| 2.7 | | Walnuts | 15.6 | 62.6 | 7.4 | 2.9 | | Sweet almonds | 24.0 | 54.0 | 10.0 | 3.0 | | Cocoa bean | 6.3 | 50.44 | 4.20 | 2.75 | +------------------------+----------+-------+-----------------+--------+ It is obvious then, that as far as the theoretical reasons for eating food at all are concerned, it is perfectly easy to obtain all the essentials for support without touching animal food, and without in any way loading the stomach with unnecessary bulk; and leaving out of the question, for the present, the economical advantage of adopting these simple foods, there is one enormous advantage which they possess for many. These are they who, especially in town life, and when they are not able to take the requisite amount of exercise, suffer chronically from slight biliousness or congested liver, and the depression attendant thereon, who feel sleepy or fatigued when in better health they would feel neither. Their ailments may rarely or never amount to what they would call “an attack,” but habitually they are slightly clogged. Now in nine cases out of ten this feeling is due to the presence of uric acid in the body, which is produced in larger quantities than the system, without the aid of daily perspiration, which gets rid of acids to a large extent through the skin, can throw off. This uric acid is a product of waste within the body, and the foods which cause it are (to a much larger extent than all others) flesh foods. Many people know this without knowing it; in other words, many men who have an attack of biliousness, lumbago, or gout (all direct results of the presence of uric acid in the body), at once cut off, even without consulting a doctor, their daily consumption of flesh. But then their ignorance makes them suffer, for they most likely in the curtailment of flesh-food do not take enough proteid, with the effect that after a day or two of such treatment they feel lowered. Naturally: they have been starving. And the lowered feeling they put down to the absence of flesh-food, whereas it is chiefly the absence of proteid from which they are suffering. They could easily have avoided this by eating instead of flesh some of the fleshless foods which are valuable in proteid, and they can--humanly speaking--if the abstinence from flesh-foods, as is almost invariably the case, relieves their attack, guard against such attacks in the future, by a diet, complete or modified, of the kind which has relieved them. But, and this is highly important, it is a fatal mistake not to take enough proteid, and not to remember that it is easily possible to eat heavy meals without taking enough. Four or five ounces per diem of proteid, not only swallowed but digested, is said to be the average required.