Fasting for the cure of disease/Chapter 12
CHAPTER XII
DIET
"Know prudent, cautious self-control Is wisdom's root."
Robert Burns.
CHAPTER XII
DIET
DIET at any time is largely a matter of special need, but it would seem that, after a course of fasting, the successful issue of which depends upon a reduction to normal in all respects, certain fixed rules might be laid down to apply to all cases. Peculiar limitations are developed in each individual, for which the physical sins of generations of ancestors are in great measure responsible; hence empirical methods must be employed in the selection of foods requisite for the case in hand.
Taste plays an important part in the choice of food material in health, and it is popularly believed that, when an article of sustenance is not repugnant to this sense, it is healthful and wholesome, and that harm cannot result from its ingestion. One of the objects that nature has in placing the nerves of taste in the mouth is to prevent noxious substances from entering the stomach; but, as a consequence of persistent cultivation, the sense of taste has been much perverted, and most men and women are more or less abnormal in taste perception. To the lack of sense perception in this respect is due much of carelessness in mastication. Improperly accomplished salivation and the seeds of disease are resulting evils. With normal taste the medical profession would be at loss to administer the average drug were the patient to masticate or insalivate its substance. Recognizing this fact as well as the subsequent action of the digestive juices upon medical remedies, the physician obviates the difficulty presented by the use of capsules or by introducing the drug directly into the blood.
The sense of smell, reaching out beyond the body ere food material passes the lips, assists in its selection, and it and taste, when normal in function and not vitiated by cultivation and habit, form a perfect picket-line of protection against the introdution of unwholesome nourishment into the system. Normally constituted bodies prefer those odors that are classified as pleasant, yet continual personal contact with emanations that are distinctly disagreeable, first brings tolerance and finally pleasure in their presence. Perhaps this departure from natural law and normal instinct can be illustrated in convincing form by contemplating the sensual delight of the epicure in cheeses of doubtful age but of indubitable rottenness.
The fallacy of attempting practical application of a theory of food selection based upon taste and smell alone is easily demonstrated. The question resolves itself into one concerning the needs of the body, but, after a fast, taste and smell are restored to normal acuteness and, so long as they remain in this state, they may be used as partial indicators. At this time all wholesome food gives delight and is desired with a hunger created in a clean, healthy system that asks for nourishment and that fully enjoys its ingestion. Simple foods, properly prepared and correctly proportioned as to the relative amounts of fats, carbo-hydrates, and protein, with the necessary mineral salts, are what the dietitian and the patient should endeavor to supply. The fast is ended, the system cleansed, and the digestive organs are in full vigor, waiting to form pure blood and pure tissue from pure food.
No further detail is needed to show that mankind habitually overeats and that, as a result, nutritive material is absorbed into the circulation in quantity beyond the requirements of the body, loading the system with an unnecessary and harmful burden and hampering with poisonous waste the operation of its machinery. But, just as the liver stands guard, in so far as it may, over matters absorbed, and just as it separates the good from the bad, so, at the very inception of the digestive process, the mouth, with its armor of teeth and its salivary apparatus, determines in large degree the amount of food needed in nutrition.
The mouth holds the nerves of taste, taste is enjoyed in the mouth, and taste has its great purpose in deciding just when food has been ground between the teeth sufficiently to prepare it for the subsequent processes. Taste disappears when food has been properly insalivated, and too thorough mastication cannot occur, for the benefits derived are immeasurable, even apart from the comminution of solids. The mouth easily accomplishes this work when the habit of mastication has been acquired, but, if it perform it carelessly, the other organs of digestion cannot act in normal function, and, as a matter of fact, perfect digestion cannot occur, since one of its processes has been omitted. The only portion of the operation of digestion that can be voluntarily controlled is that which is done in the mouth, hence the subject of the mastication of food is an all-important one. Its value in the economy of the human body is excellently treated by Horace Fletcher in his "A-B-Z of our own Nutrition."
Fletcher says: "When food is filtered into the body after having become liquified and made alkaline or at least neutral by saliva, the appetite is given a chance to measure the needs of the body and to discriminate against excess. As soon as the point of complete saturation of any one deficiency is reached, the appetite is cut off as short as possible, with no indication of stomach fullness. It will welcome a little of protein, and then turn to sugar or fat in some of their numerous forms. Thirst for water will assert itself for a moment, sometimes asking but a drop and again for a full glass ; and, afterwards, when near the point of complete saturation, appetite will hesitate for a moment, as if searching around for some rare substance and may find its final satisfaction in a single spoonful of sweet, or of a sip of something in sight. "The appetite, satisfied by the infiltering process, is a sweetly appeased appetite, calm, rested, contented, normal. There is no danger from the flooding of intemperance for there is not even toleration of excess, either of more food or of more drink, and this contented appetite will remain in the condition of contentment until another need has really been earned by evaporation or destructive katabolism."
Fletcher uses in his description the term, appetite, in the sense that the word, hunger, is employed in the present text. In the conditions that he so well expresses lies the solution of the problem of overeating. Mastication, carried to the degree that taste is neutralized, absolutely precludes eating save for the needs of metabolism. The supply is made equal to the demand, neither more nor less; and intemperance in food or drink is effectively prevented.
A scientific discussion of the question of diet is manifestly out of place in this text. Authorities differ widely and none has dealt with feeding from the viewpoint met after a fast, with a stomach, so to speak, re-created.
It is no undue iteration to again point out that diet is largely a matter of special need, and that no fixed rules can be promulgated to apply in every case ; but certain general principles require discussion, of which the first and most important deals with the use or non-use of meat. Flesh in any form should never enter the dietary of normal man. Arguments for and against have long been exchanged on this subject, and advocates of the strongest will combat the non-flesh diet for years to come. The argument that serves to refute this error in hygiene contains, among others, the following premises : First, dead animal tissue holds within it the products of metabolism. The process of change is suddenly arrested when the animal is killed, and the juices of the body of the latter contain un-eliminated toxic products from broken-down cell-tissue that no process of cooking can destroy. For that matter, even were they completely annihilated, flesh is still changed vegetable tissue with the waste of the process of change and that of the living organism retained in its structure, a condition that logically suggests the consumption of the plant rather than of its creation. In addition, decomposition of animal flesh begins at the moment of death, and by the time it is consumed as food, decay has progressed almost to the point of putrefaction. In the fast it is observed that excessive meat eaters and patients who previously have undergone the "Salisbury treatment" with its forced feeding of flesh, exhibit a foulness in elimination so much beyond that in all other cases that it renders them obnoxious even to themselves.
Mr. Otto Carque in his "Errors of Bio-Chemistry" says: "There is also a marked physiological difference between plant and animal food. Animals are distinguished from vegetables by incessant decay in every tissue, a decay which is proportional to animal activity. This incessant decay necessitates incessant repair, so that the animal body has been likened to a temple on which two opposite forces are at work in every part, the one tearing down, the other repairing the breach as fast as it is made. In plants no such incessant decay has ever been discovered. If it exists at all, it must be very trifling in comparison. Protoplasm, it is true, is taken from the older parts of the plant, and these parts die; but the protoplasm does not seem to decompose, but is used again for tissue building. Thus the eternal activity of animals is of two kinds, tissue-destroying and tissuebuilding, while that of plants is principally of one kind, tissue building. Flesh foods will, therefore, impart less vitality to our system than plant foods, because the former always contain a quantity of substances which have undergone the various stages of katabolism and have lost their vital force. We feel drowsy and indolent after a heavy meal of meat, while an apple, an orange, a bunch of grapes, instantly refreshes us. The theories that flesh makes flesh, that blood is converted into blood, that calf's or sheep's brain increases our mental capacity, that meat is predigested plant food, cannot stand in the light of physiological chemistry."
And again, recent experiments carried out most thoroughly by Irving Fisher, Professor of Political Economy at Yale University, show beyond any chance of refutation that the physical endurance of the human body is increased to the utmost by non-flesh diet. In the course of these experiments meat-eating athletes competed in test exercises with nonmeat eaters, both sedentary and active in occupation. The results were so largely in favor of the non-flesh diet that the most ardent advocates of the opposite side can find no loop-hole through which to escape from the facts.
No adequate explanation is as yet available of the evident superiority of a vegetarian diet over one of flesh as regards endurance, save, perhaps, in the theory that a diet composed in greater part of proteid produces uric acid and other crystalline substances, which in turn cause muscular fatigue in exercise. The facts are patent in these instances as related, as well as in the experiments made by the author of the text along similar lines during the past twelve years. The results obtained demonstrate that a non-flesh diet builds a consistently strong and enduring physical structure, while the reverse is true in great part when meat figures in the list of food ingested. In the past, facts such as these have been obscured and the truth has suffered because the idea contained in the term, "vegetarian," suggested what was popularly regarded as fanaticism carried beyond all bounds. In the history of the world no doctrine advanced with polemical warmth and coupled with enthusiasm and dogma almost religious, has ever had influence upon scientific thought, and, for this reason, the matter needs to be approached deliberately and dispassionately, and with the seriousness befitting a subject that is of more practical import than any other in the whole range of hygienic research. When this shall have been accomplished, the theory embodied in the results of the tests mentioned will be fully borne out and conclusively established as a living truth.
With the individual himself rests the selection of a healthful and properly distributed food supply. In order to maintain a normal body in perfect equilibrium, the amount and the selection of food require careful consideration. Quantity depends upon physical characteristics and the kind of labor at which the subject is employed. A working man destroys more tissue in shorter time than does the banker or the clerk ; yet, usually, the latter eat no fewer meals nor less at a sitting than their burly brother. What is needed for the one is far more than sufficient for the others. Should the brain-worker devote spare time to outdoor recreation or to manual labor a mean might be established; but, in general, equilibrium is seldom reached, and the supply of food is far in excess of requirement. The laboring man, too, is at fault in this respect, for, unless his be an exceptional case, the basis of diet is starch, which carries its nutritive principle in a bulky vehicle, demanding extra labor from the digestive tract in order to separate waste from nutriment and to eliminate the former.
To reduce the supply of food to the reciprocal basis of demand, the plan that suggests the omission of the early morning breakfast is perhaps the easiest method to follow, and, once the habit is acquired, this meal is scarcely missed. Common sense indicates that food ingested soon after rising is really detrimental to the body and the mind, for the brain and the nervous system are recuperated by the night's rest, and tissue cells have been replaced while the body slept. In fact, the reasoning power is retarded and hampered in its action by the presence of food in the stomach, since the latter calls energy elsewhere and deprives the brain of just so much of its motive power. The whole mental and nervous systems are at their maximum of energy in the early morning; the blood, in its double function, has replaced the waste it has carried away, and the entire human fabric stands at the threshold of the day ready for anything but the process of digesting food. There is no true hunger at this time; habit alone causes fictitious desire.
Hunger determines the hours for the ingestion of food each day. Regularity of habit as to the times for serving meals is an outgrowth of economic convenience, and more often than not the participant is imposing a burden upon a system in no need, therefore with no desire of sustenance. In health, dependent upon occupation, hunger makes demand at least once but not more than twice daily, if the previous demand has been satisfied.
In much that has been written concerning the matter of diet there are so many sweeping and conflicting statements, impossible rules, and foolish conclusions, that no wonder is felt at the fact that the whole subject is usually ignored as too intricate. There are many who try to enforce personal ideas upon others in this connection ; very persistent people these, to whom the term, "crank," may well be applied, and a "crank," who has picked up some scientific jargon and thinks himself cured of his ailments, works more harm than good in the world. This class may be extended to include those who really have been benefited by a diet that happens to suit personal requirements, and it comprises also the one-food people who are in continual search of what not to devour, and who would reduce the universe to whole wheat and pecans. By these, at each encounter with their fellowmen, are discovered disease symptoms identical with their own, for which the same remedy is insisted upon and perhaps applied. It is absurd for any who are not familiar with the chemistry of foods to endeavor to talk learnedly of their action in human economy, and it may be taken as an axiom that, within the individual capacity, which can be known only by individual experiment, a diet limited in variety to not more than three proportioned items at each meal is more conducive to health than unlimited choice or a single dish. A list that is strictly limited to few things trains the stomach to adapt itself accordingly, and eventually trouble ensues when change is attempted.
After all, the amount of food and the kind thereof are of secondary importance to the physical condition of the digestive apparatus of the subject. It must continually be borne in mind that the state of the digestive organs is the crux of the whole situation. Therein lies health or illness. The aim of physician and of patient should constantly be directed at the restoration of the system to health, after which its maintenance in this condition requires careful attention to the selection and to the quantity of food.