(Discusses the different kinds of foods, and the part they play in the making of health and disease.) It is my purpose in this chapter to lay down a few general principles to aid you in the practical problem of selecting the best diet for yourself. But it must be made clear at the outset that there can be no hard and fast rule. All human bodies are more or less alike, but on the other hand all are more or less different. Modern civilization has given very few bodies the chance to be perfect; nearly all have some weakness, some abnormality, and need some special modification in diet to fit their particular problem. The ideal in each case would be a complete study of the individual system. Some day, no doubt, medical science will analyze the digestive juices and the gland secretions and the blood-stream of every human being, and say, you need a certain percentage of starch and a certain percentage of protein; you need such and such proportion of phosphorus and iron; you should avoid certain acids—and so on. But at present we are devoting our science to the task of killing and maiming other people, instead of enabling ourselves to live in health and happiness; so it is that most of those who read this book will be too poor to command the advice of a diet specialist. The best you can do is to get a few general ideas and try them out, watching your own body and learning its peculiarities.
Human food contains three elements: proteins, fats and carbohydrates. The proteins are the body-building material, and the foods which are rich in proteins are lean meat, the white of eggs, milk and cheese, nuts, peas and beans. A certain amount of this kind of food is needed by the body. If it is missing, the body will gradually waste away. If too much of it is taken, the body can turn it into energy-making material, but this is a wasteful process, and the best evidence appears to be that it is a strain upon the system. Experiments conducted by Professor Chittenden of Yale have proven conclusively that men can live and maintain body weight upon much less protein food than previous dietetic standards had indicated.
The fats are found in fat meats and dairy products, and in nuts, olives, and vegetable oils. The body is prepared to digest and assimilate a certain amount of fat, no one knows how much. I have found in my own case that I require a great deal less than people ordinarily eat. I have for many years maintained good health upon a diet containing no more fat than one gets with lean meat once or twice a day. I never use butter or olive oil, nor any fat in cooking. My reason for this is that fats are the most highly concentrated form of food, and the easiest upon which to overeat. Excess of fat is a cause, not merely of obesity, but also of boils and pimples and "pasty" complexion, and other signs of a clogged blood-stream.
The third variety of food is the carbohydrates, and of these there are two kinds, starches and sugars. Starch is the white material of the grains and tubers; the principal food element of bread and cereals, rice, potatoes, bananas, and many prepared substances such as corn-starch, tapioca, farina and macaroni. Starchy foods compose probably half the diet of the average human being. In my own case, they compose about one-sixth, so you see to what extent my beliefs differ from the common. Starch is not really necessary in the diet at all. I have a friend who is subject to headaches, and finds relief from them by a diet of meat, salads, and fresh fruits exclusively. The first thing that excess of starch or sugar does is to ferment in the system, and cause flatulence and gas. But strange as it may seem, if the excess of starch is perfectly digested and assimilated into the system, the condition may be worse yet, because you may have a great quantity of energy-producing material, without the necessary mineral elements which the body requires in the handling of it.
If you cremate a human body and study the ashes chemically, you find a score or more of mineral salts. You find these in the blood, and no blood is normal and no body can be kept normal which does not contain the right percentage of these elements. It is not merely that they are needed to build bones and teeth; they are needed at every instant for the chemistry of the cells. Every time you move a muscle, you fill the cells of that muscle with a certain amount of waste matter. You may prove how deadly this matter is by binding a tight cord about your arm, and then trying to use the arm. We are only at the beginning of understanding the subtle chemistry of the body; but this much we know, the cells transform the waste products, and they are thrown out of the system as ammonia, uric acid, etc.; and for this process the blood must have a continual supply of many mineral salts.
So vital are they, and so fatal to health is their absence, that it is far better for you to eat nothing at all than to eat improperly balanced foods, or foods which are deficient in the organic salts. You may prove this to yourself by a simple experiment. Put two chickens in separate pens, where nobody can feed them but yourself. Feed one of them on water and white bread, or corn starch, or sugar, or any energy-making substance which contains little of the mineral elements. Feed the other chicken on plain water. You will find that the one which has the food will quickly become droopy and sickly; its feathers will fall out, it will have what in human beings would be known as headaches, colds, sore throats, decaying teeth and boils. At the end of a couple of weeks it will be a dead chicken. The one which you feed on water alone will not be a happy chicken, neither will it be a fat chicken, but it will be a live chicken, and a chicken without disease. I am going later on to discuss the subject of fasting. For the present I will merely say that a chicken which has nothing but water is living upon its own flesh, and therefore has a meat diet, containing the mineral elements necessary to the elimination of the fatigue poisons.
I am going to try not to be dogmatic in this book, and not to say things that I do not know. I confess to innumerable uncertainties about the subject of diet; but one thing I think I do know, and that is that human beings should eliminate absolutely from their food those modern artificial products, which look so nice, and are so easy to handle, and are put up in packages with pretty labels, and have been in some way artificially treated to remove the wastes and impurities—including the vital mineral salts. Among such food substances I include lard and its imitations made from cottonseed oil, white flour, all the prepared and refined cereals, polished rice, tapioca, farina, corn starch, and granulated and powdered sugar. Any of these substances will kill a chicken in a couple of weeks, and the only reason they take a longer time to kill you is because you mix them with other kinds of foods. But to the extent that you eat them, your diet is deficient; and do not console yourself with the idea that the mineral elements will be made up from other foods, because you don't know that, and nobody else knows it. Nobody knows just how much of any particular organic salt the body needs. All we know is that the primitive races, which ate natural foods, enjoyed vigorous health, while the American people, who consume the greatest proportion of the so-called "refined" foods, have the very best dentists and the very worst teeth in the world.
There are many kinds of sugar, found in the sugar-cane and the beet, and in all fruits. Sugar may also be made from any form of starch; this is glucose, which is put up in cans and sold as an imitation of maple syrup. The ordinary granulated and powdered sugar is made by taking from the natural syrup every trace of mineral elements; so I have no hesitation in saying that the ordinary cane sugar and beet sugar of our breakfast tables and our confectionery stores is not a food, but a slow poison. The causes of the wonderful progress of American dentistry, which is the marvel of the civilized world, are cane sugar, white flour, and the frying-pan, each of which dietetic crimes I shall take up in turn.
We have the richest country in the world; we eat more food, probably by 50 per cent, and we waste more food, probably by 500 per cent, than any other people in the world; and yet, go to any small farming community in America, and what do you find? You find the teeth of the young children rotting in their heads, and having to be pulled out before their second teeth come. You find these second teeth rotting often before the age of twenty. A friend of mine, who knows the American farmer, sums it up this way: "He has two things that he requires if he is to be really respectable and happy. First, he wants to get all the fireplaces in his home boarded up, and all the windows nailed tight; and second, he wants to get all his teeth out, and an artificial set installed. Out of the farmers' wives in my neighborhood, not one in ten keeps her own teeth until she is thirty."
If you go to the Balkans, where the peasants live on sour milk, with grains which they grind at home; or to southern Italy and Sicily, where they live on cheese and black bread and olives; or among savage people, where they hunt and fish and gather the natural fruits, you find old men without a single decayed tooth. There must be some reason for this, and the reason is found in our denatured grocery-store foods. The farmer's wife will gather up her eggs and her butter and cheeses, and take them to the store and bring back cans of lard and packages of sugar. The farmer will sell his perfectly good wheat and corn meal, and bring back in his wagon cases of "refined" cereal foods, for which he has paid ten times the price of the grain!
Dentists will tell you that the way candy injures the teeth is by sticking to them and fermenting, forming acids, which destroy the tooth structure. And that may be a part of the reason. But the principal reason why the teeth decay is because the blood-stream is abnormal, and is unable to keep up the repairs of the body. Your teeth are living structures, just as much as any other part of you, and they will resist decay if you supply them with the proper nourishment.
You need sugar; you need a considerable quantity of it every day. Nature provides this sugar in combination with the organic salts, and also with the precious vitamines, whose function in the body we are only beginning to investigate. All the mineral substances which give the color and flavor to oranges, apples, peaches, grapes, figs, prunes, raisins—all these you take out when you make sugar. Or perhaps you put in some imitations of them, made from coal tar chemicals, and drink them at your soda fountains! So little appreciation has the American farmer's wife of natural fruits, that when she preserves them, she considers it necessary to fill them full of cane sugar; in fact, she has a notion that they won't keep unless she cooks them up with sugar! So snobbish are we Americans about our eating, that we make the best of our foods into bywords. We make jokes in our comic papers about the "boarding-house prune"; and yet prunes and raisins are among the wholesomest foods we have, and if we fed them to our children instead of cakes and candy and coal-tar flavorings, our dental industry would rapidly decline.
And the same thing is true of bread. When I was a boy, I thought I had to have hot bread at least twice a day, and if I were called upon to eat bread that was more than a day old, I felt that I was being badly abused by life. I used to read fairy stories, in which something called "black bread" was mentioned, something obscure and terrible; the symbol of human misery was Cinderella sitting in the ashes and eating a crust of dry "black bread." But now since I have studied diet, I have taken my place with Cinderella. I can afford to buy whatever kind of bread I want; I can have the best white bread, piping hot, three times a day, if I want it; but what I eat three times a day is a crust of hard dry "black bread."
"Black bread" is the fairy story name for bread made of the whole grain. It is eaten that way by the peasant because he has no patent milling machinery at his disposal, to fan away the life-giving elements of his food. Nearly all the mineral elements of the grain are contained in the outer, dark-colored portion. The white part is almost pure starch; and when you use white flour, you are not merely starving your blood-stream, your bones, and your teeth, you are also depriving the digestive tract of the rough material which it is accustomed to handle, and which it needs to stimulate it to action. I am aware that whole grain products are a trifle less easy of digestion, but we should not pamper and weaken our dig............