Aside from emotional storms, great nervous shocks, inoculation (vaccination), and violent exposure, nearly all diseases can be traced back to the stomach, or errors in eating. Even in cases of exposure, vaccination, or contagion, if the digestion and the assimilation of food, and the elimination of waste are perfect, the body will have the power to resist nearly all these causes of disease. Curing disease, therefore, by scientific feeding, is merely a method of removing causes and _giving Nature a chance_ to restore normality. [Sidenote: Foods that ferment make inferior flesh] Food that sours, ferments, or that does not digest within Nature's time-limit, cannot make good bone and brain. A defective digestion that converts food into poisonous gases in the intestinal canal will make inferior flesh and blood, just as any other defective machine will turn out inferior work. This is the natural law governing all animal life. [Sidenote: Nature's protest against unsuitable building material] Millions of learned people admit that good specimens of men and women can be constructed only out of good building material. They admit that the quality of a man, like that of a house, or a machine, depends upon the kind of material used in his construction; and yet they allow this important material to be selected and prepared by the most ignorant and unlearned, and they take it into their bodies with a childish thoughtlessness that is amazing; and when Nature imposes her penalty for violating her laws, they seek a remedy in drugs and medicines, and these are applied only to the symptoms which are merely the protest Nature is uttering. Thus a powerful drug silences or kills the friendly messenger who brought the timely warning, but the cause still remains. Suppose houses, ships, and machinery were constructed and repaired after this plan! NATURAL LAWS DEMAND OBEDIENCE Recompense for obedience to natural law, and punishment for its violation, are the invariable order of the universe, and are nowhere so effectively and emphatically demonstrated as in the cause and cure of the condition called disease. There are certain laws which, if obeyed, will build the human body to its highest efficiency of energy, vitality and strength; but in order to obey these laws, one must know them, and in order to know them one must pass through the long and arduous mill of experience, or else learn from one who has done so. Pain is a warning that something is wrong with the human mechanism, and he who tries to silence this signal with medicine will be punished for two wrongs instead of one. Nature tolerates no trifling, no deception; her laws are inexorable, her penalties inevitable. [Sidenote: Treating symptoms instead of causes]