the nutrition of her young followed a similar discovery in the young men of England during the Boer war. Although, this temporary interest in the physical welfare of our future cannon-fodder waned as the patriotic fervor which gave rise to it lessened, with the passing of the war, malnutrition of our children and adults is as acute as ever if not more so. Routine examinations of school children have revealed that malnutrition is as prevalent in these as it was in the young men examined in 1917-1919 and 1933-1946.
Sir Stephan Tallents, Secretary of the Marketing Board (England) in an appeal, in the first half of 1932, for a closer understanding of matters vital to the British Empire, declared: "Research workers have satisfied themselves that whole populations--indeed a scientist told me the other day that I might safely say whole continents--are suffering from malnutrition." He lamented the fact that it takes twenty years for the results of scientific research to percolate into practice.
The United States Children's Bureau found that one-fourth to one-third of the children in this country are definitely malnourished according to medical standards. In some communities malnourishment is so common that it is hardly recognized as en abnormal condition. They found that the number of children of really superior nutrition is really very small.
While a majority of these children manage to grow up, they carry the marks of faulty nutrition with them throughout their lives. Small bones, weak, receding, deformed chins, deformities, defective teeth, undeveloped bodies, flat chests, deformed spines, poor sight, anaemia, marked susceptibility to disease, and low mentality are only some of the more obvious results of malnutrition. Here in San Antonio, among our Mexican population, one scarcely sees a single Mexican who does not present unmistakable evidences of malnutrition.
Malnutrition shows itself in a variety of ways. In young children growth is arrested, the teeth and eyes are defective, sore eyes and rickets, emaciation and deformity develop. In adults, anaemia, loss of appetite, underweight, constipation, pellagra, beri-beri, and nervous troubles result.
Malnutrition manifests itself not only in a failure to gain in height and weight but in many other ways. Indeed many malnourished children are fat, while, others are as tall as the average child of their age. A child may be normal, meaning the median or average, as far as height and weight are concerned, and still present many evidences of malnutrition.
The more common symptoms of malnutrition are a dry, delicate skin which is either pale or wax-like or else sallow, or pasty, or earthy in appearance; dry, rough hair, brittle nails; blue circles or dark hallows under the eyes, with a pale, colorless mucous lining of the eye-lids; loose skin, flabby, undeveloped muscles, round shoulders, projecting shoulder blades, fatigue posture, prominent abdomen, irritability, listlessness, inattention, "laziness," undue mental and physical fatigue, mental backwardness, a temperamental disposition, lack of natural inquisitiveness and a lessened power of concentration; the child is also likely to be finicky about his food. The undernourished child is usually underweight, although some of them are fat and flabby. Borderline conditions of malnutrition commonly pass for healthy conditions.
Dr. Hess, of Columbia University, says that clear-cut disorders are not the most common or important results of food deficiency. Lack of vitamins, he says, "generally does not bring about typical pathological states but obscure alterations of nutrition, ill-defined functional disabilities which cannot be characterized or even recognized as disease."
These ill-defined functional disabilities and obscure alterations of nutrition represent the initial beginnings and the subsequent so-called disease is only a further development of the same alterations and disabilities. It is of the highest importance that we realize that by reason of faulty diet, or other factors that impair nutrition, serious damage to the young may occur without the development of symptoms which definitely mark the condition as deficiency.
The causes of malnutrition are commonly divided into three classes: physical, social and dietetic.
The "physical causes" are diseases and various malformations. Among these are listed tuberculosis, chronic disease of the tonsils and sinuses connected with the nose, pyelitis, decaying teeth, adenoids and deformities of the jaw and nose. Chronic disease of the tonsils and sinuses connected with the nose are said to be "the most common of the diseases causing malnutrition in childhood." "Decaying teeth often cause malnutrition." "Adenoids and deformities of the jaw and nose are the most common of the deformities which produce malnutrition." Tuberculosis is not considered a common cause of malnutrition in childhood.
Morse, Wyman-Hill say of malnutrition due to these causes: "The remedies are obvious: removal of diseased tonsils and teeth and of the adenoids, treatment of the sinuses and pyelitis, and correction of the deformities." This is a surgical program and is aimed at effects, not causes.
K. B. Rich in a report of the work of the educational authorities in the Chicago Elementary Schools, showed that the treatment of enlarged tonsils, adenoids, carious teeth, and flat-foot are ineffectual in over-coming malnutrition, although the program had been undertaken with great expectations of success. Fresh air. sunshine, exercise, and improved diet and cleanliness were then tried and these proved effective.
Decay of the teeth is due to malnutrition. So is tuberculosis. So are most deformities of the nose and jaw. The medical profession is so in the habit of getting the cart before the horse--of converting an effect into the cause--that they do it unconsciously. Take the one factor of decay of the teeth. This is so unmistakably an effect of faulty nutrition that we can hardly excuse those who say that the tooth decay causes faulty nutrition.
In the discussion of the "social causes" we usually find more evidence of intelligence, although the treatment of these seldom goes far enough, due to the fact that our universities and research institutions are controlled by big business interests and to the further fact that these same universities and research institutions are large stock holders in oil companies, mining companies, cotton mills, etc., and are deeply interested in dividends from these. It is, therefore, more profitable to these institutions to vivisect animals, study germs, and endorse serums and surgery than it would be to tell the truth about the social causes of disease, where this might tend to decrease the incomes of these big business concerns.
Under social causes we find listed lack of fresh air and sunlight, too hot or too cold houses, mental over fatigue and physical over fatigue. Physical over fatigue is said to be due, usually, to too much hard play. The more than two million children, employed in poorly ventilated, poorly lighted mills, factories and sweat shops in this great land of "progress" and "prosperity" are not likely to play too hard.
There is no condemnation of the crowded slums of our larger cities where sunshine and fresh air are lacking. There is no condemnation of the low wages, high rents, and other economic factors that prevent parents giving their children the benefits of fresh air and sunshine.
Other "social causes" are insufficient sleep, due either to excitement or improper food, or to the premature abandonment of naps and rests or to not putting the child to bed early enough; too much study, neglect at home, family friction, unsuitable books and stories, too many parties, movies, long automobile rides, and too much other such excitement or improper amusement.
To these causes, let me add nagging, scolding and whipping and slapping of children, overclothing, too much handling, especially of infants, smoking by older members of the family in the house, drugs, serums, vaccines, surgical operations, etc.
"The remedy," say Morse-Wyman-Hill, "is, of course, a simple rational, not too strenuous life, without undue excitement, and with plenty of fresh air and sunshine." The remedy must go beyond this prescription. It must take the children and their mothers out of the mills and sweat shops; it must remove them from the slums and crowded tenements; it must supply these children with an atmosphere of love and kindness. It must supply them with houses that are not "too hot or too cold." It must keep them out of the hands of the surgeons and the pus punchers and serum squirters.
Under "dietetic causes" is mentioned "improper food" rather than a "lack of food." This means that the child is fed on foods that are inadequate in one way or another; that do not supply the child's body with all the needed food elements. Without indulging in the customary stereotyped chin music about ''calorie requirements," "balanced diets," "protein needs," "fat needs," "accessory foods or vitamins," etc., let me say that this means that the child is fed on white flour and its products, degerminated and demineralized corn meal, denatured cereals, pasteurized and canned milk, sulphured and canned fruits, jellies, jams, white sugar, candies, ice cream, cocoa, chocolate, soda fountain slops, cooked vegetables, mashed potatoes, pies, cakes, crackers, cookies, etc., to the exclusion of fresh raw fruit, fresh raw green vegetables, fresh raw milk (preferably its mother's milk) raw nuts, and whole grains, if grains are used.
A child may be eating foods containing all the food elements required, and yet, due to indigestion from overeating or from any of the above mentioned "social causes," not be able to digest and assimilate its food. Many cases of malnutrition are due to this cause. Undernourishment from overeating is common in our oft-fed babies. Dr. George S. Weger rightly says that an: "Overcrowded nutrition means starvation, whether it be in the infant that is fed more because it cries from already having had too much, or in the adult who gluttonizes because he is drunk on food and craves more stimulation of the same sort." When parents and physicians accept this fact and act upon it, children will be more healthy and will develop more beautifully
A common, but unrecognized cause of innutrition is toxemia resulting from impaired elimination. This toxic state of the blood and lymph is back of the chronic disease of the tonsils, adenoids and sinuses, which is listed as a "physical cause" of malnutrition. Toxemia deranges and perverts nutrition. It is due to anything that overtaxes the vital or nervous powers and checks elimination.
There are all degrees of malnutrition ranging all the way from a near-normal condition where there seems to be no definite symptoms, but still the child appears to be in not quite normal condition, to a condition presenting all of the symptoms previously described and many more and worse conditions. Malnutrition lays the faulty anatomic foundation of various organic diseases in later life. The remedy is a complete overhauling of the child's life--social and dietetic. See chapter on Feeding of Children.

Example of Superior Nutrition
What are classed as nutritive, or deficiency diseases have two groups of causes--namely:
1. Deficiencies in diet, either in quality or quantity, usually, except in famine districts, in quality.
2. All of those factors and influences, whatever their nature and source, which render it difficult or impossible for the body to utilize the elements of its food, even though the food is perfect.
Dietitians rarely give any attention to this second group of causes. They experiment with healthy animals and seldom see any other factor than that of a studied and deliberately made dietary deficiency. They are easily misled by their one-sided, or as they call them, controlled experiments.
In dealing with children and adults let us always keep in mind that we are not dealing with controls. The life of a human being, child or adult, is much more complex than that of any experimental animal in the laboratory. His environment is more varied, his contacts greater in number, the influences to which he is subjected more numerous, and the resources of his environment greater.
Pregnant mothers that are fed on a good diet, if their nutrition is impaired by overwork, worry, fear, or other cause, will not be able to assimilate the elements of their food and their babies will be born with the "seeds" of some deficiency disease "in their bones." The babies will then be fed-up (stuffed) in an effort to force them to take on weight and their own weak nutritive machinery will be so impaired that, in spite of an adequate diet, deficiency will develop. Too much handling, drugging and any other cause that debilitates the infant and child will damage its nutrition sufficiently to bring on nutritive disease. Indeed there is an element of nutritive disease present in every so-called disease.
The needs of children for vitamins, salts and proteins are relatively greater than those of adults. These things are absolutely indispensible for the processes of growth and a deficiency in any one of them during the growth period has nutritional consequences. For this reason it is during infancy and childhood that most careful attention to nutrition is essential.
By slight alterations in feeding, it is possible to produce all degrees of muscular change, and "other physiological functions are undoubtedly interfered with by the same apparently small dietetic abnormalities."
Many eye troubles are blamed on the teeth, when, as a matter of fact, it would be equally correct to blame the tooth trouble on the eyes. Dr. Howe says: "Now it is apparent that both tooth and eye-trouble may have the same underlying cause! Xerophthalmia (the disease that attacked the Roumanian children because of the lack of vitamin A in their diet) is one of the first signs of vitamin deficiency in experimental guinea pigs. Running eyes occur in vitamin-deficient feeding. Many of our skulls showed decalcified areas in the orbit (eye socket) usually at the base of the teeth.
In young guinea-pig mothers on the vitamin deficient diet, many eye disturbances appeared, cloudy spots on the coatings of the eye, opacity of the lens in both eyes like cataracts. After feeding the cataract specimen with orange juice in large quantities, the trouble disappeared."
"Vitamin deficiency" may mean anything such as deficiency in health. When the diet is properly balanced with regard to minerals, there is no likelihood of any deficiency in vitamins occurring. By shortage or deficiency the "orthodox" food scientist usually means a shortage sufficient to result in some "deficiency disease." If ordinary health is maintained they are satisfied; superior health is not worth working for. We want better health than just average or so-called "normal" health. Not merely freedom from "disease," however slight, but abounding, positive health is the goal every parent should set for his or her children.
Sherman and Macleod found in their animal experiments, that a great abundance of "vitamin-rich" foods, far more than enough to eradicate evidences of deficiency, added to a diet that is fully adequate for the development of the normal size, produces a marked superiority in the appearance and condition of the animal. There is increased growth and weight, the animal matures earlier, has a longer adult life, increased reproductive power with more offspring, has a delayed senility, so that the whole life-span is increased about ten per cent. This improvement may properly be called super-health.

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Cereals
CHAPTER XII
Cereals, after Ceres, goddess of the harvest, are grains. Oats, wheat, rye, rice, barley, millet, and similar grass seed, used as foods, are denominated cereals. They grow and mature in short seasons, can be grown in parts of the world that have short growing seasons, will grow almost everywhere, may be produced with a minimum of effort and will keep almost indefinitely. For these reasons they have been the mainstay of whole populations, despite the many objections that may be offered to their use. Until recent modern times, they were used almost wholly as whole grain and not as refined products.
I should not have to remind my readers that the only grain products that are permissible in the diet of an intelligent and informed individual are whole grains in the dry state. But after this has been said, it is necessary to sound a warning against the use of grains in the Hygienic diet. At their best, grains are inferior articles of food and they certainly form no part of the normal diet of man. Every man, woman and child in the land will be better off by leaving them out of their diet.
Dr. Emmet Densmore was the first to raise a voice against the use of cereal products. He pointed out that man is a frutarian animal, not adapted to the use of cereals, and traced many evils to the employment of grains, even whole grains, as food. He declared bread to be the "staff of death" instead of the "staff of life" as it is usually referred to.
Considering man a frutarian and finding that fruits (ripe) contain plenty of sugar, but little or no starch, whereas the cereal and vegetable diet of civilization is largely starch, he began to investigate the subject still more. He soon found that starch requires much more time and energy to digest than fruit and that cereals are the most difficult of all to digest. "Fruits are best, cereals are worst" he declared. He quotes, approvingly, Dr. Evans as saying: "'Cereal and farinaceous foods form the basis of the diet of so-called vegetarians, who are not guided by any direct principle, except that they believe it is wrong to eat animal food. For this reason vegetarians enjoy no better health, and live no longer than those around them'."
Declaring man not to be naturally a grain-eating animal, Densmore says: "The only animals that may be truly said to be grain-eating are birds. Many species of birds eat a considerable portion of grass seeds (and all cereals are developed from grass) * * * birds are the animals for which starchy seeds are the natural food, and birds have altogether a different digestive apparatus from other animals." Even birds do not feed their young on grains--"They generally feed their young on insects and molluscs, while feeding themselves on fruits and seeds," declares Densmore.
Squirrels often are forced, from scarcity of food, to eat cereals. They bite off the end containing the germ and eat this, leaving the rest of the grain. Berg says "the proteins of most seeds, and especially those of cereals, are especially characterized by inadequacy due to a lack of cystin and lysin. In like manner, it is a common characteristic of seeds, not only to contain an excess of acid, but also to exhibit a deficiency of calcium. For lime is almost always present in the soil, so that seeds need not contain any more calcium than is requisite to provide for the growth of the first rootlet. In animal organisms, on the other hand, the need for calcium is very great. Cereals, consequently, quite apart from the fact that they contain an excess of acid, are about the most unsuitable food we can force upon the growing animal organism. The best proof of this is that even graminivorous birds collect insects to nourish their young. The fledglings of the most strictly vegetarian birds are carnivora."
All experimenters seem to agree that the much vaunted cereal diet is inadequate. Funk, Simmons, Pitz, Hess, Unger, Hart, Halpin, Steenbock, Davis, Hogan, Mendel, Wakeman, Parsons and others of equal standing agree with Berg who agrees with Densmore. Oats are deficient in basic salts. Wheat is deficient in sodium and calcium, while the germ of the wheat is inadequate as a growth-factor. Rice is deficient in salts, and especially in calcium. It does not contain enough calcium to support an adult hog. It is also deficient in sodium and chlorine. They are all lacking in iodine.
Mineral deficiency is a common fault in the diet of young animals fed largely on cereals and it has long been known to farmers and stockmen that their animals must have grass and other green foods--that they will not thrive well on an all-cereal diet. In his laboratory experiments with whole wheat bread, Milo Hastings found that the animals used thrived better and grew more rapidly as the percentage of green foods was increased and the percentage of whole wheat bread was decreased in their diet. If the green foods constituted well over half their diet, they thrived best.
"We have learned," says Berg, "that all cereals have certain defects which may be looked upon as characteristic of these nutriments. As regards inorganic salts, they are deficient in sodium and calcium; they are also poorly supplied with organically combined sulphur and with bases generally; but they contain a superabundance of inorganic acid-formers and of potassium. The cereals are also poor in A, B and C, the poverty being more marked in proportion to the fineness of the flour. Finally, the proteins of the cereals are always inadequate; they are lacking to some extent in the ringed amino-acids, and are especially poor in lysin and cystin."
The contention, so frequently heard, that whole wheat is a perfect food, is a foolish statement of over-enthusiastic salesmen. A few years ago an acquaintance of the writer's made an effort to walk from New York to San Francisco on a diet of whole raw wheat alone. Before starting, however, he consulted me and I advised him not to try it, but to have an abundance of lettuce and celery and some fruit in addition to his wheat. He would not hear of such a plan. Whole wheat is a perfect food and he was going to prove that one could accomplish such a walk on a whole wheat diet. He didn't get as far on his wheat as George Hassler Johnston got on his water diet (fasting) before he discovered that whole grain wheat is not the perfect diet that the "health" food exploiters and amateur dietitians say it is.
"It has long been known," says Berg, "that when herbivores, and still more when rodents, are fed exclusively on grain, acidosis rapidly ensues. In rabbits on a maize diet, for example, the acid urine contains far more phosphorus than is being introduced in the food. (Showing that phosphorus is being lost from the animal's tissues.--Author). * * * Rats, again, can only endure an exclusive grain diet for a short period, speedily succumbing to such a regime. An abundant addition of protein to the grain does not help. Hogan, however, tells us that that an addition of alkalies preserves life and has a marvellous effect in furthering growth."
McCollum fed rats on a diet restricted to grains--only one kind of grain being used at a time--and found that they became restless, irritable and apprehensive. They were "on edge," rather than "full of pep." He inclines to the belief that the "obstreperousness" of the horse that "feels his oats" is due to the fact that he is suffering from an "attack" of nerves; that he is displaying pathological irritability and apprehensiveness, rather than healthy activitiy.
There are vegetarians who might more properly be called cerealists; that is, they drop flesh from their diet and substitute large quantities of cereals therefor. Usually they do this because they are told that whole wheat, for example, is an almost perfect food--"has all the elements the body needs in about the right proportion." These people not only consume too much cereal for which they suffer, but they eat their cereal in forms that tend to ferment before it digests.
Take for example, the mush dish of boiled oat-meal, to which has been added milk and sugar, so commonly eaten. It is one of the worst abominations that ever slipped down the human throat. It is practically indigestible. No saliva and no ptyalin are poured out upon such a dish and it may remain in the stomach for hours, undergoing little or no digestion, before it is permitted to pass into the intestine. Fermentation is inevitable. Cracked wheat, soaked and boiled, and then served with milk and sugar, milk and honey, milk and sweet fruits, is equally indigestible.
The oatmeal, or cracked wheat or other soaked or boiled cereal does not undergo salivary digestion, even when, and if, eaten without milk and sugar. When eaten in the usual combination, digestion is doubly impossible.
Flaked cereal foods (various types of corn flakes and other such foods) are much in use. Chemical analysis shows them to be possessed of abundant food value, though, actually, they are largely charcoal. They are said to be ready-cooked and predigested. This is a fallacy that the public must outgrow. They are pressed between rollers at intense heat and are rendered practically valueless as foods.
Whole wheat alone will not sustain life, health and growth in an ideal manner. After a shorter or longer period on such a diet, the rate of growth slackens unless, in addition to the whole wheat, the animal is also fed some green foods. Furthermore, if growth is to continue in an ideal manner, the amount of green foods must be greater than the amount of whole wheat. Hasting's experiments only serve to corroborate the correctness of the long-time observations of farmers that their horses, mules, etc., must be given grass or other green foods and cannot be fed exclusively upon grains or other dry foods for any considerable time without harm.
Wheat is the most acid-forming of the cereals. Oats seem to have the worst effect on the teeth. Rice which is probably the best of the cereals, is the staple article of food in the diet of more than half the world's human inhabitants. Cases of beri-beri in human beings have been reported in which whole and not polished rice constituted the bulk of the diet.
I have repeatedly referred to the dangers of attempting to feed man after the results of experiments on animals. For, as Berg says, "The same nutriment has very different effects on different species of animals." Maize proves harmless to fowls and pigeons. Rats maintain health on it. It produces marked polyneuritis in rabbits and scurvy in guinea pigs. Pigs fed on maize die from general malnutrition. Fowls fed on wheat maintain health while pigs and rats develop polyneuritis on this diet, and guinea pigs develop scurvy thereon.
Says Berg: "The varying reactions of different species of animals to an identical diet is still a complete enigma, and in my opinion insufficient attention has been paid to the matter. Speaking generally it would seem that graminivorous birds thrive on whole grains, but suffer from polyneuritis when the grain is hulled. In mammals, on the other hand, grain feeding may cause polyneuritis in certain circumstances, especially in rodents (except for the omnivorous rat), which are highly susceptible to acidosis. In many mammals, however, a grain diet induces scurvy instead of polyneuritis; while some animals perish from general malnutrition owing to the inadequate supply of inorganic nutriments in the grain. When grain has been thoroughly hulled, almost all animals, human beings included, become affected with polyneuritis. Are these variations due to varying requirements in respect to vitamins; or are the polyneuritic disorders due to the absence of various vitamins which act differently in different species of animals, or are essential to different species in varying degree?"
This last question of Berg's completely ignores the mineral deficiencies of grain and the varying requirements of various animals for these minerals. It completely ignores the individuality of the organization and functions of the various species. It is enough for us, at this point, that we note the evils of the largely grain diet and the confirmation of Densmore's earlier claims. While fowls thrive on a grain diet (this is only true of adult fowls), we must not overlook the fact that in a state of nature the graminivorous birds all consume large quantities of green grasses, and even consume most of the seeds or grains in their green or "milk" state, when they are alkaline and not acid.
Corn, while green and still growing, contains almost no starch, but considerable sugar. During the last two or three weeks of its maturing period, this sugar is converted into starch which, unlike sugar, is insoluble in water and therefore not readily fermentable. What is true of corn is true of other grains.
Green corn is not classed as a starch. It ranks relatively high as a base-forming food. Some of our State Agricultural Experiment stations have shown that, when green corn is detached from the stalk, it immediately begins to ripen and will accomplish as much of the ripening process in twenty-four hours, as it would have done in several weeks, had it been left on the stalk. So rapid is the transformation of the sugar into starch that in twenty-four hours, it is changed from an alkaline-ash to an acid-ash food.
Germinated grains make better food than dry grains. Grains "in milk," this is, before they have been matured, are alkaline foods, but the matured grains are acid. Fresh corn on the cob, not off the stalk for twenty-four hours or longer, is an alkaline food.
Never before in history have as much cereals and refined flours been consumed, as in America and parts of Europe, since the perfection of the rolling mill process in 1879. Bread is consumed in enormous quantities. Breakfast foods (denatured cereals) are eaten in considerable quantities in almost every household. "Health" food stores and "health" food factories turn out more cereal products than all other products combined. The advocates of whole cereals, in preference to the denatured kinds, did their work too well. Vegetarians are usually great eaters of cereals. They would receive less harm from moderate amounts of meat.
Cereal (denatured) with cream (pasteurized) and sugar (white) is a staple breakfast in most households. A predominantly acid forming breakfast, a horrible combination--and plenty of sickness as a result. The physicians continue to tell us that germs cause our diseases!
Bread eating is one of the great curses of modern life. Made of cereals, largely of denatured cereals, mixed with salt, soda, yeast, lard and often other ingredients and subjected to a high degree of temperature, in cooking, and then eaten three and four times a day, in considerable quantities, mixed indiscriminately with all classes of foods and taken in addition to much other starch food, bread is one of our chief sources of woe.
The so-called enrichment of white flour has given people a false sense of security. Various states have passed laws requiring the "enrichment" of all flour manufactured in or shipped into them. The people are lead, by this requirement, to believe that the "enriched" flour is good food. Never was a greater fallacy entertained. These laws were lobbied through the state legislatures by the milling companies, in an effort to head off the rising demand for wholewheat flour. They seem to have temporarily succeeded.
This "enriching" process adds a small quantity of "synthetic vitamins" but does not return to the flour the minerals that have been extracted. Seventy-five percent of the minerals of the wheat are extracted in the process of making white flour. All of the vitamins, and not just one, are removed. The present process of "enrichment" is similar to the process of sixty and seventy years ago of adding phosphorus to the flour to replace the phosphorus extracted in milling.
In the milling process organic salts are extracted. These are not returned by the "enriching" process. In the milling process real vitamins are removed. Part of these are replaced, by the "enriching" process, with fraudulent or imitation vitamins. What folly to remove the vitamins in the first place! Why not leave them in the flour and why remove them at all?
Dr. Anton J. Carlson, noted physiologist of the Department of Physiology of the University of Chicago, recently uttered a warning about this very matter in which he said that the term "enriched" applied to white flour to which a little vitamin B is added is misleading. "Such flour is still impoverished," he said. Referring to the fact that the idea is "put across" that "enriched" flour is better than whole grain flour he pointed out that refining actually takes out salts, vitamins and proteins, only a small part of which are replaced by the "enrichment" process. The learned physiologist added that the theory that some races cannot physiologically tolerate whole grain is without foundation. He declared it to be not a matter of toleration but of acceptance, adding that food acceptance is a question of what a person is used to from childhood. "You cannot overnight change the diet of a healthy people," he declared, although, since he never saw a healthy people, it would be interesting to know how he came to this conclusion.
Grain alone was shown, by experiments conducted by the Defensive Diet League, to be a much safer food than grain and meat--the combination of these at the same meal being the chief trouble-maker. We know that too much bread, if taken alone, will break down one's health. But the combination of bread and meat causes even more trouble. Such a diet, when fed to experimental animals (young ones), resulted in high blood pressure, Bright's disease and troubles which usually accompany these conditions in man. Neither do the animals grow as they should.
Cereals are about the most difficult to digest of any habitual sources of starch except beans and peas. They are difficult for the infant and growing child. They ferment easily and cause much gas and intoxication.
Cereal starches require from eight to twelve times as long to digest as does potato starch. Grierson found that two full hours are required to digest the starch of wheat, corn and rice, and eighty minutes to digest the starch of oats, whereas the same amount of potato starch digests in ten minutes.
Doctors frequently recommend the feeding of cereals to infants and children. Densmore declared: "Cereal or grain and all starch foods are unwholesome for all human beings; but this diet is especially unfavorable for children, and more especially for babies. The intestinal ferments which are required for the digestion of starch are not secreted until the babe is about a year old; and these ferments are not as vigorous for some years as in adults. All starch foods depend upon these intestinal ferments for digestion, whereas dates, figs, prunes, etc., are equally as nourishing as bread and cereals, and are easily digested--the larger proportion of the nourishment from such fruits being ready for absorption and assimilation as soon as eaten." No starch and, more particularly, cereals, should be given any child before it is two years old.
Dr. Percy Howe, of Harvard University, says: "Mrs. Mellanby and Dr. Pattison, in England, have just concluded a very interesting experiment on 71 children in a bone-tuberculosis hospital, for a period of 28 weeks, which may help to establish the fact that cereals, especially oatmeal, exert an anti-calcifying influence." Calcification is the deposit of lime salts in the tissues. Cereals would prove a distinct evil in rickets, tuberculosis and in growing children, if this is proven to be true. Of course, these people had no right to experiment on these children, but since human vivisection goes on in every hospital and sanitorium in the world, they probably thought they had as much right to flirt with human health and life and produce suffering, as do the other physicians, surgeons and "research" workers.
We may state a few conclusions about cereals from the above facts:
(1) Cereals do not form any part of the natural diet of man and are not necessary to health and life. (I believe geologists and anthropologists are agreed that man did not become a cereal eater until late in his history).
(2) They are best omitted from the diet entirely and especially from the diet of infants and children.
(3) Where they are eaten, only the whole, undenatured, unprocessed cereal should be taken.
(4) They should form but a small amount of the diet and should be offset with an abundance of fresh fruits and green vegetables--properly combined.
(5) To insure the conversion of their starches into sugar they must always be eaten dry and not as porridges and mushes.

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Fruits
CHAPTER IX
"Figs or Pigs, Fruit or Brute?" is the title of a little book on fruitarianism which I have in my possession. The question is a pertinent one and its correct answer is freighted with increased health and happiness for everyone. Dr. Alcott declared, and this at a time when the regular profession declared fruit to be practically without food value, that; "The purest food is fruit. Fruit bears the closest relation to light. The sun pours a continuous flood of light into the fruits, and they furnish the best portion of food a human being requires for sustenance of mind and body."
Botanically, fruits are the edible parts of plants that result from the development of pollinated flowers, such as peaches, oranges, cucumbers, tomatoes, peppers, nuts, beans, peas, etc. Although, scientifically, beans, peas, nuts and other such articles of food, are classed as fruits, popularly such seed, because they do not possess an edible capsule (we do eat the green pods of the bean), are not considered as fruits. Botanically, the wheat grain or other cereal is a fruit. We shall here consider under the term of fruit, however, only those foods that possess the edible capsule surrounding the seed and shall consider nuts and cereals in separate chapters.
The soft, delicious pulp of the peach, pear, plum, apple, orange, etc., constitute fine food and is prepared by the plant especially for export purposes. Primarily, seeds are produced for reproduction. Secondarily, they are produced in great over abundance, that some of these may be used as export products. Some fruits, such as the banana, pineapple and the seedless orange, do not surround a seed. Other fruits, like the pomegranate, are largely seed, with but little edible pulp.
Edible fruits exist in greater variety than any other form of foodstuffs; over 300 different edible varieties are known. The tropics are especially abundant in them. Long before Bichat proved, by comparative anatomy, that man is naturally frugivorous, the race had recorded this fact in a thousand ways. The very word frugal refers to fruit. Dr. Oswald tells us of the Romans of the Republican age that, "in their application of the word, a frugal diet meant quite literally a diet of tree-fruits."
Ancient peoples realized the great importance of fruits. The Bible is full of references to fruits and vineyards. The same is true of other ancient literature. Moses exempted the man, who had planted a vineyard, from military service. The pagans consigned the olive tree to Minerva, the date to the Muses and the fig and grape to Bacchus for protection.
"And the Lord God planted a paradise eastward in Eden and there He put the man whom He had formed. And out of the ground made the Lord to grow every tree that is pleasant to the sight and good for food; And God took the man and put him into the Garden of Delight to dress it and keep it. And the Lord God commanded the man, saying, 'of every tree of the garden thou mayest freely eat'."
In these few words the writer of Genesis explains to us that man was originally a gardener or rather a horticulturist and lived upon the fruits of the trees. In this, many of the ancient myths, legends and tradition agree perfectly with Moses. These also picture man as living in a state of perpetual bliss with health, strength and a very long life, so long as he remained on his fruit and nut diet and as becoming depraved, weak, short-lived and diseased when he forsook this and took to a diet of meat. This early age of man was called the "Golden Age."
The tradition of the deluge has it that the first thing Noah did after the waters of the flood had subsided was to plant a vineyard. The account of the spies sent by Joshua to investigate the land of Canaan tells us that they brought back "unto all the congregation, and showed them the fruit of the land."
The Latin poet, Ovid, pictures for us, a Golden Age when "Western winds immortal spring maintained," and when man lived on fruits, berries, and nuts. He says: "The teeming earth, yet guiltless of the plough, and unprovoked, did fruitful stores allow." During this age there was no vice and crime. Then, after describing the horrible cruelties inflicted upon animals, in order to appropriate their flesh as food, he says:
"Not so the Golden Age, who fed on fruit,
Nor durst with bloody meals their mouths pollute."
Referring to a subsequent "Silver Age," Ovid says:
"Then summer, autumn, winter did appear, 
And spring was but a season of the year; 
The sun his annual course obliquely made, 
Good days contracted, and enlarged the bad. 
The air with sultry heat began to glow; 
The wings of winds were clogged with ice and snow; 
And shivering mortals, into houses driven, 
Sought shelter from the inclemency of heaven. 
Those houses, then, were caves, or homely sheds; 
With twining osiers fenced, and moss their beds, 
Then ploughs, for seed, the fruitful furrows broke, 
And oxen labored first beneath the yoke."
Geology proper knows only one climate--a universal spring-like climate which reigned from pole to pole. Then, there came a great change in earth's climate. Ovid describes man before and after this change. He pictures agriculture and dwelling in caves and houses, as succeeding the Golden Age. Almost without exception, the poets, philosophers and historians of antiquity picture the diet of primitive man as being very simple and consisting largely of fruits and nuts. Porphyry, a Platonic Philosopher of the third century, after carefully investigating the subject of diet, tells us that "the Ancient Greeks lived entirely on the fruits of the earth." Making all allowances for the accretions of time and the loss of accuracy which time brings to traditions, these ancient myths embody important truths. They were not manufactured "out of whole cloth." They are not only important as blurred pictures of a more remote antiquity, but are also important as indications of the importance the peoples of less remote times attached to fruits and nuts. The myth of Promethus, who first stole fire from heaven, points back to a time when man did not cook his food; when he was not a deformed, sickly, suffering creature as we see him today, but a long-lived, healthy, happy being.
The Greeks always served two courses of fruits, while the Romans, if they ate breakfast at all, had a fruit breakfast. The third course of the principal daily meal of the Romans consisted of a super-abundance of fruits from their own orchards. Rich Romans planted fruit trees on the tops of high towers, and on the tops of their houses. The ancient Gymnosophists, of India, lived entirely upon fruits and green vegetables. It was a part of their religion to eat nothing which had not been ripened by the sun, and made fit for food without any further preparation.
Fruits are rich in alkaline minerals and in those qualities or characteristics which are called vitamins and complettins and also in organic acids. Sweet fruits are especially valuable for their delightful sugars, so easily digested (sometimes almost pre-digested), which sustain the body with so little energy expenditure in digestion.
Fruit sugars are better than starch. Even bananas, commonly condemned as indigestible, are a superior food and easily digested if fully ripened. Fruit sugars require very little work in digestion and consume far less energy than starch. "The ordinary dried figs of commerce," says Dr. Densmore, "are said to contain about 68 per cent of glucose, which when eaten, is in the identical condition that the starch of cereal food is converted into after a protracted and nerve-forcing-wasting digestion." The same is true of grapes, dates, raisins, bananas, etc.
Starch is an almost insoluble carbohydrate and is converted into sugar in the process of digestion in rendering it soluble. The following brief description by Milo Hastings, of the storing of starch by plants and its later conversion into sugar is both interesting and instructive: "Many plants store future food material in this form of starch and later, when nature requires this material in soluble form so it can move and flow through the cells, the starch is changed into sugar.
"This is the change that occurs in the sprouting or malting of all grains, and malt syrup is sugar made in this fashion from the starch of the barley grain. Even the starch of the potato turns to sugar when the potato is planted, and sometimes after long storage we get a little of this sugary taste in our potatoes and wonder what is the matter with them.
"When we get starch in any form it is changed into sugar before absorption from our digestive organs and yet after absorption some of this sugar is changed back into gycogen or 'animal starch,' which is stored in the liver, or to a lesser extent in the muscles, until it is needed as fuel for our muscles. Then before it is actually oxidized or burned in the muscles this product must again be changed back to sugar."
Fruits are rich in levulose (fruit sugar), which is the choicest of all sugars. It represents starch in a state of complete digestion and is ready tor instant absorption and assimilation. It is the ready absorption of this sugar that renders fruit juices so refreshing to the fatigued person.
The best source of sugar for the body is sweet fruits--grapes, dates, bananas, figs, raisins, etc. These sugars come to us almost pre-digested and well-balanced with minerals and vitamins. These fruits are wholesome, natural, delicious and are full of life-sustaining qualities. No cook, confectioner or manufacturer can even remotely imitate these delicious products of nature's solar-vital laboratory.
Sweet fruits are superior to starches as a source of carbohydrates. Man is a sub-tropical animal and his craving for sweets is, undoubtedly, a survival of his habit of subsisting largely on the sweet fruits which grow so abundantly in the sub-tropics and tropics. Sweet fruits serve the same heat and energy purposes that starch does and need almost no digestion. The digestion of starch foods consumes much more energy than does the digestion of sweet fruits. Dr. Densmore, indeed, strenuously advocated a non-starch dietary and insisted upon the substitution of sweet fruits for starch foods. For he claimed, and rightly, that sweet fruits give the greatest amount of nourishment for the least amount of digestive strain.
Herbert Spencer, who stigmatized bread and milk and butter, as insipid, and who praised fruits because they were savoury and wholesome, declared that "the more the labor of digestion is economized, the more energy is left for the purposes of growth and action." He perceived, also, that considerable energy is consumed in converting starch into sugar, in making it available for use in the body.
Starch digestion takes place largely in the duodenum. Indeed, combined, as it usually is, with proteins and acids, starch is almost wholly digested in the duodenum, and has usually undergone considerable fermentation before it reaches there.
Starch must first be converted into sugar before the body can use it--fruit sugars have been converted from starch to sugar while ripening under the influence of the sun. The sun and the life force of tree having done this part of the work, man may save his energy by eating the fruit instead of cereals or potatoes, which certainly do not form any part of man's natural diet.
Fruits produce more food per acre than any other food, except pecans. Humboldt calculated that the ground required to produce thirty-three pounds of wheat or ninety-nine pounds of potatoes, will produce four thousand pounds of bananas--a delightful fruit that is more valuable than both of these foods. Grapes and other fruits will all produce comparatively large yields.
A grapevine planted in 1775, at San Gabriel, Calif., now has a base eight feet and nine inches in circumference; its branches spread over an area of twelve thousand square feet--a space the size of a city lot 100 ft. by 120 ft. It produces a ton of grapes a year. No tilled crop can equal fruits and nuts in the amount yielded. Fruit culture will simplify agriculture and lessen the farmer's burdens.
Fruits are commonly divided into three classes according to the amount of sugar and fruit acid they contain, viz., acid fruits, sub-acid fruits and sweet fruits. The most common fruit acids are malic, tartaric, citric and oxalic. These occur usually in acid salts of potassium, sodium or calcium.
Malic acid is found chiefly in apples, pears, currants, berries, pineapples, grapes and cherries. Tartaric acid is found in grapes. Citric acid is found in oranges, lemons, limes, grapefruit, tangerines, tangeloes, tomatoes, gooseberries and currants. Oxalic acid is found in small amounts in raspberries, tomatoes, grapes and currants, with but a trace of it found in apples, plums, oranges and lemons. Cranberries are rich in it. During the ripening process, fruit acids are slowly transformed into sugar. As the orange, for example, ripens, its acid content decreases and its sugar content rises.
The principal sweet fruits are dates, figs, sweet grapes, raisins, bananas, prunes and the pawpaw.
The chief subacid fruits are apples, pears, apricots, blackberries, blueberries, raspberries, cherries, grapes, peaches, persimmons, plums and practically all deciduous fruits.
The acid fruits are oranges, lemons, limes, pineapples, grapefruit, tangerines, tangeloes, strawberries, loganberries, cranberries, loquats and tamerinds.
The world teems with a profusion of kinds and varieties of edible fruits and no effort will be made here to consider all of them individually. A few of the more commonly known fruits will be briefly noticed. They will be considered alphabetically, rather than under their classifications.
Apples: These fruits are poor in vitamin C and are not especially rich in B, but added to a scurvy-producing diet, they prevent scurvy. They are also described as curative in scurvy.
Apples contain calcium, phosphorus, sulphur, iron and magnesia. Their phosphoric acid is in the most soluble form, while the iron in the apple is more easily taken into the blood than iron from any other source. Dr. Tilden especially recommends apples for rachitic children, and for building good bones and teeth. Dr. Claunch stated that cavities in his teeth healed while he was on an apple diet. There are many varieties of apples, all of them a delight to the sense of taste, and they are obtainable throughout the year.
Avocado: The avocado is coming more and more into popularity and as its cultivation increases, is destined to become one of the finest articles of diet on the American bill-of-fare. At present the best avocados we get in this country are raised in California. Florida and West Indian avocados are not as tasty as California avocados and do not possess the food value of the latter. A good California avocado contains about 3.39% protein. This is about the protein content of milk and that of the avocado is equal to the protein of milk in its content of amino acids essential to growth and repair. It is low in carbohydrates, containing but 2.9% of these of which 1% is invert sugar. They are rich in a very tasty emulsified oil which has a high degree (about 93.8%) of digestibility. The total minerals of a good California avocado amount to 1.18% of the total edible portion. This includes an ample proportion of the bases: calcium, potassium, magnesium and sodium. It contains considerable iron while phosphorus is found in generous combination with its protein. Copper, essential to the assimilation of iron, and manganese are present in smaller quantities. The avocado contains liberal supplies of several of the vitamins. It is a good source of thiamin (B1 and ribofla/in (B2 or G) and is a fair source of A and C (ascorbic acid). The avocado requires no preparation, but is ready to eat when it reaches the mellow stage. Due to its high fat content it is not wise to eat it with other protein foods.
Bananas: The banana is a tropical plant and together with figs, dates and a host of other such fruits, are demonstrations that nature has not designed sweet fruits for cold regions and juicy and sub-acid fruits for the tropics. People who live on banana plantations consume them in large quantities and withstand the heat well. Figs and dates are favorite foods of the desert peoples.
Chemical analysis shows the banana to contain: water 73.3 per cent; protein 1.3 per cent; fat .06 per cent; total carbohydrates 22 per cent; mineral element .8 per cent. The mineral content of the banana is largely potash, sodium and chlorine. Lime and iron exist in but small amounts.
Prof. Jaffa says that green bananas contain: sugar .94, starch 22.26. Ripe bananas contain sugar 18.87, starch, .82. When bananas are thoroughly ripened the almost indigestible starch of the green banana has been converted into an almost pre-digested sugar ready for immediate absorption. A well-ripened banana is almost predigested. It is then good for food, not before.
Bananas are rich in vitamins A and B, which promote growth. The antiscorbutic vitamin C is abundant in bananas. Vitamin D, which is supposed to prevent rickets, is said by some investigators to be deficient, although Berg declares it is present in sufficient quantity. Vitamin E, which is supposed to promote fertility, is present although its quantity is supposed to be small.
Tested on rats, banana protein proves to be inadequate; yet there is a So. American parrot that lives exclusively on bananas and attains an age that makes the oldest rat look like a day-old infant. The fecal discharges of this parrot have the fragrance of bananas and are as inoffensive as bananas themselves.
Banana protein has been proven to be of about equal value to those of grains and potatoes. "An abundant supply of bananas," says Berg, "is a guarantee that the food will contain an excess of bases," although there may be a partial lack of calcium salts. They are too poor in calcium to be adequate growth promoters. Bananas plus nuts, plus green vegetables would make an adequate diet for child or adult and for a pregnant or a lactating mother.
Berg says: "Bailey Ashford relates that indigenes convalescing from yellow fever, eat nothing but bananas, consuming from thirty to forty of these fruits daily without any supplement whatever, health and strength returning in a marvellously short time. I have myself proved that, after habituation to the strange diet, it is possible to live very well on bananas and butter, with a much lower consumption of protein than is requisite, for instance, upon a wheaten diet."
Thousands of rubber gatherers perform prodigious feats of muscular strength and endurance on almost no other food than bananas. The banana is higher in nutritive value than any other fresh fruit. Mr. Mcfadden, who once declared the banana to be a complete food, thought one could live a life-time on it and be thoroughly nourished, providing only, that the bananas were eaten when thoroughly ripened. He stated that he had known many athletes of more than ordinary ability to live almost entirely on bananas for an extended period and maintain their strength to a high degree on this food.
There is little doubt that a mature individual could live for some time on bananas alone, without any appreciable decrease in strength or health, and this is especially true if the bananas eaten had fully ripened on the tree. But bananas do not form a complete food and one could not live a life-time on these alone. Mr. Mcfadden made the above statement at a time when we knew less about the life-sustaining and growth promoting value of foods than now. He was not for from right, at that.
Bananas that are shipped are pulled green and are ripened after reaching the dealer. They are usually sold to the consumer and eaten by him in only a partially ripened state. Often they are sold with green tips. More often, however, the banana is all yellow. A yellow banana is still an unripe banana. A fully ripened banana is flecked with little brown spots. It resembles the complexion of a much freckled boy, except the banana freckles are darker and become black. Fully ripened bananas are usually sold much cheaper than the unripe ones because they do not keep long after ripening. It is just then, however, that they should be eaten.
No fruit that is pulled green and ripened afterwards, is as good as are those that are permitted to ripen on the tree. The ripening process is less complete, their food value is not so great, their flavor is not so delightful. These things are due to two chief causes: (1) they are deprived of the sap from the tree, and (2) they are deprived of the influence of the sun's rays.
I have been informed that if a stalk of bananas is placed in the sunshine, with the end of the stalk in water, the bananas will ripen almost as well as if they had been permitted to ripen on the tree and will have almost as delicious a flavor.
Bananas are excellent food for children and should be given them instead of candy, cakes, pies, sugar, etc. They will supply the child with the needed sugar in an easily assimilated form. All children relish them and will prefer them to the above abdominations. Give them well-ripened bananas and let them chew them well.
A lady once saw the writer give his little two year old son a banana to eat, and thought it a crime that I did not mash the banana up well before giving it to the boy. She had a girl only a few months older and fed her bananas this way. It is the writer's conviction that the wrong was on her side. Mashed bananas can be swallowed without chewing, but the whole banana requires some chewing before swallowing. The mother chewed the food of her daughter with a masher, but this did not insalivate it. The daughter then swallowed it without insalivating it.
It is true that a well-ripened banana does not require much insalivation but it should be given all that naturally comes to it in the necessary chewing. Other than this, children should not be fed in a manner that encourages them to swallow their food without chewing it.
Popular and quasi-scientific opinion has it that the banana is difficult to digest. So it is if eaten green, as is usually the case, while they are still starch, the green starch being almost insoluble. In this state they are much like green apples, green peaches, etc., and may result in trouble when eaten. There are few foods that are more easily digested than a fully ripened banana, and surely none with a stronger appeal to the unperverted taste. The use of tobacco seems to deprive the user more or less of his natural relish of fruit.
Berries: The acid of berries is chiefly citric, with small amounts of malic acid. All berries, except cranberries, are excellent foods. The strawberry possesses a delicate, sweet-acid flavor and a delightful aroma. It is rich in iron and lime, containing about a fourth of a grain of lime to the ounce. It excels all other fresh fruit, except figs and raspberries, in richness in iron. Strawberries are richer in iron than most vegetables, being excelled only by green peas and fresh lima beans.
Cranberries, unlike other fruits, contain an excess of acid minerals.
Cherries: Over two hundred varieties of this excellent fruit are grown in the United States, and their composition varies with the variety. They are rich in sugar, minerals and vitamins.
Dates: A sweet fruit of the palm, the date is an excellent source of simple sugar. It is richer than most fruits in protein, being richer, even, than mother's milk and is relatively high in minerals.
Figs: A prince among the sweet fruits are the many varieties of this anciently cultivated fruit (or flower). Native figs were found growing in Mexico, Central and So. America when the New World was discovered. Many varieties are grown in this country, although few varieties are known to the general public. The mineral content of figs closely resembles that of human milk. They are rich in sugar and are excellent sources of vitamins.
Grapes: Grapes merit their title, "King of Fruits." They are rich in iron and fruit sugar and vitamins. Their use in the famous "grape cures," of France and Southern Germany, has demonstrated their wonderful nutritive and "cleansing" value.
They contain from fifteen to thirty per cent sugar and, like most fruits, are low in protein. They are also rich in vitamin C.
Raisins: or dried grapes, are very rich in a readily assimilable sugar.
Haws: A delicious fruit growing wild in Southern United States and known as red haws and black haws, according to their color, these fruits are deserving of cultivation and wider use.
Mangoes: The mango is a tropical fruit and has long been cultivated by man. It does well in Florida, Southern Texas and in a few sheltered spots in California, although the best mangoes our market affords come from Central America. It is one of the most delicious of fruits and is destined to grow in popularity.
Melons: All melons are excellent foods. There was an old notion, fostered by the medical profession, that melons cause "chills" and "feners," remnants of which still exist and cause many people to reject these foods. Three general types of melons are produced in America. These are:
Casaba: Also known as the winter melon, is represented by several varieties, such as the casaba, honey dew, golden beauty, Christmas melon and other types.
Musk-melon: Most musk-melons are commonly known as Canteloupes. There are many varieties called canteloupes. In the South the term musk-melon is reserved for one variety which is much larger than the others and is ridged or sectional. The persian melon and the banana melon belong to this group. The banana melon gets its name from its shape, similar to that of the banana, although it grows to great length and is large in diameter.
Watermelons: These are among the largest of our fruits, often weighing more than a hundred pounds. There are many varieties of water melon. It is common to describe the outer skin of the water melon as green; some of them are golden yellow, It is also common to refer to the inner part or meat as red; there are water melons with yellow meat.
All kinds and varieties of melons are valuable for their minerals, vitamins, sugars and pure water.
Contrary to popular and professional belief, probably nobody is ever allergic to melons. My experience has been that so-called allergic individuals can take all the melons they desire without distress, if the melons are eaten alone. Melons do not combine well with other foods, except perhaps, other fruits.
Nectarines: are closely related to the peach and are sometimes classed as a variety of the peach. In appearance they seem to be a cross between a peach and a plum, as they have a smooth skin. The composition of the nectarine is similar to that of the peach, although its flavor is distinctive.
Oranges are rich in lime and other alkaline salts. They have a delightful flavor and may be relished by everyone. Their use combats "acidosis" and prolongs youth. These, with grapefruit, are our best agents in feeding the sick. As a cleansing diet, I prefer the grapefruit.
The experiments of B. Leichtentritt (on guinea pigs) in an effort to determine the relations between the presence of "accessory food factors" in the diet and the course of tuberculosis provide wonderful testimony in favor of acid fruits. When he added lemon juice to a "basal diet" this made a very great difference. The lemon juice improved the general nutrition of the pig--especially the fat storing power--and "raised its resistance to the tubercle bacillus." The bacillus was forced to live on the dead tissue and excreta (were restored to their normal saprophytic work) and forced to abandon their parasitic activities. The different diet compelled the bacillus to change its tactics and, if it continued to grow freely, did so without producing any definite toxic effect.
I have not discussed grapefruit (pomelo), lemons, tangerines, tangeloes, etc., under separate heads, because, in general, what is said of the orange applies also to these fruits. Even the pineapple is not greatly different from these foods. The orange is richer in sugar than most other citrus fruits. The Texas grapefruit is richly supplied with sugar and is not bitter. The pinks and ruby reds are very popular, though not superior in flavor or food value to the white grapefruit.
Papayas: Called also a "tree melon" because of its resemblance to a melon, this fruit grows on a giant herbaceous plant and not on a tree. It is a valuable and delicious fruit, but lacks all the magic and medicinal virtues with which the salesmen of papaya juice and papaya extracts invest it. It is a tropical fruit but does well in Florida and the Lower Rio Grande Valley section of Texas. It does not stand shipping and must be eaten "on the ground" to be really appreciated.
The vitamin content of the papaya is a feature that has attracted considerable attention. Bulletin No. 77 of the Department of Agriculture tells us that the papaya contains four vitamins. The vitamin content according to international units per 100 gms., is about 2,500 units of vitamin A, 33 units of vitamin B and 70 units of vitamin C. Vitamin D is present but the amount is as yet, undetermined. This is a relatively high vitamin content.
Prescribing papaya with protein meals because of the presence in it of the enzyme, papain, or vegetable pepsin, as an aid to digestion is wrong. Because of the presence of this enzyme in the fruit, it should never be eaten with protein foods. Teaching the stomach to rely upon outside sources of digestive enzymes, instead of removing the cause of digestive impairment, is a ruinous practice.
Pawpaws: The American Pawpaw must be distinguished from the papaya, which is also sometimes spelled "papaw" and "pawpaw." Our pawpaw, a native of the United States, grows best in the Mississippi Valley where it was highly valued by the Indians. Someday it will be more widely cultivated in America. Unfortunately, it does not ship well and is but little known outside its native haunts. Carque says it is fully equal, if not superior, to the banana in nutritive value. It surpasses all other varieties of fresh fruit in protein content, its edible portion possessing 5.2 per cent protein. It is also rich in sugar.
Peaches: Flavored by the presence of a very small quantity of hydro-cyanic acid and fruit ethers, the peach is one of the most delicious of fruits. Low in protein and fat, comparatively rich in sugar, the many varieties of peaches are chiefly valuable for their vitamins and the sodium, potassium and calcium that make up most of their mineral content.
Pears: Botanically related to the apple, pears are similar to apples in composition, but contain more sugar and less malic acid. Pears are not especially rich in vitamin A.
Persimmons: Carque says the persimmon comes to us from Japan. This is true only of certain varieties. We have many varieties of persimmons that are native to the Southern part of the United States, and they are more tasty than the Japanese persimmon, though smaller. He says that in color, the persimmon resembles the tomato. This is also true only of certain varieties. There are black persimmons. The persimmon is among the most delicious of fruits.
Plums and Prunes: The many delightful varieties of plums are rich in sugar, minerals and vitamins. The dried prune may contain seventy per cent sugar, hence deserves to be classed as a sweet fruit. Plums are not especially rich in vitamin A.
Tomatoes: are commonly classed as vegetables but we shall consider them as fruits. They are the equal of oranges, both in vitamins and in alkaline elements and are the finest of foods. For a long time tomatoes or "love apples" were regarded as poisonous and were grown in flower beds as ornaments. People would not eat them, although the Indians had eaten them for ages. The old physio-medicalists claimed that they contained mercury and would rot the liver. Regular medical men eschewed them because they "make the blood acid." There are still people who believe that tomatoes are poisonous and that they build acidosis. There are still physicians who proscribe the tomato in rheumatic cases.
The tomato contains 1.40 per cent alkaline salts as against .34 per cent acid salts. It is so predominantly alkaline that its use cannot be too strongly urged. The juice of the tomato ranks next to orange juice in its beneficial effects. We can recommend it to babies and adults in large quantities. Tomatoes should be eaten uncooked and properly combined.
Tomatoes are also rich in vitamin A.
THE FRUIT DIET
The great nutritional value of fruits is unquestioned by the well-informed. Supplemented with nuts, they form the ideal diet of man. All fruits are rich in vitamins and mineral salts and are especially valuable in preventing or remedying deficiency "diseases." Dr. Oswald says: "From May to September fresh fruit ought to form the staple of our diet."
A few years ago, in one of his articles in The New York Evening Graphic, Milo Hastings wrote: " 'A daily reader' without name, sex or address, notes that fruit is always recommended to purify the blood, drive diseases from the body, etc. He, or she, wants to know why we should not live all the time on this superior type of food and so maintain perfect health.
"The idea, with slight modification, has been tried. A generation ago, Prof. Jaffa, of the University of California, made a scientific study of a group of fruitarians, only these persons included nuts in their fruit diet. The professor found them underweight and undersized folks, but all in fine health. He also calculated the total amount of food they ate and found, as measured in caloric units, that they were living on much less total food than the teachings of those times held to be possible.
"At the time this report was issued food authorities taught us that we all ought to overeat because the average man did overeat, and that we all ought to be somewhat fat because the average man was overfat. Looking over that report today, we realize that these minimum eaters were really in first class physical condition and were living the way of long life and freedom from the ills of fleshpots. They were able to live on fruits by including nuts, which are very rich in protein and fat, neither of which elements exist in fruit proper to a sufficient degree to maintain normal life.
"The chief reason we cannot live on fruits is that they contain practically no protein. This is also one reason why adding them to the average diet is beneficial, for the average diet is too rich in protein. Going on a fruit diet is 'cleansing' chiefly because it is a protein fast, and most of the accumulated wastes and poisons of the body are of a protein nature."
Dr. Gibson says of the nut and fruit diet: "In the light of the latest notations in the science of human nutrition, there is no activity in the human system, no process of digestion, assimilation, and nutrition, no nervous expenditure or structural strain, that cannot be sustained and maintained to its highest constitutional potency by a judicious dietetic balance of fruit and nuts. The former gives it sugar for the maintenance of fats and heat of the system; its organic salts to sustain the chemical composition and metabolic balance of the blood; its acids for breaking up tissue congestions, due to accumulation of waste matter; while the nut, with its storage of nitrogen and fat, furnishes material for anatomic repairs, and lubrication of the various joint movements. Finally the carbons contained in both the fruit and nut unite to generate the cerebro-vital explosions which set free the energies of high tensioned nervous life."
Dr. John Round (England) reports that, "In 1854 cholera attacked the Midland counties; there were many deaths in Staffordshire and elsewhere, but the fruit-growing and cider-making villages of Herfordshire escaped. The physicians of that time attributed this to the custom of eating fresh fruit; it is certain that the villagers did not peal their apples, and so consumed vitamins freely, it being a fact that the vitamins exist near the peel in all such fruits."
Dr. Gibson says: "The gains accruing to an individual from a well-established nut-and-fruit-diet would be far reaching. His domestic economy, by virtue of the time-and-labor-saving simplicity of a mostly fireless housekeeping would give rise to surprising assets. Furthermore, the relation between man and his associates in the animal kingdom would find a perfect moral and ethical adjustment. There would be no justification for killing or taking of life, for the sake of life; no dependence on animal sacrifice for our existence. Released from this awful task of compulsory 'slaughter of the innocents,' man would rise into a living protective power of peace and good will to every creature within his zone of influence, aiming at a consecration in place of a desecration of expressions and opportunities of life. His attitude towards his dumb and helpless neighbors would be serene, sweet and peaceful, with no grim implement of murder, concealed in the caressing hand."
Because of the rapidity with which fruits leave the stomach, and the readiness with which they decompose after they have been broken up, fruit is best eaten alone and not in combination with other foods. A fruit meal is the ideal.
Under all conditions and circumstances fruits should be taken alone and not eaten at the same meal with other foods. Fruits digest in the intestine, not in the mouth and stomach, and should not be held up in the stomach to await the digestion of other foods before being passed on to their own digestive fields.
Sugar on fruit means fermentation. Two sugars do not go well together. Cane sugar and beet sugar must be converted into simpler sugar before they can be utilized. Fruit sugars do not. Cane and beet sugar tend to prevent the absorption of fruit sugars until they both ferment.
Preserved fruits are confections, not fruit. We do not advise them. Canned fruits have little to recommend them.
The use of fruit juices as desserts and as appetizers, so strongly advocated in some quarters, is pernicious. The practice is based on the belief that we must secure all of the needed food elements at each meal. It is advocated in total disregard of the limitations of the digestive enzymes. Such eating guarantees indigestion to everyone who practices it.
Drinking fruit juices at all hours of the day, instead of water, is a sure road to indigestion. Fruit juices are foods, not drink, and should be taken as foods. Troubles arising from the misuse of fruits should not be blamed on the fruits.
Dried fruits are superior to bread in nutritive value, besides which they supply the bases so commonly lacking in cereals and cereal products. Sulphured fruits should never be employed. Sun dried fruits are best. Eat them dry or soak them but do not cook them. Fruits should never be cooked. Nor should they be frozen. They should be eaten ripe, fresh and uncooked. Their taste is not always as agreeable in this stage, but they are richer in vitamins before fully ripened. They lose vitamins in ripening. Fruits, like vegetables have more vitamin C in proportion as they are green. Fruits in general, like many nuts, are poor in vitamin A.
Allergies to fruits are commonly not that at all. The troubles attributed to allergy are, in almost every instance due to misuse of the fruit. Eaten in proper combinations, people who imagine they are allergic to fruit, find they have no difficulty with them. Placing these "fruit allergic" people on a diet of fruits, using the very fruits to which they are supposed to be allergic, proves them not to be allergic.

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Vegetables
CHAPTER XI
We think of vegetables as plants cultivated for their edible portions. This loose definition includes leaves, stems, roots and tubers, pods, buds, flowers, seeds and fruits.
Leaves: spinach, chard, beet greens, turnip greens, Chinese cabbage, mustard greens, kale, cabbage, etc.
Stems: rhubarb stalks, celery, cardoon, fennel, etc.
Roots and tubers: potatoes, sweet potatoes, turnips, radishes, carrots, salsify, parsnips, Jerusalem arthichoke, onions, etc.
Buds and flowers: French artichoke, broccoli, cauliflower, etc.
Seeds: beans, peas, peanuts, okra (of okra and green beans we also eat the pods), etc.
Fruits: Tomatoes, peppers, cucumbers, melons, squash, pumpkins, egg plant, etc.
The plant is the basis of all animal life; all animals deriving their food either directly or indirectly from plants. Plant eating animals always consume vegetables when they can get these and, while we speak of certain forms of animal life as graminivorous, it is a well-known fact that these animals, pigeons, for example, become ill, breed badly and rear fewer young, if they are unable to procure green food as well as grains.
The most marvellous chemical laboratory known resides in the green leaf. Here are formed all the marvellous products of the vegetable world--delightful colors, delicious aromas, foods, poisons, vitamins. But this is not all. Here in this scene of marvellous activity and growth are produced substances that impart the power to grow to young animals, which are unable to synthesize the highly complex organic materials essential to cell functioning out of crude inorganic matter.
Vegetables are one of our most important sources of food; the green leafy ones being, usually, more abundant in alkaline minerals than fruits. They are also rich in vitamins and carry small amounts of proteins of the highest quality. Experience and experiment have shown that the addition of green vegetables to a fruit and nut diet improves the diet and it is a fact that practically all frugivora include green vegetables in their diet.
Many valuable plant foods, weeds we call them now, have been used by peoples at various times, which are no longer in use. The American Indian used many plants, "wild," which we do not use. The Chinese make use of many greens unknown to us. So do the New Zealanders and Abyssinians. Archeologists find evidence that our progenitors made use of a vast number of plants which we ignore. During the Middle Ages salads were in high repute.
The North American Indians cultivated extensive gardens and cultivated many plants, some of which we have dropped from our gardens, perhaps to our detriment. They employed various kinds of greens, many fruits and a number of varieties of nuts and berries. Corn was practically their only cereal.
As shown in the introduction, the medical profession once taught that practically all the fresh fruits and vegtables which we eat, especially in the summer when they are most abundant, are causes of disease. It has required years of constant effort on the part of vegetarians and fruitarians to overcome this fallacy.
It will not be necessary to do more than briefly refer to a few of the more common vegetables. Let us being with the lowly lettuce which is one of the finest vegetables. It is safely alkaline and does not contain the opium that popular superstition says it does. Old fashioned leaf lettuce is superior to head lettuce in food value. Young lettuce is better than old lettuce. Hot house lettuce is of little worth, because it lacks sunshine.
Mr. Harter says: "Now that we in the North are getting Texas-grown lettuce, full of sunshine and good cheer, we feel that the winter lettuce problem is approaching solution." "Eat some lettuce every day. Eat garden-grown lettuce when you can get it--grown right where you live. The next lettuce is that 'shipped in from' Texas. Then comes Florida lettuce, not so good, not probably because of lack of sunshine, but because Florida soils are said to lack something that plant life needs. Texas soil needs no fertilizers while they must be used heavily in Florida. All fertilizers are questionable. Some are very bad; some destroy the value of foods; some make them injurious."
Bulletins Nos. 94-95 of the Defensive Diet League of America say: "We know definitely that lettuce, spinach and other products grown on the comparatively exhaustless soil of Texas and the far West are so much more valuable as foods that it seems almost unbelievable, as for example, such a comparison of vitality as one to ten thousand. Of course loss in shipping long distances must be taken into account."
Spinach, a native of Persia, grows wild in Asia minor. It was cultivated in ancient Babylon and Nineveh. It is a fine food, but it has been much overrated, particularly as a food for children. Beet tops, turnip tops, kale, mustard, dandelion, leeks and other green leafy vegetables may be used instead of spinach.
Cabbage, which grew wild on the shores of the Mediterranean, was gathered for the tables of Rome. It is one of our most valuable vegetables and should not be spoiled by converting it into sour-kraut. A head of cabbage, weighing two pounds, contains more organic salts of iodin than the thyroid gland can use in a week.
The cucumber was among the first cultivated plants and has been known for 2000 years. Fresh, green or ripe, they make excellent foods. Our parents thought they were poisonous. The poison resided chiefly in the skin, which nobody dared to eat, but some of it existed in the body of the cucumber. These excellent foods were first carefully pared and then soaked in salt water to "take the poison out of them." They were accused of causing "fevers." These prejudices, although they persist in the public mind, are unfounded. Cucumbers are not poisonous and do not cause fevers. Their skins are rich in minerals which are valuable to the body.
Cucumbers are especially rich in iron, potash, magnesium and calcium. They rank high among the alkalinizing vegetables. Containing about ninety percent pure water, they form excellent summer foods. They should never be pickled (pickled they are indigestible) nor soaked in salt water. They are best eaten unpeeled, whole, seeds, skins and all. Everyone may relish them whole--unpeeled, unsalted and fresh.
In the eighteenth century, New Englanders burned large stocks of potatoes because they were thought to be harmful and it was believed that if the cattle ate them they would be poisoned.
Okra is a food that comes to us from Africa, where the negroes call it gumbo. It is a tasty and valuable food, though not widely known outside the Southland. In its young, raw state it is very sweet. It is excellent for thickening soups instead of using the usual starches.
Mushrooms, falsely reported to rank high in food value, are as indigestible as boot straps. Simple observations show that they pass through the digestive tract unchanged. Untoward results have been reported as coming from their use.
Many superstitions cluster about the onion family--onions, scallions or shallots, garlic, leeks, chives--are numerous and some of them are very old. They possess none of the curative and prophylactic virtues attributed to them. Garlic will not reduce blood pressure, it is not an intestinal antiseptic, onions will not "cure" gall stones. None of the curative powers attributed to these foods are real.
These bulbs and their blades are rich in mustard oil that imparts to them their irritating quality and renders them unfit for regular articles of diet. The oil is eliminated through the kidneys and must, if used regularly, ultimately impair the kidneys. Their irritating effects upon the digestive system cannot but enervate these. For all their richness in certain valuable food factors, they should be eaten only rarely--and then, only when you are going to be alone.
All foods that grow above ground in the sun are superior to foods that grow under the ground, a fact known to the ancients. Roots and tubers are usually deficient in calcium and sometimes in sodium. This is especially true of potatoes and carrots. Beet tops, radish tops and turnip tops are more important foods than the beets, radishes and turnips.
There is a seasonal rise and fall in the nutritive value of vegetables caused by the varying amounts of sunshine in the different seasons. Spinach, for example, grown in summer is richer in vitamins and basic minerals, such as iron, calcium and manganese, than spinach grown in winter. This is also true of other green vegetables and of fruits and berries. Winter vegetables grown in the far south, Florida, Southwest Texas, etc., are far superior in these respects to winter vegetables grown farther north.
There is a marked difference between the green parts of plants and the seed from the nutritional standpoint. The seeds contain an excess of acids, while the leaves contain an excess of bases. Leaves are richly supplied with sodium and calcium, whereas, all seeds are deficient in these bases. Animals fed on grain, must also be given plenty of green fodder, if they are to rear their young. Even birds must have greens along with their grains. Green leaves contain considerable quantities of vitamin A--more, usually, than most fats contain.
Due to the greater abundance of salts and vitamins in young, rapidly growing plants and also to the fact that most of them are alkaline in reaction, they are better than the matured ones for food. It will be noticed by all who observe them that animals and birds prefer young tender grasses, herbs and seeds to the older forms of plant life. Migratory birds follow the vegetation northward in the Spring and southward in the late Fall.
Young onions, young cabbage, etc., are better than old onions or old cabbage. The same is undoubtedly true of potatoes, popular opinion to the contrary notwithstanding. Young lettuce is better than old lettuce. Young peas, young beans, etc., are basic foods, but matured pulses of all kinds are acid formers. Those of us who are located in the winter-garden and valley regions of Texas, where we have fresh fruits and vegetables all year are to be envied by our less fortunate kinsmen of the North and East.
The outer, greener leaves and stalks of lettuce, celery, cabbage, etc., are superior to their white, inner leaves and stalks. Lazy people, who do not like to chew, dislike the tough outer stalks of celery, or the outer leaves of lettuce. They prefer the "hearts" of these and other such foods. But these outer leaves contain more minerals and are possessed of more of those food qualities to which the name vitamin (or complettin) has been attached. In well-to-do families these better parts of such foods are thrown away; in the poorer families they are not discarded.
In general, green vegetables are the richest sources of minerals and vitamins. Practically all green leaves are rich in vitamin C. Cabbage is also rich in B. Cucumbers are rich in C, as is also the bell pepper. Leaves contain an excess of bases (alkaline salts) while seeds contain an excess of acids. Even nuts, with perhaps one or two exceptions, contain an excess of acids. Green leaves also contain small quantities of very high grade proteins.
The following paragraphs are from the third edition of Chemistry of Food and Nutrition, by Prof. Sherman, of Columbia University: "They (vegetables and fruits) tend to correct both the mineral and the vitamin deficiencies of the grain products, and in a sense they supplement the milk also, in that many of the vegetables and fruits are rich in iron or vitamin C, or both * * * This increasing use of vegetables and fruits improves the food value of the diet at every point at which the American dietary is likely to need improvement.
"The benefit to health which so generally results from a free use of milk, vegetables and fruits in the diet may be attributed in part to the fact that these foods yield alkaline residues when oxidized in the body; but this point should not be too greatly emphasized, for there are several other respects in which the eating of liberal amounts of milk, vegetables, and fruits is certainly beneficial, notably in supplying calcium (lime), iron and vitamins, and in improving the intestinal condition.
"It becomes apparent that a dietary made up, as so many dietaries are, too largely of breadstuffs, meats, sweets, and fats, may be satisfying to the palate and to the traditional demand for variety, may furnish ample quota of protein, calories, with fats and carbohydrates in any desired proportion, and yet may be inadequate because of faults in its mineral and vitamin content. We now understand how it is that fruits, vegetables and milk in its various forms serve (in ways which until recently could not be fully appreciated) to make good the deficiencies of breadstuffs, meat, sweets, and most fats."
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Drink
CHAPTER XIV
Drink we define as pure water only. No other fluid except water deserves the name of drink. Other fluids commonly referred to as drinks are either foods or poisons and should be classed under these heads. Thirst is a demand for water--not for food or for a so-called beverage. Fruit juices, milk, etc., are foods, and should be taken as such.
The body is largely water and its water content is greater during its period of most rapid growth than at other periods. Water supports all of the nutritive processes, from digestion on through absorption and circulation through the body, assimilation and disassimilation, to excretion. It is the chief agent in regulating body temperature, serving much as does water in the radiator of an automobile.
Some of the most important offices of water in the body are:
1. It is an essential constituent of all tissues and cells and of all body fluids--blood, lymph, glandular secretions, etc.
2. It holds the nutritive materials in solution and serves as a medium for the transportation of food to the various parts of the body.
3. It holds waste and toxins in solution and serves as a medium for the transportation of these from the body.
4. It keeps the various mucous membranes of the body soft and prevents friction of their surfaces.
5. It is used in regulating body temperature.
The body is constantly throwing off water and this must be replenished. It gets much of its water in foods in the form of juices. Other water is taken as drink. A good part of the water taken in becomes an integral part of the tissues, that is it becomes "living water."
Fresh rain water and distilled water are best. Distilled water is not dead, as some foolishly say it is. Pure water from a rock spring is excellent drink.
Drinking water should be as pure as possible. Hard waters, mineral waters, etc., contain considerable mineral matter, and are injurious in proportion to the amount of mineral they contain. The delusion that mineral water is curative is an old one and has resulted in incalculable harm to countless thousands.
One of the dogmas of modern so-called science is that man should drink so much water a day. People are advised to drink at least a given amount daily regardless of the quality and quantity of their diet, the nature of the environments (climate, season, occupation, etc.) and without consideration for the instinctive demands of their bodies. If they are not thirsty they are advised to drink anyway; to cultivate the habit of drinking a glass of water at regular intervals. The advise usually given is to drink at least six glasses of water between meals each day.
I do not believe in routine drinking anymore than I believe in routine eating. There is not and never was any necessity to drink any specific number of glasses of water a day. Indeed, many have gone for years without drinking water as such.
A peculiar feature about this drink-lots-of-water dogma is that it is held by those who advise one never to eat unless truly hungry as much as by those who preach the belly's gospel of three squares plus and go by your appetite. Why should one drink without thirst? Is this more appropriate than eating without hunger? Does not the body know when water is needed?
The great importance of pure water should be recognized, but all of the facts about water given in this chapter do not teach us that we should be constantly taking water into our stomachs.
Water needs vary with season and activity and other factors. The man who is engaged in active physical labor in the summer's sun requires more water than the office worker who is in the shade, perhaps near an electric fan, and pushes a pencil or operates an adding machine. We require more water in summer than in winter, more during the day's activities than during the night's slumbers. The more rood one eats the more water will his system demand. The fasting individual has little thirst. The person whose diet is chiefly fresh fruits and green vegetables gets large quantities of water in its purest form from these. He needs to drink less water than the man whose diet is largely dry. If milk is taken with meals this supplies considerable water.
The body's water requirements depend upon age, sex, activities, season, climate, etc. It needs a certain amount of water under given conditions, but it makes no difference to the body from whence it obtains this supply. It is perfectly satisfied with the juices of fruits and vegetables or the water in milk and, accordingly, we find that infants on a milk diet and adults who consume an abundance of juicy fruits and succulent vegetables have little or no desire for water.
The amount of solid matter in milk is small. It is nearly all water. The percentage of water in milk is greater than the percentage of water in the infant. There is, therefore, no reason to give much water to the milk-fed infant. If fruit juices (also nearly all water) are fed to the infant, in addition to the milk, there is absolutely no reason to give additional water to infants. This I have proved on several infants. They need no water save that contained in their milk and fruit juices, during their first year of life, and their growth will be above the average.
How about adults? Most green vegetables and fresh fruits contain a higher percentage of water than the adult body. If the diet contains an abundance of these foods little or no additional water will be required.
Dr. Lamb, of England, took the position that man is not by nature a drinking animal. Dr. Alcott and others of the vegetarian school proved by direct experiments that those who adopt an exclusively vegetable regimen and make a large proportion of their diet consist of juicy fruits and succulent vegetables can be healthfully sustained and nourished without water-drinking. Sophie Lepel, of England, also condemned the use of water.
If the fertilized ovum of some sea animal is placed in tap water and watched, its weight will increase to as much as a thousand times the original. The ovum develops despite the entire absence of all other nutrients except water. Obviously such growth is not normal and the cells formed under such conditions are deficient and weak. Growth of this kind can occur only within narrow limits and the water-logged cells are far from ideal.
Super-saturation of the protoplasm of plants submerged in water weakens and even kills them. Excesses of water produce rank, watery vegetation, while prolonged standing in water will kill most vegetation more surely than a drought.
If a sufficient amount of water is forced into man or animal it will produce all the symptoms of alcoholic intoxication. Nothing is to be gained by excessive water drinking at any time. Excessive water drinking tends to water-log man's tissues and fluids and to lessen the vitality of his cells. The power of the blood to absorb and carry oxygen is lowered and the body is weakened. One sweats more when he drinks more, but excessive transpiration is weakening. Observation will readily show that those who suffer most from the summer's heat are the ones who drink the most water. We naturally conclude that they drink more because the heat causes great thirst. If these individuals can be induced to drink less, their sweating will decrease, thus showing that the excessive drinking was largely responsible for the sweating.
I do not believe that a small excess of water is particularly harmful, but I believe that the safest rule about drinking is: drink as little as thirst demands. A false thirst induced by salt or some other irritant, is not to be "satisfied."
I have never been able to find any sound reason why we should deliberately drink a certain number of glasses of water a day just because somebody has arbitrarily decided that we require that much water. I know of no sound reason why we should take water in the absence of real physiological need for water, as expressed in genuine thirst. I am fully convinced from my own observations and experiments that there are many people who are injuring themselves by drinking too much water.
Dr. Trall severely condemned the "indiscriminate practice of large water-drinking" and said, "I have seen not a little mischief result from it." Drs. Shew, Cully, Johnson, Wilson and Rausse, of the hydropathic school, severely and justly repudiated the extravagant recommendation of large water-drinking contained in many works on water-cure. Dr. Tilden, though, like the author, once an advocate of much water-drinking, has for several years past condemned the practice. The late Dr. Lindlahr did not favor the practice.
Shall we, then, affirm that all the water should be taken that instinct calls for? If so, how much does instinct call for? What is an instinctive call for water? How much of our present thirst is due to habit? How much to irritation? What part is normal? Is an abnormal thirst any better guide than an abnormal appetite?
Water drinking can become a habit like any other thing we do. Those who cultivate drinking large quantities of water will feel a "need" for much water. On the other hand, eating salt, spices, condiments, greasy dishes, concentrated foods, meats, eggs, cheese, sugar, starches, etc., creates an irritation that is usually mistaken for thirst. But water will not ally such a "thirst." One may inundate his stomach with water every five minutes and still be "thirsty." If he will refrain from drinking he will find that his supposed thirst will be satisfied much sooner. It is argued that people turn to strong drink because water will not allay such "thirst." Perhaps it is often true. If the supposed thirst is endured it will be satisfied with the normal secretions and this almost irresistable desire for water will pass away. On the other hand, if water is taken, these secretions are not used to allay the "thirst," while the water, upon leaving the stomach, carries the secretions that are there along with it.
Those who seek to do the body's work for it and are afraid of letting it do its own work in its own way will object to permitting these secretions to be used for this purpose and will maintain that it robs the system of that much water. The objection is unsound from first to last. The secretions can satisfy the "thirst" while water will not. Besides this the secretions will prevent putrefaction and fermentation in the digestive tract while water will favor these very processes. Lastly, the secretions are not lost to the body, but are reabsorbed.
Would we say to the glutton: Eat all your appetite calls for; or to the satyr and nymphomaniac; Indulge as much as your desires command? If not, then, why shall we say to the man of perverted thirst: Drink all your thirst calls for? Such advise could be beneficial only where thirst is normal.
How much should one drink? I don't know. How much should one eat, or breathe, or sleep? You answer--"All that nature calls for." Suppose we say the same in regard to water drinking--how much does nature call for? This will depend on a number of circumstances and conditions, such as; the amount and character of food eaten, amount and character of work performed, climate, age, sex, etc.
No hard and fast rules can be set down in this matter. The intelligent person will not attempt it. It is often stated that our bodies require a certain minimum of water daily. This is doubtless true, but it by no means follows that we should always drink this amount. We may get two-thirds or all of this amount in our diet.
Drinking with meals: There are many who advocate drinking with meals although animals and savages abstain from water at this time. Drinking with meals or soon thereafter is not compatible with good digestion.
While eating, large quantities of digestive juices are being poured into the stomach. If drink--water or beverages--is taken, these are diluted. The water passes out of the stomach in ten to fifteen minutes and carries the digestive juices along with it. The food is deprived of these juices and digestion is greatly retarded. Fermentation and putrefaction follow.
Drinking water and beverages leads to bolting of food. The food is washed down instead of being properly masticated and insalivated. Many foods are dry and require much insalivation before they can be swallowed. Washing them down with drink prevents the completion of this first and necessary step in digestion. Forego the drink and the glands of the mouth will meet the demand for fluid by a copious supply of digestive fluids.
Drinking water with meals and directly after meals, leads to dilatation of the stomach. Chronic indigestion, gastritis, ulcers, and even cancer follow in their logical order.
A fictitious thirst often follows a meal. This is especially so if the food has been salty, greasy or full of spices and condiments. This "thirst" should be ignored. If thirst following a meal is not satisfied with water, it will be satisfied with digestive secretions and these will bring along enough enzymes to prevent fermentation and accomplish digestion in good order. The intake of fluids with meals and immediately after meals interferes with all the digestive secretions and results in indigestion. One may safely drink fifteen to twenty minutes before meals.
The person who eats fruit, green and succulent vegetables, and avoids condiments and has overcome his drinking habit, will have little cause for drinking at any time and no cause for drinking at meal time or immediately thereafter. Let him not fear that his health will suffer therefrom. I can assure him that it will improve and quickly at that.
Drinking with meals is a frequent cause of overeating. It stimulates the appetite, sometimes even creating an enormous one. Trall says: "Some persons have boasted of the 'ravenous appetite' produced by drinking twenty or thirty tumblers of water a day; but I cannot understand the advantages of 'ravenous appetites'; they are generally indicative of excessive morbid irritation of the stomach."
Distilled water: This is water that has been vaporized by heat and re-condensed by being cooled. In this process the mineral matters that are suspended or dissolved in the water and the vegetable and other organic matters that are suspended therein, are left behind, so that the water is rendered practically pure. The hardest and foulest of waters may be rendered practically pure by distillation. Certain noxious gases contained in water falling in the cities are not lost upon distillation. For this reason, it is best to use other water for distillation.
Nature is ceaselessly engaged in distilling water. Were this process not in ceaseless and eternal operation, the water of the earth would become so contaminated and foul as to be unfit for use. In spite of this, all natural water is more or less impure. Some of it is very impure. Hard waters are full of dissolved and suspended mineral matters. Surface waters are full of earthy matters and organic matters. Even fresh rain water contains gases and dust picked up in falling. Distillation provides us with the purest water obtainable.
Distilled and aerated, distilled water has the taste of freshly fallen rain water. It is soft water, for it has lost its minerals. It contains so few impurities that it constitutes the best drinking water obtainable.
Objections are frequently offered to the use of distilled water. Distilled water is said to be "unnatural." It is as unnatural as the purest rain water. It is said to be dead. There is no such thing as live water. All water is lifeless. It is said that the body needs the minerals dissolved in the water. That the body needs minerals is certain, but it needs them, as previously shown, in the form of organic salts and derives these from foods. It is objected that the use of distilled water causes decay of the teeth and softening of the bones. This objection has no foundation. Observations will quickly reveal that decay of the teeth is very common in people who are habitually using hard waters. It is objected that the affinity of distilled water for minerals causes it to take up the minerals from foods so that the body derives no benefit from these. This objection is a peculiar perversion of physiology. One of the functions of water in the body is to take up these very minerals and take them to the cells and tissues. How absurd, to object to the use of distilled water because it serves this very function better than does contaminated water!
Mineral Waters: "According to the theory of the anti-Naturalists," says Dr. Oswald, "a man's instincts conspire for his ruin; whatever is pleasant to our senses must be injurious; repulsiveness and health-fulness are synonymous terms. To every poison known to chemistry or botany they attribute remedial virtues; to sweet-meats, fruits, fresh air, and cold spring-water all possible morbific qualities. But for consistency's sake, they make an exception in favor of mineral springs. Spas impregnated with a sufficient quantity of iron or sulphur to be shockingly nauseous, must therefore be highly salubrious. Solitary mountain regions afflicted with such spas become the favorite resort of invalids; dyspeptics travel thousands of miles to reach a spring that tastes like a mixture of rotten eggs and turpentine."
Saline and sulphur spring waters are purgative, since the alvine canal hastens to rid itself of these injurious waters. A stay at the watering place teaches the colon to rely upon the mineral excitant, hence the chronic constipation that so often follows upon the return from the spa; the excitant being withdrawn, the tired organs lie down for a rest. "From a hygienic standpoint," says Dr. Oswald, "a sanitarium without a spa is therefore by no means a Hamlet-drama minus the Prince."
In 1930 the town boosters of Seaton Delaval, England, desiring to advertise the curative properties of their water supply, hired a chemist to analyze it. The chemist found that its peculiar flavor was due to near-by miners washing their pedigreed dogs in the reservoir with kitchen soap. Some years ago a wonderful health-spring in one of Gotham's many suburbs was curing its patrons daily. It achieved a great reputation as a cure-all. So great was its reputation, a movement was started to improve the property. While improving the grounds a break in the sewer was found. This was quickly repaired and, to the sorrow of the exploiters and disgust of the drinkers, the spring promptly dried up.
So come and go the cures and neither the curing professions nor the people ever forsake their superstitious belief in cure. Those who were drinking the leaking sewerage and those who took Fido's bath water, like those who pin their faith in poisonous drugs, filthy pus, diseased animal serums, marvellous machines and apparatuses, colored lights, electrical currents, metaphysical formulas, and punches in the back, simply went elsewhere for a cure.
The poodle soup of Seaton Delaval and the Gotham sewerage effected their cures in the same way that the famous mineral waters from the mineral wells and springs effect theirs. All methods of cure, however absurd or fantastic, however impotent for good or potent for harm, could point to apparent cures. But sooner or later in the march of experience all cures are exploded.
Drugged Waters: Health (?) Boards no longer permit the drinking of pure water. They drug the drinking water of cities with iodine, chlorine, lime, alum, etc. This compulsory wholesale and indiscriminate drugging of the people is made possible by reason of the fact that we have state medicine in America.
Just as examples of the wholesale drugging of our water supply the small city of Fort Lauderdale, Fla., uses 40,000 pounds of alum in three months in its city water supply, or a little over a pound per capita per month; while Columbus, Ohio, purchased for use in its water in 1933, 8000 tons of lime, 3000 tons of soda ash, 1200 tons of sulphuric acid, 500 tons of bauxite (an aluminum ore compound), 500 tons of coke and 8 tons of liquid chlorine. I shall not discuss each of these poisons separately. Iodine will be discussed elswhere. At this point I shall confine my remarks to chlorine.
Chlorinated water is water that has had chlorine, an "inorganic" acid-forming mineral, added to it, to destroy "typhoid germs." Chlorine is a poison and if enough of it is put into the water to destroy germ life, it will also destroy animal and human life. Chlorinated water is more to be feared than the "typhoid germs."
All poisons are cumulative in their effects, if they are habitually used. If there is not enough chlorine placed in city water to kill outright, it will produce its effects in time. Sprinkling the lawn with chlorinated water kills the grass and flowers and impairs the soil.
In Toronto, Canada, where chlorinated water has been used for a period of years, there has been no reduction of typhoid. During the five-year period from 1921 to 1925 there were more deaths from typhoid in Toronto than in the combined cities of Kingston, Cobourg, Cornwall, Brookville, Belleville and Hamilton. These later cities all used the same water and it was not chlorinated.
So much for its failure; now for its damages. Some authorities state that even the steam escaping from radiators supplied with chlorinated water has been known to cause death. The victims were gassed with the same gas that the soldiers were killed and injured with in World War I. Boiling this water may fill the room, day after day, with this gas. There is also a greater concentration of the mineral left in the water, which goes into the foods cooked in it. Mr. Harter, president of the Defensive Diet League, says: "The worst feature of all is the slowness with which the darned thing works and the absence of symptoms until the trouble has reached an incurable stage."
Clarke, of London, author of a medical dictionary, and a good authority, presents a long list of diseases which have resulted, in human beings, from repeated and long-continued doses of water containing the approved percentage of chlorine. Among these diseases are colds, catarrh, acute rheumatism, inflamed and ulcerated mouth, malignant pustules, acne, carbuncles, nettle rash with fever and dry, yellow, shrivelled skin. Dr. Clarke seems to have proven his case. Even if the chlorine does not produce these troubles outright, it does not kill the germs that are held responsible for them.

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Nuts
CHAPTER X
Nuts are seeds of certain trees. Unlike the seed of the peach and plum, they possess no edible capsule. The peach, once a bitter almond, has developed, under cultivation, a delicious edible capsule. The peach seed, has a taste like that of the almond. The capsules of the pecan, walnut, chestnut, cocoanut, almond, hazelnut, hickory nut, etc., are not edible. They are tough, fibrous materials containing tannic acid and other foul tasting substances that protect the seed from being eaten until it is matured. Botanically, nuts are classed as fruits, as they develop from pollinated flowers. Because the nut is the seed of the tree and is not the edible pulp that surrounds the seed, as is the edible portion of the peach or plum, nuts are discussed in a separate chapter and are not considered in the chapter on fruits.
Paleontologists tell us that primitive man was a nut eater. All over the face of the earth man has used nuts as food from time immemorial. There are many kinds of nuts and these have all proven excellent sources of food, not alone for man, but for the lower primates and many other animals, including many birds. They are rich in food values, delightfully flavored and keep for extended periods so that man, as well as the squirrel, may store them for future use. Many animals besides squirrels eat large quantities of nuts. Many of the birds make use of the nut as an article of food. Horses will consume great quantities of acorns. While they will eat fruit from the trees, they eat acorns off the ground after they have fallen. Hogs eat so many hickory nuts that in certain parts of the country they are called pig-nuts. Horses are also fond of pecans.
The nut tree, like the fruit tree, strikes its roots deep into the earth, where they take up the precious minerals, and sends its limbs high into the space above, where, from air and sun, they take in the carbon, that enable the majestic tree to produce its wonderfully nutritious seed.
Day after day, through spring, summer and autumn, the great sun drives the river mists before it and sends down through the softly whispering foliage a thousand shafts of burnished gold that drain the nectarous dew-drop from its chalice and kiss the nut until its youthful, mineral-laden sap changes to delightful food beneath their passionate caresses.
It takes months of sunshine to perfect the nut and when it is completed it is a veritable store house of mineral sand high-grade protein, emulsified oil and health-imparting vitamins. Packed in a nature-made, water-proof and air-tight shell, the nut-meat comes to us clean and wholesome. Hermetically sealed the nut does not become contaminated and spoiled as does meat, for example. Nuts are free from waste products, are aseptic and do not readily decay, either in the body or outside of it. They are not infested with parasites (trachinae, tape-worm, etc.), as are meats.
Nuts, particularly the pecan, produce more food per acre than any other product and no one need eat animal products so long as these delightful foods are to be had. They are not to be considered as a "meat substitute." The meat is the "substitute," as Prof. Sherman, of Columbia University, says.
Kellogg says that "nuts are the choisest of all substances capable of sustaining life," and that in "nutritive value the nut far exceeds all other food substances." Also, "The nut is the choisest aggregation of the materials essential for the building of sound human tissues, done up in a hermetically sealed package, ready to be delivered by the gracious hand of Nature to those who are fortunate enough to appreciate the value of this finest of earth's bounties."
Nuts are rich in minerals, particularly iron and lime. Pecans are rich in potassium, magnesium and phosphorus. Almonds, pecans, walnuts, chestnuts and hazelnuts contain an average percentage of iron of about two and a half times that of fruit, three times that of vegetables, greater than that of cereals and more than average meats. The almond is rich in iron and lime. One pound of almonds contains as much calcium as twenty-five pounds of beef, or eleven pounds of bread and potatoes. The almond is twice as rich in blood-building elements as meat and is very rich in bone-building elements, in which meat is sadly lacking.
Most nuts are abundant in vitamins A and B. The researches of Cajori demonstrated the abundant presence of growth-promoting vitamins in pecans, English walnuts, chestnuts, almonds, pine nuts, filberts, and hickory nuts.
Most nuts are rich in oils. The fats (oils) of nuts are the most easily digested and assimilated of all forms of fat. Kellogg says: "The fat of nuts exists in a finely divided state and in the chewing of nuts a fine emulsion is produced so that the nuts enter the stomach in a form adapted for prompt digestion."
Nuts are fairly rich in starch and sugar, and are three to four times richer in vitally important salts than animal flesh, even richer than milk in these vital substances. Not albumen is easily assimilated and does not form uric acid. Nuts are rich in fat, which, like that of milk, is in a state of emulsion--that is, ready-made, prepared, or pre-digested, as it were--for circulation through the lymphatic system.
Measured in calories, most nuts rank high. One example must suffice. Measured in calories, two ounces of shelled pecans contain as much food as a pound of lean beef.
Everything that can be had from flesh foods can be gotten in better condition and more usable form from other sources, and especially from nuts. Nuts are not only cleaner than meat, they come in hermetically sealed shells that prevent contamination.
Nut proteins are of the highest order, most nut proteins being complete. Kellogg maintains that nut proteins are the best of all sources upon which the body may draw for its supplies of tissue building substances and that the proteins of nuts are superior to those of ordinary vegetables or meat. "Nuts furnish perfect proteins." Nut proteins are superior to those of cereals and are claimed to be more complete than those of eggs. Indeed, Kellogg says: "The special method of research adopted by Dr. Hoobler of the Detroit Women's Hospital and Infant's Home, provides a most delicate biological test for the nutriment value of food. The test shows the nut to be superior to meat, milk or eggs or all these foods together in producing the highest degree of nutritive efficiency. Nut protein is the best of all sources upon which the body may draw for its supplies of tissue-building material."
Carque says: "Investigations made at Yale University have proven that all nuts furnish a relatively high amount of basic amino-acids, and that the nut proteins are of high biological value, fully adequate to maintain life and growth and for the elaboration of mother's milk. Professor Cajori found in his experiments, conducted at the Sheffield laboratory, that the protein and fat of nuts were generally absorbed to a large extent."
Studies of the proteins of nuts by Osborn and Harris, Van Slyke, Johns and Cajori demonstrated that the proteins of nuts are at least equal to those of meat. This was shown to be true of the almond, black and English walnuts, butternut, pecan, filbert, Brazil nut, pine nut, chestnut, hickory nut and cocoanut. Observations have shown that, in general, the proteins of oily seeds are complete proteins. Johns, Finks and Paul found that the globulin of the cocoanut is an adequate growth-factor in rats and that cocoanuts are almost completely sufficient as the sole source of protein in human beings. Para nuts have also been shown to be rich in superior protein. Not all workers are agreed about hickory nuts, many maintaining that these possess a low-grade protein. The others named are rich in high-grade proteins, promoting growth, development, reproduction, lactation, and the rearing of the young, not alone in animals, but also in man.
Nuts are acid-ash foods, as are all proteins, but they are not so much so as are animal proteins. The comparative degrees of acidity of the proteins run walnuts, 8; oysters, 15.3; veal 13.5; eggs, 12; chicken, 11.2; beef, 9.8; etc. Nuts contain less acid minerals than meat.
A brief consideration of a few of the nuts best known in this country will help us to appreciate their great value and, perhaps, cause us to encourage the production of more nuts. It would be difficult to overestimate the tremendous gain that would accrue to the people of our country if the millions of acres now devoted to grain-raising were devoted to nut and fruit culture. Let us look at the nuts in alphabetical order:
Acorn: A farinaceous nut produced by the oak tree. It was used to a great extent by the ancient Greeks and by the early inhabitants of the British Isles. It is still used extensively as food in certain parts of Turkey. When the white man first visited California he found 300,000 Indians thriving on a diet in which acorns were staple. They had thrived for hundreds of years on the acorn diet.
Almond: This is one of the finest of nuts, being higher in its phosphorus content than any other product of the vegetable kingdom. It also possesses considerable calcium. It is low in potassium. Contrary to popular teaching, the almond is not a base-forming food. It is definitely acid-forming, as are practically all nuts, Its skin should be removed before eating the almond as it contains a strong astringent. Avoid the sulphur-treated almonds sold in the market. An average analysis presents: water, 6.0; protein, 24.00; fats, 54.33; carbohydrates (no starch), 10; cellulose, 3; organic salts, 3.3.
Brazil nut: In our younger days we knew this nut as the "nigger-toe." It is one of the most important of the nuts. It is high in fat and rich in calcium and magnesium. Like the almond, its skin should be removed before eating it. An average analysis reveals: Water, 4.8; protein, 17.2; fat 66; carbohydrates (mostly sugar), 5.7; cellulose, or fibre, 3; organic salts, 3.3.
Cashew. Technically, this is not a nut, but the seed of the cashew apple. Unlike other seeds of fruit, it grows on the outside of the apple, at its lower end. It cannot be eaten in its natural raw state and the "raw" cashews sold in the market have been treated with low heat to dissipate the cardol and anacardic acids in them which acids burn the mouth and throat. The skins have also been removed.
Chestnut: Though having all the appearance of a nut, its shell is thinner than that of most nuts, the chestnut, in composition, is more closely related to the starchy grains. Almost as many people the world over live on bread made from chestnut-flour as upon that made from any kind of grain. It is superior to cereal flour as a food. An average analysis of the chestnut shows the following: Water, 6; protein, 10; fats, 8; carbohydrates (mostly starch), 70; cellulose, 3; minerals, 2.4.
Cocoanut: This is a very popular nut which, unfortunately, is usually consumed in horribly incompatible mixtures. Both its meat and its milk are fine foods and in some tropical places it makes up almost the whole bill-of-fare. An average analysis of the cocoa-nut gives the following figures: water, 3.5; protein, 6.3; fat, 57.4; carbohydrate, sugar and fiber, 31.5; organic salts, 1.3. Its minerals are chiefly phosphorus and potassium with small amounts of iron, sodium and manganese. It should be eaten with green vegetables or, like melons, taken alone.
The cocoanut is a remarkable sugar food. Its meat is an excellent and tasty food, its juice is a delicious and nutritious "drink." In its unripe or custard-like state it forms an almost perfect food for those who live in the tropics. When sprouted the "milk" of the cocoanut is transformed into a snow-white, sponge-like ball that is very sweet and very much in demand in countries where the nut is grown. Its oil, an emulsified fat, is employed as butter, and not used solely for soap-making.
Hickory-nut: Like the pecan, the hickory is strictly an American nut and many of us can recall the days we spent gathering them and eating them before the fire in the winter. The Indians stored these nuts in great abundance for winter use. Unfortunately, like the black walnut, it has a thick hard shell that prevents it from becoming popular with our effete people of today. An average analysis of the seventeen varieties of this nut that grow in America shows: water, 3.7; protein, 15.15; carbohydrates (almost all sugar), 12; organic salts, 2. The protein of this nut is of a high order, but it is claimed to be inadequate as a sole source of protein.
Pecan: This is the king of nuts and is a native of America. It was first used by the Indians who planted it all over large sections of our country. Dr. G. E. Harter of the Defensive Diet League of America, says that "one can live a full life, amply nourished, upon an exclusive diet of pecans and fruits." Members of the League demonstrated this fact. He says: "The fatty elements of this nut are more easily assimilated by the human body than any other obtainable." Here is an average analysis: water, 3.5; protein, 13; fat, 70.8; carbohydrates (mostly sugar), 8.5; cellulose (fiber), 3.7; organic salts, 1.5. The pecan is lower than most nuts in protein, but contains an ample quantity; it is highest of all nuts in a delicious and easily digested oil.
The pecan is not only rich in food value but possesses great appeal to the sense of taste. The pecan is a low protein food. Its fat is the easiest to digest of the nut oils. Pecans are easily digested. If well-chewed and properly combined they may be digested by all save the weakest digestions. Many chronically underweight persons pick up weight at once, when, in the pecan season, they consume pecans in great quantities. Pecans are not constipating, as is asserted in some quarters. On the contrary, due no doubt to the large quantity of oil they contain, they tend to be mildly laxative.
Pignolia or Pine nut: This is not really a member of the true nut family. There are many varieties of pignolias and they are highly esteemed. This nut possesses the highest percentage of protein of any natural food, a small portion of them supplying all the protein needs of the body. They are also rich in an easily digested oil. Well-chewed, as all nuts should be, they are easily digested. An average of a number of analyses shows the following composition: water, 6.4; protein, 33.9; fat, 49.4; carbohydrates (simple sugar), 6.9; organic salts, 3.4. Its mineral content is made up largely of calcium, magnesium and iron.
Pistachio: These nuts are greenish in color and the greener they are the better nuts they are. Although high in protein, this nut has been found to be non-acid, inclining to be alkaline-forming when digested. Its oil is very easily digested. It contains no indigestible cellulose, but is all food. Broadly the pistachio contains: water, 4.2; protein, 22.5; fat, 54.5; carbohydrates (largely simple sugar), 16; organic salts, 3.
Walnuts: Under this head it is customary to include, along with the English walnut, which came originally from France and Italy, and the black walnut, which is a native American nut, the Butternut. Each of these three nuts are excellent and tasty foods. For taste, the author's preference is the black walnut, but it has a thick, hard shell that renders it difficult to get at. Unfortunately, most present-day Americans know the black walnut only as a source of fine and beautiful wood out of which some of our most beautiful furniture is made. Compared with the black walnut, the English walnut is flat and stale. The following table of comparative analyses of these three nuts will tell you nothing of the flavors of each of them:
               Black   English   Butternut 
Water           2.5      2.5        4.5
Protein        27.5     18.5       27.9 
Fats           56.3     64.5       61.2 
Carbohydrates  11.7     12.5        3.4 
Cellulose       1.7      1.4       none 
Minerals        1.9      1.7        3.0
In addition to the above listed nuts with which we are acquainted in this country, there are many other varieties of nuts. Some of these are very good nuts, others are not so good. The Castanopis or California chestnut is considered a link between the oak and the chestnut. It is eaten chiefly by birds and squirrels. The Chufa, known also as the earth-chestnut, is not really a nut. It grows underground like the peanut and when slightly parched has a flavor resembling the nut. The Queensland nut, grown only in Eastern Australia, resembles the Brazil nut, but has a superior flavor. The Pilinut or Javanese almond grown in the Philippines, East Indies and Asia, is seen in the U. S. only when brought here by immigrants. The Sapucaia or Paradise nut, is little known in this country outside our seaboard cities. The Suari or tropical butternut is a native of British Guiana and is seldom seen in this country.
Peanuts are not nuts, but legumes. They are also known as ground-peas, ground-nut, goober, etc. In England they are called monkey nuts. The peanut grows underground, but does not grow on the roots of the pea vine. Ranked high in biological value because of its high protein content, its protein being of high quality, the peanut is a very much overrated food. Harter declares it to be the most dangerous of the bean family. It is high in protein; its mineral content is made up largely of phosphoric acid and it contains a high percentage of starch. The combination of these three substances makes it highly acid-forming and, when eaten with anything but green vegetables, very difficult to digest, if, indeed, it is digestible at all in other combinations. It is a great favorite of the candy-makers and this is certainly a vicious use of the peanut. The composition of the many varieties of the peanut depends upon soil, climate, etc. Its protein composition ranges from 25 to 35 percent, its fat content from 40 to 55 percent. The average of over two thousand analyses shows the following: water, 7.9; protein, 30; fat, 50; starch and cellulose taken together because inseparable by present methods, about 12; minerals, 2.9. I do not share Harter's view that eating peanuts is "literally playing with fire," but I know from experience how much trouble they can cause when not eaten correctly. Roasted peanuts are almost indigestible. Peanut butters are commonly roasted, salted and have hog lard added. At its best, raw peanut butter is oxidized to some extent and not equal to the peanut.
Nuts are commonly thought to be difficult of digestion. This thought seems to have its basis in the common habit of eating nuts as a last course in a several course dinner. The nuts are blamed for the discomfort that results from such eating. Biochemists assert that they have shown that nut proteins are not as digestible as flesh proteins. Even if this were true, it would not place flesh proteins above nut proteins. But this is not true. Their tests are not worth anything inasmuch as they were not properly carried out. The ability to digest nuts may be very low in one who is not accustomed to eating nuts; whereas, the same person, perhaps habitually eating flesh, will have marked ability to digest flesh. If he begins the daily use of nuts his ability to digest these foods will increase day by day until maximum ability is reached, after which it levels off and remains at this maximum level, providing, of course, that he continues to eat nuts. To ignore this fact in determining the digestibility of any food, is to make tests that are of no practical value.
Finely ground and emulsified nuts have proven to be the very best substitutes for milk, when the mother's milk fails and the child is sensitive to cow's milk. There are many children who are sensitive to cow's milk and to the prepared milk foods on the market. Many children have been killed by milk whose lives might have been saved by nuts. Nut-butters are not to be recommended for this purpose. These are cooked, contain considerable "free" fatty acids, are usually salted, and often have other denatured oils added to them. Only the raw or unfired nuts are to be used.
Being concentrated foods, nuts must be eaten moderately and require to be thoroughly masticated. Combined with green vegetables, eaten as a regular part of the meal, and not at the end of a hearty meal, as is the usual practice, and thoroughly and slowly chewed, they are not difficult to digest and may be eaten by everyone. Their delightful flavours make them palatable to all save the most depraved appetites.

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Effects of Cooking
CHAPTER XXVII
Speculations upon the origin of cooking are, perhaps futile. I have suggested that it may have developed out of ancient black magic--that it was an effort to impart the magic properties of fire to food. Certain it is, man did not cook his foods until after he learned to use fire and it was probably long thereafter, before he cooked much of it.
Someone has said: "God made man and the Devil made cooks." A British writer says: "Just try to imagine what a powerful lever the Devil possessed when he invented cooking and persuaded the primitive savages to seek after extraneous foodstuffs which could only be eaten if they were softened and made tasty by means of heat." Accepting the Devil as merely the personification of evil, he is undoubtedly the Father of Magic.
Simple prolonged heating of foodstuffs, especially at a high temperature and doubly so in the presence of water, either that contained in the foods themselves, or that added in the process of cooking, certainly results in a number of important changes in the foodstuffs which render them less and less valuable as foods. Even those foods that are regarded as fairly thermostable are certainly damaged by prolonged heating so that a diet that may be adequate in the uncooked state may be very inadequate after being thoroughly cooked. (High degrees of heat in the presence of water produces hydrolysis.)
At about 145 degrees Fahrenheit certain properties of plant life are destroyed. A leaf of cabbage, for example, if immersed in water that can be easily borne by the hand, will wilt, showing that part of its cellular life is destroyed at that low temperature. The heat to which such foods are subjected in cooking may be increased or prolonged until all the properties of the plant are destroyed. Many articles of food which are baked in an oven are subjected to a very intense heat ranging from 300 degrees F. to 400 degrees F. Much of their food value is destroyed, thereby. Bread that is browned in an oven is half-destroyed, being partly charcoal, tar, and ashes. If it had been left in an oven twice as long it would have been entirely destroyed. At every step in the process of cooking from the time the food is put in or upon the stove until it is entirely destroyed, if it be permitted to cook that long, destructive changes take place that impair its food value and unlit it for use by the body. I propose here to discuss the most important of these changes in the following order:
(1) Cooking coagulates (hardens) the proteins of milk, eggs, meat, etc., making them tough and, with the exception of egg protein, less digestible, while impairing their food values.
Protein digestibility is decreased by cooking, except in the case of egg whites. If egg white is just curdled it is rendered more easily digestible--if it is boiled hard it is made difficult of digestion. Meat protein is hardened at 160° F. Meat is more easily digested raw than cooked. Milk protein is coagulated at 145° F. and becomes less digestible than raw milk.
Sensitive amines are supposed by some to be saponified by heat, especially in the presence of water. Becoming a bit technical, for which I apologize to my lay readers, the amine group is replaced by the hydroxyl group in the foodstuffs and it has been shown that the hydroxides cannot be reaminised by the animal body. This means that the protein has been reduced to useless substances. It is said that while among the synthetic amines there are many which, owing to peculiar structural conditions, the amine group is readily detachable, no such substances are known among the natural amines. This is not wholly true, for it is known that water in which meat has been boiled contains more ammonia than was demonstrable in the meat. There is unquestionably a splitting off of certain amines. To assume that this has no bearing on nutrition in the absence of direct proof of such effect does not seem to me to be justifiable.
When either cystin or cystein are heated in the presence of water the sulphur is split off so that, as Berg says: "both cystin and cystein are * * * rendered valueless for nutritive purposes, inasmuch as sulphydration cannot be affected in the animal body." He says that this decomposition of the sulphhydril group of amino acids by heat in the presence of water "does actually occur."
I quote the following from Vitamins by Ragnar Berg: "the experiments of Francis and Trowbridge and those of Trowbridge and Stanley have shown that when meat is boiled even for a comparatively brief period, organic phosphates are transformed into inorganic."
Berg says: "Besides the sulphur group, we have reason to suppose that the food contains other groups of substances with a readily modifiable composition. * * * We are, however, certain that the proteins, and especially the neucleoproteins, contain thermoliable mixed-organic compounds." He mentions certain phosphates that are rapidly transformed by the cooking process and points out that while the body is capable of taking the more complex phosphates and reducing them to lower stages, it is unable to reverse the process. Only plants can do this.
Simple prolonged heating of foodstuffs, especially at high temperatures or under pressure, produces the following effects:
1.	The disaminisation (deaminization) of vitally important amine compounds. 
2.	The decomposition of similar sulphur compounds (and perhaps of substances belonging to other unstable groups.) 
3.	The metamorphosis of metaphosphates and pyrophosphates into orthophosphates. 
The first two of the above listed effects renders it impossible for the foodstuffs to be assimilated to form cell-substance, for the unstable groups in the food mixture will have been destroyed.
In considering the evils that may flow from deaminization of proteins (or of amino acids) by the cooking process, it is probably important that we think primarily of the effects of cooking upon the essential amino acids. Berg's conclusion, however, after reviewing the evidence, is that deaminization is not as important as the change of organic phosphates into inorganic.
Prof. Charles Richet, of the Paris Academy of Sciences, fed raw beef juice to tubercular patients and reported excellent results from this diet. He concluded however, that cooking meat interferes with the perfect assimilation of it that might otherwise occur. Rare beef has no vitamin value and its iron is said to be very poorly utilized by the body. This is probably not so of the iron in raw beef.
The British sociologist, Anthony Ludovici, recounts an instructive experience with cats. He bred cats for the purpose of studying the process of birth. He discovered that cats actually enjoy the process of birth, that they purr while their kittens are being born. Mr. Ludovici realizing that animals never cook their foods, took it for granted that his cats should have raw meat. Then, on one occasion, he was called away to the country and left one of his female cats in the care of some friends. When her kittens were born shortly after his return, her flanks heaved helplessly for several hours and she groaned almost like a human being. He despaired of her ever delivering her kittens. Inquiry revealed that his friend had fed the cat on cooked meat, vegetables, bread and milk and milk puddings. Further investigation revealed that not merely the happiness of cats during parturition but of other animals also, is inseparably connected with optimum condition during gestation--pregnancy. He found he was able to produce pleasurable or painful parturition at will by feeding his cats in different manners and keeping them indoors or outdoors. He discovered that he could do the same thing with bitches and, upon inquiry among shepherds, discovered the same thing among sheep. He tells of difficulties among cows and horses fed in certain very unwholesome ways. I have never seen difficulty in cows, and I have watched the birth of many calves, but these cows were supplied with good pasturage and were outdoors all through gestation. Not merely raw flesh foods, but uncooked foods of all kinds, are best for food.
In Vol. 39 (pages 21-31), 1939 of the Transactions of the American Therapeutic Society, F. M. Pottenger, M. D., and D. G. Simonsen recount the results of some experiments which they performed with cats. For a lengthy period of time they fed two groups of cats on similar quantities of meats and vegetables. The only difference between the diets of the two groups was that the meat of one group was uncooked, that of the other group cooked.
These men report that all the cats that received the uncooked flesh led normal lives, appeared perfectly healthy and were able to reproduce themselves throughout the length of the experiment which ran through several generations. On the other hand, none of the cats fed cooked meat were able to maintain good health for any length of time, nor were some of the second and third generations able to reproduce. All of the cats eating cooked flesh developed very serious troubles, such as softening of the bones, including those of the skull, bowed legs, rickets, curvature of the spine, paralysis of the legs, thyroid abscesses, convulsions, cyanosis of the liver and kidneys, enlarged colon, degeneration of the motor nerve ganglion cells throughout the spinal cord and brain stem, with some cells affected in the cerebellum and cerebral cortex.
The reader's attention is directed to the cumulative effects of this diet. A diet that seems adequate in one generation may turn out to be very inadequate if carried out through a few generations. It should not be thought that because a particular mode of eating seems adequate for an individual that it will not produce serious results in the children or grandchildren. Long ago it was said: "The fathers have eaten sour grapes and the children's teeth are set on edge."
(2) Cooking alters the fats in food rendering them less digestible and converting some of them into poisons.
Fatty emulsions tend to break down when exposed to heat, while fats exposed to high temperatures are made less digestible. The application of heat to fats and oils of all kinds develop free fatty acids which are not only non-assimilable, but are often poisonous.
(3) Cooking causes a great loss of the soluble minerals in the food.
It has been shown that when meats are boiled, from 20 to 67 per cent, of their salts are found in the broth. When these are baked 2.5 to 57.2 per cent of the mineral is found in the drippings of the meat. The meat is already predominantly acid-forming, before it is subjected to these processes.
When potatoes are peeled and soaked in cold water before boiling 38 per cent. of their mineral matter is lost. Green vegetables, when boiled and the water in which they are boiled is poured off or rejected, lose practically all of their soluble minerals. White flour, denatured corn-meal, polished rice, and all other denatured or demineralized foods have lost most of their minerals. Beans and peas, cooked in the usual manner lose much of their mineral content.
Prof. Snyder showed that 100 lbs. of cabbage contains 7.5 lbs. of solids, more than one-third of which--2.50 or 3 lbs.--are lost when cooked in water. Spinach has a solid content of 10%, of which, nearly one-fourth is lost when cooked in water. Carrots cut into small pieces and cooked in water lose 20% to 30% of their weight. If rice is boiled and the water poured off, it loses so much of its valuable nutriments that Native Indian soldiers preferred to drink the liquid and leave the rice for the British.
Milo Hastings writing about some cooking experiments conducted in the laboratory of the department of agricultural chemistry of the University of Wisconsin, says:
"In this interesting investigation sixteen kinds of vegetables were cooked in three different ways. One lot of each vegetable was boiled in enough water to cover the cut up vegetables. A second lot was cooked in twice as much water. A third lot was steamed without coming in contact with the water except such water as would collect on the vegetables by the condensation of steam.
"The raw vegetables and those cooked in these different fashions were all carefully analyzed for the total amount of food elements, of protein and of calcium, magnesium, phosphorus and iron. The results showed that all food elements are lost to a much greater extent in boiling than in steaming.
"The general average of loss of total nutriments was three times as great in boiling as in steaming. The loss was naturally greater from the leaf vegetables than from the root vegetables. Cabbage seemed to suffer more than any other type of food in the experiment. The reason for this is that cabbage, when cut up for cooking is cut across the leaf structure. Spinach suffers less because the leaves are cooked whole. Cabbage cooked in the larger volume of water lost 60 per cent. of its total dry matter, 62 per cent. of its protein, 72 per cent. of its calcium, 60 per cent., of its phosphorus and 67 per cent. of its iron. In other words, when one eats cooked cabbage, he is getting only a third of the value of raw cabbage, to say nothing of the destruction of the vitamins. Even the steaming process of cooking cabbage gives none too good a record, as this showed losses of from 22 to 43 per cent. of the above listed food elements.
"In the case of spinach the loss of iron is of especial interest as spinach is the richest known source of food iron. Boiling in enough water to cover showed a loss of 43 per cent. of the iron in spinach. Cooking in twice that much water showed a loss of 57 per cent. of the spinach iron. Steaming showing a loss of 25 per cent. of the iron.
"Not all foods showed such large losses from the cooking, thus potatoes, even though pared showed only 9 per cent. loss of total food in boiling and only 4 per cent. loss in steaming.
"This investigation will certainly help to explain why the ordinary boiled vegetable dinner, such as is served in the unprogressive restaurants, is such a flat tasted and washed out affair. Nearly half of the valuable mineral elements have probably been poured down the sewer along with the dish water. Clever cooks make sauces for such washed-out vegetables that may compensate for the loss in tastiness of the natural ingredients, but only intelligent cooks try to prevent such losses."
Berg says: "the mere steaming of vegetables for five minutes dissolves out so large a proportion of the inorganic bases that the residue contains an excess of acids. Simultaneously the vitally important complettins (vitamins) are entirely dissolved out of the vegetables."
(4) Cooking destroys the elementary plant form, tearing down its structure, changing its composition and bringing about certain destructive changes in the element-groupings in all foods, returning part of these elements, especially the organic salts, to their inorganic and, therefore, useless state, so that a large part of their mineral content is lost.
Plant processes take the unorganized elements of the earth and air and organize these into related compounds, which, then, become available for animal life. Without vegetation there could be no animal life, for the reason that soil and rock are not available substances for animal replenishment. This being true, it is only natural to conclude that once plants have organized these elements into forms available for animal sustenance, any process which returns them wholly, or in part, to their primitive condition renders them, to that degree, unfit for food, and more or less disease producing. That cooking brings about more or less oxidation and disorganization in every oxidizable substance in foods of all types, admits of no doubt. When nutriment has been oxidized in the body, the resulting "ashes" cease to be usable and are eliminated. What reason have we to believe that food oxidized outside the body is more fit for use? Ralph E. Sunderland, chemist and food scientist, declares oxidation to be the chief destroyer of foods and explains the matter thus:
"The same elements (the sixteen chemical elements composing the human body), are the component parts of technically 'fertile' soil in which they are present in inorganic form and as such are not assimilable by the human body, else we could look directly to the soil for our substance. In order to convert these inorganic elements or minerals into a form which can be assimilated by the human body it is necessary for nature to create from the soil vegetation in which these same elements are present in organic form. In vegetation they remain organic until, by oxidation, they return again to their original inorganic form ready to produce more vegetation.
"True food is totally organic substance. If that organic substance is permitted to become, to any degree, inorganic, it simultaneously becomes to that degree useless as food.
"All organic minerals oxidize when they come in contact with oxygen and moisture. That is, they thus become inorganic again. In ordinary room-temperature the process of oxidation proceeds; but in the presence of heat oxidation is very greatly increased. Therefore, the cooking of vegetation in the presence of the oxygen of the air--the condition under which all home cooking and most commercial cooking occurs--changes a large part of what was organic and useful as food into inorganic oxides which cannot be assimilated by the human body."
French investigators found that when milk is boiled the complex calcium-magnesium carbono-phosphate it contains, is decomposed and precipitated in an insoluble form. This means that a natural organic salt which is directly assimilable and available for immediate bony growth, is changed into a form almost impossible of assimilation.
McCollum and Parsons in this country, found that the precipitated salts cling to the walls of the vessel or container so that part of them are actually eliminated from the milk. The excess of bases in the milk is thus greatly reduced. As this excess is low in even the best of milk, the double robbery of alkalies occasioned by boiling has grave consequences.
It is a fact, therefore, that the longer foods are cooked and the higher the temperature to which they are subjected, the more oxidation takes place and the greater is the destruction of the food. I may add, also, that efforts to cook out of the presence of the oxygen of the air, though not as destructive as the common forms of cooking, produces great ruin to the food. Cooking onions, cabbage, cauliflower, etc., oxidizes the sulphur. These foods should never be cooked.
(5) Cooking renders starches less digestible and more prone to fermentation.
Cooked starches are said, by many, to be easiest of digestion. Toasted bread is said to be dextrinized. Are these things so? It has long been known that animals digest raw starch best and that they do not fare well on cooked foods. Farmers quit cooking food for their animals years ago. Milo Hastings says:
"Closely akin to the idea of predigesting cereals by roasting and toasting them are the old notions that raw starch is indigestible and that all home cooked starchy foods need very long, tedious periods of cooking. This idea was almost universal a generation ago and is probably still taught in school text-books, which are usually a generation behind.
"I got suspicious of the idea that humans couldn't digest raw starch when I was in college and read about experiments in cooking grain for farm animals, in which the scientists proved that the cooked foods were less digestible than uncooked foods--for animals.
"The human food teachers came back by saying that man's digestive system has been changed by long ages of cooking and had lost the power to digest raw starch. So I tried it, and did my college thesis with a series of experiments on the digestion of raw versus long cooked cereal starches. I found out that my own particular digestive organs worked just like the pigs' and cows'. Worse yet for the popular theory, my mother insists that I wasn't descended from raw turnip eaters, but that our folks came over in the next ship after the Mayflower and had been cooking as long as the rest of them."
The Department of Agriculture, in Washington, conducted experiments which revealed that raw corn, rice and other starches are digested in amounts up to eight ounces, daily. Raw potatoes showed digestibility of seventy-eight per cent.
Kellogg, Langworth and Devel have each shown that raw starches digest quite easily. The Scotch Highlanders have, from time immemorial, eaten their oatmeal simply scalded. Hon. W. N. Beaver for many years a magistrate in Papua, New Guinea, says that the natives of Kiwai formerly ate their rice raw.
Raw cabbage digests in two hours whereas it requires four hours for cooked cabbage to digest. As almost everybody has difficulty with cooked cabbage and almost nobody has trouble with raw cabbage these differences are common knowledge.
High temperatures are required to change most sugars although the sugar of milk is changed in pasteurizing.
Actual feeding tests have shown that the brown crust of bread has less food value than the soggy inside. In other words the most thoroughly cooked portions of food (any food) are less valuable as food than the less cooked portions.
The facts are that cooking renders starches less digestible, while boiling them so that they are saturated with water, prevents all salivary digestion. Very little dextrinization of starch is produced I by cooking. It is the office of the salivary enzyme (ptyalin) to perform this work and we profit by permitting salivary digestion to digest our starches. Toasting bread charcoalizes rather than dextrinizes it.
(6) Cooking destroys the vitamins in foods and impairs or completely destroys their anti-neuritic, anti-scorbutic, etc., factors.
Before vitamins were ever heard of and before it was found that cooking destroys or impairs vitamins, the advocates of eating all foods raw held that, besides the ordinary chemical elements in foods, there was something else which they termed life, which was destroyed by cooking. For example, Prof. Byron Tyler had an article in The New York Herald, Sunday, October 14, 1900 entitled "Cooked Food is Humanity's Greatest Curse," in which he proclaimed that "cooked food is dead food." That these men were right in principle is now undoubted. The "life" of foods was undoubtedly those qualities now called vitamins.
Raw food advocates also contended that man cannot use inorganic substances and that cooking returns food elements to their inorganic state. The change in the meaning or use of the word organic has resulted in much confusion, but the truth announced by our predecessors is unimpaired and cooking does, as they claimed, both disorganize food and return part of it to its inorganic (as they understood the term) state, thus making it useless to the body. There can be no doubt about this.
Although reports on this conflict considerably, cooking undoubtedly destroys vitamins. Berg says: "Since the complettins (vitamins) C and B and the anitneuritic D are readily soluble in water, they are dissolved out in the first boiling."
Vitamins are very delicate and unstable things and are lost and destroyed in many ways. Foods that are cooked and held over to the next meal lose some or all of their remaining vitamins. Dried foods have lost much of their vitamins in the drying process. Canned foods that are cooked and stored in the warehouses lose their vitamins. Canned foods and dried foods have very little to no protective power.
There are many methods of cooking. How much of the vitamin content of a particular food is lost in cooking depends upon: 1. the method of cooking employed; 2. the temperature to which the food is subjected; 3. the duration of the cooking time; 4. the abundance or relative abundance of oxygen that reaches the food while it is cooking; 5. the pressure to which it is subjected; 6. the presence or absence of light; 7. how much the food is cut up before being cooked; and 8. the kind of vessel in which it is cooked.
Riboflavin is destroyed in appreciable amounts when meats and vegetables are cooked in the presence of light. This vitamin is lost to but slight degree when the foods are cooked in the dark or in a closed container. The loss of pantothentic acid from cooking is moderate to slight in vegetables but is up to one third in flesh foods. Pyrodoxin losses are moderate for flesh, much smaller for vegetables and it is claimed that the amount of this vitamin is increased by cooking in a few vegetables. Cooking causes a very high loss of biotin from flesh, even as high as 72 per cent. Its loss in vegetables is reported by some investigators to be only "moderate to negligible." When vegetables are cooked they lose as high as 59 per cent of their inositol. Flesh foods loose less of this vitamin. Folic acid losses in cooking are very great for most foods. From one-third to one-half, even as much as two-thirds of niacin is lost from meats in cooking. Some investigators deny this, saying the loss of this vitamin is slight. Perhaps these differences of opinion grow out of the use of different methods of cooking in making their tests.
Studies of the foods served to patrons of restaurants have shown that the average loss of vitamin C from vegetables is 45 per cent; of thiamin is 35 per cent. Heat and cooking them in water and throwing away the water accounted for these losses. An additional loss of about 15 per cent of vitamins occurs when the vegetables are held for long periods on the steam table before serving them. Restaurant eaters are advised to concentrate on raw vegetables and to eat early before foods have stood for prolonged periods on the steam table.
Cooking foods under high pressure is rapidly destructive of their vitamins. Prolonged cooking is also very destructive of vitamins.
Quick-cooked vegetables lose less of their vitamins and minerals. The longer they are cooked and the longer they stand after cooking, the more of their value they lose. They should be eaten soon after cooking is completed.
Cooking green soy beans causes a loss of 48 per cent of their vitamin C. Sprouted soy beans lose 70 per cent of their original content of C. Thiamin and carotine are also lost in the processing and cooking of soy beans.
The antiscorbutic qualities of milk are more or less completely lost if the milk is pasteurized, boiled, condensed or dried. Dried quickly at a high temperature milk seems not to lose its antiscorbutic qualities, but it loses in food value in other ways. When it is boiled its antineuritic powers are destroyed even more rapidly than its growth-promoting powers. Barnes and Hume showed that the drying of milk reduces its antiscorbutic efficiency to about two-fifths the original. The impairment of the antiscorbutic qualtities of milk by the condensing process is great enough that young monkeys, fed on a diet of condensed milk, develop infantile scruvy. Typical scurvy is produced in adult monkeys and guinea pigs by this same diet.
Hess and Unger found that the most actively antiscorbutic vegetables lose their efficacy upon drying. The excess of bases and the water soluble antiscorbutic vitamin C are leached out of the vegetables by the bleaching process. Soldiers fed on preserved vegetables develop scurvy. An outbreak of scurvy in a Rummelsburg orphanage was referred by Muller to the use of dried vegetables and pasteurized milk. Fresh vegetables resulted in recovery. When soup-tablets and dried vegetables predominate in the diet, malnutritional oedema develops. Canned or preserved fruits and vegetables lose their antiscorbutic qualities.
Heating white cabbage impairs its antiscorbutic quality while twenty minutes of boiling the juice of cabbage notably reduces this quality; an hour's boiling completely destroying it.
According to Givens and McClugage, finely minced raw potatoes may be boiled for fifteen minutes without appreciably affecting their antiscorbutic qualities, but these are greatly impaired by one hour's boiling. Quick cooking of foods at a high temperature brings about less damage to the food than prolonged cooking at a low temperature.
In the case of seeds, such as nuts, beans, peas, grains, etc., the germinating principle is destroyed so that cooked seed will not germinate.
The following account of some experiments with raw and roasted corn was published during World War I: "In order to find out the place of maize in war bread two French physicians carried on extensive feeding experiments with pigeons. They reached the conclusion that highly milled maize is responsible for at least three deficiency diseases.
"Weill and Mouriquand published the results of some experiments on the practicability of maize as the chief constituent of bread and the possible relations between maize diet and pellagra. The authors had already shown that decorticated (hulled) cereals, grain and legumes when fed to pigeons and fowls as an exclusive diet lead to paraplegia, paralysis and death. The cause of the latter is believed to be the depreciation of a ferment contained in the cortex of the grains, which is as essential to nutrition as sufficient calories, protein and mineral matter.
"The authors fed whole maize to a pigeon aged six months as the sole diet for a period of 240 days. The bird, shut up in its cage showed great activity and vigor. Control pigeons living exclusively on entire wheat, barley, rice and oat grains were well nourished and vigorous.
"When a mixture of whole grains was heat sterilized (120 degrees Centigrade), the birds survived ninety days and died paralyzed, but a certain addition of raw grains prevented beriberism. One-third part of raw grains appears to give perfect protection.
"Pigeons were now fed on decorticated, highly milled maize. The latter was refused and the birds were artificially crammed with it. After a period of sluggishness flight became impossible (thirty-third day) and death, preceded by paralysis, soon followed. Emaciation had also taken place. Hence, both cooking and decortication deprive the grains of vitamins or ferments."
Berg points out that a mixture of equal parts of soy bean, wheat, wheaten bran, sun-flower seeds, hemp seeds, and rye meal (a mixture which is perfectly adequate in the crude state), proves conspicuously inadequate after it has been made into a paste with water and then baked.
In his experiments with monkeys McCarrison showed that cooked foods, the same as deficient and ill-balanced foods, produce, within a short time, diarrhea, or actual dysentery. The monkeys so fed lost appetite, developed anemia, unhealthy skin, loss of body weight and all the vital organs began to atrophy. He pointed out that "among the pathologic processes resulting from deficient and ill-balanced food are the impairment of the protective resources of the digestive tract against infection," and added that "there is good reason to believe that the prolonged use of moderately faulty food will lead to these results as certainly as the less prolonged use of more faulty food."
(7) Cooking drives of part of the food into the air as gases.
That the cooking of milk, even pasteurizing it, greatly impairs its food value is well known. Eggs and vegetables, like cabbage, cauliflower, onions, etc., rich in sulphur, have their sulphur oxidized. They should never be cooked. Phosphorus is also oxidized. The iron in food is ruined as food.
Iodine and manganese are oxidized at low temperatures.
Cooking produces changes in the sulphur content of eggs that cause it to form gas in the intestine of many who eat them. This gas is not only offensive, it is harmful.
(8) Cooking changes the flavor and odor of foods and renders them less palatable.
It is often argued that cooking adds to the palatability of food. This is, at least, not true with most foods and we have noticed that the others are not palatable after being cooked unless they have been flavored, spiced, sweetened, peppered, salted, etc., or have had mustard, catsup, horseradish, or some form of dressing added. The fact is we are always kidding ourselves into believing that the things we are in the habit of doing are the very things we should do; that the things we have learned to like are the things that are best for us, and we consciously or unconsciously resist any proposed change, even, if there are plenty of evidences that the change would be for the better.
The relish for food is often a mere matter of habit. Those accustomed to eating cooked foods find they do not relish certain foods in their uncooked state. This calls for a reeducation of the sense of taste.
(9) Cooking food wastes much of its food elements and renders it less nutritious.
This is quite contrary to the popular notion. However, as we have just seen, cooking robs food of much of its value and adds nothing to it. It does not increase, but in most cases decreases, its digestibility.
The United States Department of Agriculture's Bulletin, No. 22, says: "Ladd, while connected with the New York State Station, reported analysis of cooked and uncooked clover, hay and corn meal and determination of digestibility of the same. These showed that the percentage of albuminoids and fat and the relative digestibility of the albuminoids were more or less diminished by cooking. The experiments made by our experiment stations in preparing food have been mostly with pigs. At least thirteen separate series of experiments in different parts of this country have been reported on the value of cooking or steaming food for pigs. In these cooked or steamed barley meal, corn-meal, and shorts; whole corn, potatoes, and a mixture of peas, barley and rye have been compared with the same food uncooked (usually dry). In ten of these trials there has not only been no gain from cooking, but there has been a positive loss, i. e., the amount of food required to produce a pound of gain was larger when the food was cooked than when it was fed raw, and in some cases the difference has been considerable."
Was not Dr. Oswald right, then, when he declared: "For even the most approved modes of grinding, bolting, leavening, cooking, spicing, heating and freezing our food are, strictly speaking, abuses of our digestive organs." And not of our digestive organ only, but of the whole body. Cooking is the oldest and most widely used method of denaturing our foods.
TARS
Tars are complex heterogeneous substances that are derived from a variety of sources. Any organic compound that is subjected to great heat, as in frying or roasting, undergoes decomposition with the formation of highly complex black tar. Most people are familiar with the tar formed in the burning of tobacco in cigarette, pipe and cigar. The bowl of the pipe and the pipe stem become clogged with the sticky, and foul smelling stuff.
Tar forms in coffee while it is being roasted; it forms in the cereals, beans and fruits when these are roasted in making coffee-substitutes. Coffee drinkers and drinkers of coffee substitutes daily take tar into their bodies just as the smoker gets tar into his mouth, throat, lungs and blood.
If potatoes, beans, peas, etc., become dry in cooking and get scorched, tar forms. Scorched toast has tar in it. In frying potatoes, eggs, meat and other foods tar is often formed unless great care is exercised not to overheat these foods. Meats roasted in an oven that is too hot get black on the outside. Tar is formed.
Tar is an irritant. It is one of the irritants that is known to result in the formation of tumors and cancers. It would be profitable to know what percentage of the tumors and cancers that exist today owe their origin to the tars taken into the bodies of almost everyone who eats cooked foods and drinks coffee or coffee substitutes. Living in smoky cities and inhaling the smoke takes tar into the lungs. This as much as tobacco smoke, may contribute to the production of cancer of the lungs.
COOKING AND DIGESTIBILITY
The manner in which foods are cooked alters their digestibility. Cabbage, for example, cooked in one way is easily digested; cooked in another manner is almost indigestible.
Much of the indigestibility of cooked foods results not so much from the cooking, per se, as from the mixtures that are jumbled together to cook. Take the Southern practice of cooking beans, greens, cabbage, etc., with a large piece of fat, salt bacon, as an example of concocting indigestible mixtures; or the method of frying potatoes (starches) in fat.
COOKERS
The waterless cooker is the best cooker that has been devised. This should not be confused with the pressure cooker. Rapidly growing in popularity, this expensive and dangerous (they sometimes explode) pressure cooker is the worst cooker ever invented. Cooking foods under high pressure rapidly destroys their vitamins. The old fireless cooker that cooked foods at a low temperature over a long period, was a very destructive cooker. Frying pans and boilers are among the worst cooking utensils. Several different types of waterless cooker are available. The reader may choose his own. I have no prejudices against the aluminum cookers, but if the reader • is afraid of this form of cooker, the stainless steel cooker is very efficient.
FROZEN FOODS
Frozen foods are new but are rapidly becoming very popular. The deep-freeze refrigerator that enables people to freeze their foods in their own homes, is also becoming popular. Is this the great boon to mankind that the promoters of the frozen food industry claim?
Some foods are completely ruined by being frozen. Frozen lettuce, frozen bananas, frozen oranges and many frozen greens are completely unfitted for use as food. It is inevitable that all foods shall be more or less damaged by the freezing process, despite the claims to the contrary. Quick freezing does cause loss of some of the vitamins. Although it is common to deny that freezing causes a loss of vitamins, it is readily admitted by the defenders of the process that the process of thawing out the foods before using them causes considerable vitamin losses. If, then, they are cooked, there are greater losses. Frozen foods should be used when fresh foods are not available, yet I see people buying frozen corn or frozen strawberries, etc., while these foods are in season.

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Conservative Cooking
CHAPTER XXX
Foods are prepared by Nature. She turns out a finished product. There is no need for further preparation. But we have become so artificial in our habits and in our thinking, that a few words of caution are needed.
The less "preparation" foods have undergone, the better and more wholesome they are as foods. The more simple the method used in preparing them, the more valuable they are. As well try to improve the rose by paint or perfume as to try to improve nuts or fruits by cooking. How foolish to cook a peach or an orange and then try to hypnotize yourself into believing that you have improved its delicious flavor or increased its dietetic value!
The modern kitchen is a mass of unnatural and anti-natural things and processes. We have forsaken the natural and have developed our present methods of preparing foods in a hap-hazard and thoughtless way.
Every man and woman should possess a clear understanding of the "complexities and possibilities of modern public cooking," together with a full knowledge of the "significance or the insignificance of the digestive appeals, the safety or unsafely of its unprincipled combinations, and the imperative necessity of moral power, backed by the will, to control the demands of a false, because overstimulated, appetite."
The first step in improving the methods of cooking foods was made by Mr. C. Leigh Hunt Wallace, an English vegetarian and editor of the Herald of Health. This journal was the official organ of the Physical Regeneration Society, of which Mr. Wallace was leader. This society opposed drugs and vaccines of all kinds and stood for living reform. In their "General Rules for the Maintenance of Health," I find these words: "all vegetables shall be stewed in their own juices or served with the water in which they are cooked in the form of sauce or gravy. Or they may be steamed or baked, but in whatever way they are prepared, all their natural salts and flavors must be conserved." Mr. Wallace called this "the conservative system of cooking."
Much of our over praised cooking consists in boiling the minerals out of our foods and pouring these down the drain pipe and conservative cooking seeks, among other things to conserve these minerals. Vegetables, even potatoes, should never be boiled. The old method of par-boiling vegetables and throwing the water away carried away practically all of the soluble salts and vitamins.
Open-vessel-cooked foods are largely devitalized, with the oxygen so combined that it is valueless. The vitamins are destroyed and the mineral salts are disarranged or lost. The waterless cooker is less objectionable in these respects.
Rapid cooking at a high temperature produces less damage, while low heat long continued, causes more damage to food. For this reason the "fireless cooker" and other forms of slow cooking are least desirable. Cooking done under steam pressure quickly destroys all vitamins in our food.
CHOOSING FOODS
Wilted lettuce is poor food. The same is true of celery and other vegetables. Fresh foods are best. The tops should be cut from beets, turnips, radishes, etc., as these, when wilting, extract the best elements from the roots.
The mere wilting of vegetables impairs their value as food. Dr. Howe says, "Vitamins of the greatest importance are found in the green leaf vegetables as they come fresh from the gardens, but at least one of the most important of these vitamins is either killed or greatly reduced in efficiency if such vegetables wilt or are kept in cold storage. This does not mean, however, that the cold storage process is not a very valuable means of storing some forms of food.
"A knowledge of what wilting or storage will do to these tender vegetables is not confined to man. In fact, the animal knew it first. If we place fresh lettuce and either wilted or storage lettuce at the same time before the animals in our laboratory, not only will they neglect the wilted lettuce for the fresh, but they seem to feel that the wilted lettuce is suitable only for bedding and they contentedly trample or crunch upon it while eagerly devouring the fresh."
Wilted lettuce, wilted celery and other wilted vegetables are poor foods. Foods that are shipped long distances lose much of their food value. Fresh foods are always best. Canned vegetables and fruits lose much of their value by standing for a long time in the cans. The acid fruits seem to be an exception to this, at least they do not lose their quality as early as do other foods.
PREPARATION
Never soak vegetables in water for this extracts valuable elements from them and leaves them tasteless and worthless. Lettuce and celery should not be crisped in this way. Vegetables should be washed quickly, care being taken not to bruise them. They may then be wrapped in a damp cloth or wrapped in paper to protect them and placed in the refrigerator or in the fresh air to become crisp. No vegetable should ever be permitted to stand, even for a moment, in water. If they are permitted to stand in water they will be robbed of their precious minerals, which will be absorbed by the water, and you will only eat impoverished vegetables.
FRUITS AND NUTS
Nuts should never be cooked or roasted.
Fruits should never be cooked. This applies with equal force to dried fruits. Dried prunes, figs, peaches, pears, apples and other dried fruits should be carefully washed and then have enough warm water poured over them to cover them well but not enough to float them. Cover the vessel and let them stand over night. When serving, the water in which they have been soaked, being full of the salts of the fruit, should be served with them. No sugar should be added. Fruits thus prepared are much more pleasant than cooked fruits and are also much more easily digested. It requires a better digestion than most people have to digest cooked fruit. Better not try it.
LEAFY VEGETABLES
Vegetables should be cooked in their own juices with barely enough water to prevent burning and their juices served with them. When spinach, for example, is boiled and the juice is not eaten most of the soluble salts go down the drain pipe. They are lost.
The more food is cooked the deader it is. It should be eaten raw or slightly cooked. Thoroughly cooked--"dead"--foods may build the body but they can never vitalize it.
Leafy vegetables should never be steamed or cooked until they change color. Cook vegetables as short a time as possible, to preserve the living essence as far as possible, and then eat soon after cooking. Do not cook vegetables ahead and let them stand for hours before eating. Twice cooked vegetables have less food value and are less digestible than once cooked vegetables.
The lowly turnip green, so popular throughout the south, as attested by the words of the song: "Cornbread, buttermilk and good old turnip greens," is a rich source of calcium, iron and other minerals. The stems of the green are also fair sources of calcium, though containing less iron. The total ash of this green is important. But when parboiled and boiled for long periods, most of its value is lost.
Cabbage and onions have their sulphur oxidized by the usual methods of cooking them. Small heads of cabbage or small onions may be placed whole in a waterless cooker and cooked whole.
TUBERS AND FRUITING PLANTS
Carrots, beets, turnips and other tubers, also squash, tomatoes, etc., should not be pared and cut up before cooking. Scrub them thoroughly with a brush and cook them whole. Serve and eat whole, flavored with a little butter or oil only.
Potatoes should always be cooked in their skins and the skins eaten. Bake them 40 minutes in a very hot oven, or steam them in a waterless cooker.
ANIMAL PROTEINS
Eggs should be soft-boiled, coddled or poached.
Meats are best baked or broiled under the flame to retain their juices. The juices of the meat should be served with it. Fish may be steamed or baked. No meat should ever be fried. "Frying turns meat into an alkaloid," a poison, says Dr. Gibson.
CEREALS
Cereals should be served dry. They should not be boiled. They may be steamed or scalded and served with a little butter or cream--but not with sugar or milk. Stale bread is better than toasted bread.
SOUPS AND GRAVIES
Soups, which are usually swallowed without mastication, are bad foods. They are especially bad when starch is added to them Starch, flour, tapioca, rice, etc., should never be added. Okra added to soups thickens them nicely and is not objectionable.
Gravies are objectionable and should not be prepared.
ADDITIONS TO FOODS
Butter, cream, or oil served on vegetables should be added when serving and not while cooking. Fats should never be cooked.
All the vitamins are quickly destroyed by baking soda or other alkali added to the food. The fats, grease, salts, soda, acids, sugar, spices and pungent extractives so freely used in modern cookery, not only stimulate to overeating, but actually interfere with the digestive processes.
Acids added to food not only interfere with digestion but cause much trouble. Dr. Leedon Sharp (M.D.), of Intercourse, Pa., says that when a girl comes to the doctor complaining of "that tired feeling," "want of energy," "lack of pep," precarious appetite, chronic constipation and some menstrual irregularities, even if "apparently robust, often times over weight and having rosy cheeks;" if she answers "I love them" to the question "do you like pickles?", chlorosis may be diagnosed whether or not the peculiar greenish hue of the skin is presented. Blood examination, he says, will show the red cell count to be about normal with no increase in white cells, but with hemoglobin as deficient in some as 40 to 50 per cent. Bleached vegetables are inferior in food value to green vegetables. Their value decreases in proportion to the time required to bleach them. The bleaching process robs them of vitamins and bases.
DRIED FOODS
Dried foods, other than dried fruits, are now on the market. Milk, vegetables, and meats are often dried. It has been the theory in the past that this deprived the foods of nothing but their water. This is now fully proved to be not so. Barnes and Hume have shown that milk dried by the ordinary processes loses about two-fifths of its antiscorbutic efficacy. Hess and Unger state that the most actively antiscorbutic vegetables lose their efficacy when dried. An outbreak of Scurvy in the Rummelsburg orphanage, a few years ago, was attributed by Mueller and Erich to the use of pasteurized milk and dried vegetables. These vegetables had been bleached before drying and this made them all the worse, for in the bleaching they had forfeited their excess of bases. Heating at a comparatively low temperature, 30 to 40 degrees centigrade, is more injurious to vitamin C, than boiling for an hour.
The drying of cabbage, carrots and dandelion greatly impairs their antiscorbutic qualities. The C quality of cabbage is wholly destroyed at 110 degrees centigrade. Dried potatoes are also deficient in C. Dried cabbage, when stored for two to three weeks, has its vitamin C reduced by about nine-tenth. Three months storage completely destroys its antiscorbutic qualities.
The outbreak of scurvy in the Bulgarian Army during the Balkan war a few years ago, developed in spite of (perhaps, as Berg insists, because of) the fact that dried vegetables were supplied as prophylactics.
Sulphured fruits are unfit for use. They are saturated with the poisonous sulphurous acid used in bleaching them. Sundried and dehydrated fruits are preferable and I am suspicious of the dehydrated articles.
Stefanson's experiences in the Arctic emphasizes the need for fresh foods and confirm the results of many experiments which show that preserved, heated and desiccated foods lose much of their value. The value of fresh, raw fruits and vegetables and the inadequacy of denatured, processed, refined, cooked, canned, dried, desiccated, preserved and embalmed foods, as revealed by experience and experiment, will remain unshaken.
Cooking, bleaching, canning, preserving and drying (with the possible exception of sun-drying) of fruits, vegetables, grains, milk, meat and other food stuffs, are all denaturing processes and have much the same results as the milling of wheat or the polishing of rice. "Since prolonged heat is in any case injurious," says. Berg, "it is obvious that the drying of nutrients at a raised temperature must be extremely disadvantageous."
CANNED FOODS
Canned foods are extensively used. The canning industry is one of the largest industries in America. It yearly spends millions of dollars to increase its business and to induce people to believe that canned foods are excellent foods. Subsidized research workers, scientists, physicians and others issue statements designed to increase confidence in canned foods.
The process of canning foods has undergone a great change within recent years, so that canned goods are better today than they were some years ago. Canned goods, many of them at least, are not without real food value, but they can never be made to take the place of real foods and should never be used when other foods may be had. There are many hospitals and sanitariums which feed canned foods to patients and to children. This I consider a criminal practice. I have never fed canned foods to patients, nor to children.
We are frequently told that present day methods of canning preserves the salts of the foods and does not destroy their vitamins. That their vitamins are impaired does not admit of doubt and Berg tells us "it seems undesirable to trust to the antiscorbutic efficacy of stored products. The antiscorbutic power of expressed cabbage juice, lemon juice and orange juice, seems to disappear in consequence of prolonged storage." Prolonged heating of acid fruit juices does not completely destroy their vitamin C, these qualities are lost after being bottled or canned and stored.
No method of canning is known that does not impair the salts of food and to a greater or lesser extent the other qualities of the food. Home canned foods are also bad. Professor Morgulis rightly says: "A new and serious source of malnutrition has arisen in our modern industrialized civilization. By the implacable economic forces women have been drawn away from their traditional place in the home and into the turmoil of industrial production. At the same time the factory has intruded itself into the home and has preempted much of the woman's function of preparing the family's food. The manufacture of foods dispensed in cans and all ready to be served has insinuated itself into the homes of the people to such an extent that it has become literally true that many households can now-a-days be conducted with the aid of two implements--the cork screw and the can opener. The evil of these industrial conditions is seen not only in the circumstance that the younger generation is deprived of proper maternal care, but also in the fact that owing to qualitative deficiencies, tinned goods, when these are the staple articles of diet, may produce the effects of partial inanition."
COOKING VESSELS
Many types of cooking vessels are offered the public. Of these the waterless cooker is best. The waterless cooker should not be confused with the pressure cooker. Cooking vessels are made of many kinds of materials. Some of these distribute heat more uniformly than others and cook the food quicker. The first waterless cookers were made of aluminum. Due to the crusade that was carried on against the use of aluminum, many people are afraid of aluminum. In my opinion, this fear is unfounded, but for those who are afraid of aluminum, there are stainless steel cookers, earthenware cookers, cookers made of manganese, etc.

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