(Narrates the author's adventures in search of health, and his conclusions as to what to eat.) Students of the body assure us that every particle of matter which composes it is changed in the course of seven years. It is obvious that everything that is a part of the body has at some time to be taken in as food; so the problem of our diet today is the problem of what our body shall consist of seven years from now, and probably a great deal sooner.
I begin this discussion by telling my own personal experiences with food. I am not going to recommend my diet for anyone else; because one of the first things I have to say about the subject is that every human individual is a separate diet problem. But I am going to try to establish a few principles for your guidance, and more especially to point out the commonest mistakes. I tell about my own mistakes, because it happens that I know them more intimately.
I was brought up in the South, where it is the custom of people to give a great deal of time and thought to the subject of eating. Among the people I knew it was always taken for granted that there should be at least one person in the kitchen devoting all her time to the preparing of delicious things for the family to eat. This person was generally a negress, and, needless to say, she knew nothing about the chemistry of foods, nothing about their constituents or nutritive qualities. All she knew was about their taste; she had been trained to prepare them in ways that tasted best, and was continually being advised and exhorted and sometimes scolded by the ladies of the family on this subject. At the table the family and the guests never failed to talk about the food and its taste, and not infrequently the cook would be behind the door listening to their comments; or else she would wait until after the meal, for the report which somebody would bring her.
In addition to this, the ladies of the family were skilled in what is called "fancy cooking." They did not bother with the meats and vegetables, but they mixed batter cakes, and made all kinds of elaborate desserts, and exchanged these treasures and the recipes for them with other ladies in the neighborhood. In addition to this, there were certain periods of the week and of the year especially devoted to the preparing and consuming of great quantities of foods. Once every seven days the members of the family expressed their worship of their Creator by eating twice as much as usual; and at another time they celebrated the birth of their Redeemer by overeating systematically for a period of two or three weeks. Needless to say, of course, the children brought up in such an environment all had large appetites and large stomachs, and their susceptibility to illness was recognized by the setting apart for them of a whole classification of troubles—"children's diseases," they were called. In addition to children's diseases, there were coughs and colds and sore throats and pains in the stomach and constipation and diarrhea, which the children shared with their adults.
I had a little more than my share of all these troubles. Always a doctor would be sent for, and always he was wise and impressive, and always I was impressed. He gave me some pills or a bottle of liquid, a teaspoonful every two hours, or something like that—I can hear the teaspoon rattle in the glass as I write. I had a profound respect for each and every one of those doctors. He was wisdom walking about in trousers, and whenever he came, I knew that I was going to get well; and I did, which proved the case completely.
Then I grew up, and at the age of eighteen or nineteen became possessed of a desire for knowledge, and took to reading and studying literally every minute of the day and a good part of the night. I seldom let myself go to sleep before two o'clock in the morning, and was always up by seven and ready for work again. I did this for ten years or so, until nature brought me to a complete stop. During these ten years I was a regular experiment station in health; that is, I had every kind of common ailment, and had it over and over again, so that I could try all the ways of curing it, or failing to cure it, and keep on trying until I was sure, one way or the other. I came recently upon a wonderful saying by John Burroughs, which will be appreciated by every author. "This writing is an unnatural business. It makes your head hot and your feet cold, and it stops the digesting of your food."
This trouble with my digestion began when I was writing my second novel, camping out on a lonely island at the foot of Lake Ontario. I went to see a doctor in a nearby town, and he talked learnedly about dyspepsia. The cause of it, he said, was failure of the stomach to secrete enough pepsin, and the remedy was to take artificial pepsin, obtained from the stomach of a pig. He gave me this pig-pepsin in a bottle of red liquid, and I religiously took some after each meal. It helped for a time; but then I noticed that it helped less and less. I got so that a simple meal of cold meat and boiled potatoes would stay in my stomach for hours, in spite of any amount of the pig-pepsin; I would lie about in misery, because I wanted to work, and my accursed stomach would not let me.
All the time, of course, I was using my mind on this problem, groping for causes. I found that the trouble was worse if I worked immediately after eating. I found also that it was worse when I was writing books. When I got sufficiently desperate, I would stop writing books and go off on a hunting trip. I would tramp twenty miles a day over the mountains, looking for deer, and I would come back at night too tired to think, and in a week or two every trace of my trouble would be gone. So my life regimen came to be—first the writing of a book, and then a hunting trip to get over the effects of it. But as time went on, alas, I noticed that the recuperation was more slow and less certain. The working times grew shorter, and the hunting times grew longer, until finally I had got to a point where I couldn't work at all; I would go to pieces in a few days if I tried it. It was apparently the end of my stomach, and the end of my sleeping, and the end of my writing books. My teeth were decaying, not merely outside but inside; I would have abscesses, and most frightful agonies to endure. I would lie awake all night, and it would seem to me that I could feel my body going to pieces—an extremely depressing sensation!
I had been trying experiments all this time. I had been going to one doctor after another, and had got to realize that the doctors only treated symptoms; they treated the "diseases" when they appeared—but nobody ever told you how to keep the "diseases" from appearing. Why could there not be a doctor who would look you over thoroughly, and tell you everything that was wrong with you, and how to set it right? A doctor who would tell you exactly how to live, so that you might keep well all the time! I was studying economics, and becoming suspicious of my fellow man; it occurred to me that possibly it might be embarrassing to a doctor, if he cured all his patients, and taught them how to live, so that none of them would ever have to come to him again. It occurred to me that possibly this might be the reason why "preventive medicine," constructive health work, was getting so little attention from the medical fraternity.
Two things that plagued me were headache and constipation, and they were obviously related. For constipation, the world had one simple remedy; you "took something" every night or every morning, and thought no more about it. My stout and amiable grandmother had drunk a glass of Hunyadi water every morning for the last thirty or forty years, and that she finally died of "fatty degeneration of the heart" was not connected with this in the mind of anyone who knew her. As for the headaches, people would tell you this, that, and the other remedy, and I would try them—that is, unless they happened to be drugs. I was getting more and more shy of drugs. I had some blessed instinct which saved me from stimulants and narcotics. I had never used tea, coffee, alcohol or tobacco, and in my worst periods of suffering I never took to putting myself to sleep with chloral, or to stopping my headaches with phenacetin.
At the end of six or eight years of purgatory, I came upon a prospectus of the Battle Creek Sanitarium. This seemed to me exactly what I wanted; this was constructive, it dealt with the body as a whole. So I spent a couple of months at the "San," and paid them something like a thousand dollars to tell me all they could about myself.
The first thing they told me was that meat-eating was killing me. It was perfectly obvious, was it not, that meat is a horrible feeding place for germs, that rotten meat is dreadfully offensive, and likewise digested meat—consider the excreta of cats, for example! I listened solemnly while Doctor Kellogg read off the numbers of billions of bacteria per gram in the contents of the colon of a carnivorous person. It certainly seemed proper that the author of "The Jungle" should be a vegetarian, so I became one, and did my best to persuade myself that I enjoyed the taste of the patent meat-substitutes which are served in hundred calory portions in th............