Multitudes of people are convinced that there is _something wrong_ with their eating. Instead of food giving them the highest degree of mental and physical strength, which it should do, it actually produces ills and bodily disorders; moreover, not knowing the cause, people have no conception of a remedy other than drugs. It is amazing when one thinks how man, for two thousand years, has treated disease. Instead of studying causes and endeavoring to remove them, he has treated symptoms and symptoms only. It is generally known that the practise of medicine consists in treating symptoms rather than causes. For example, nearly all headaches--one of our common afflictions--are caused indirectly by impaired digestion, faulty secretion and excretion, yet the drug stores and Materia Medica (the Bible of the profession), are laden with "headache cures," all of which act only upon the symptoms. The whole system of drugging people when they are sick is merely a method of quieting the signals--of killing or paralyzing the messengers. Most drugs, taken into the human body, are merely diminutive explosives, the effect of which is destructive. They are like a lash cruelly applied to a willing servant who lags from sheer exhaustion. [Sidenote: "Ease" and "Dis-ease"] Since symptoms are really the language of Nature, if we learn to interpret them, we need never err in diagnosis, and consequently never err in getting directly at the causes, as we must do in order to "cure." A drug that could _cure_ a disorder caused by wrong feeding would perform a miracle. _It would reverse one of the fixed laws of the universe. It would produce an effect without a cause._ Nature works along the lines of least resistance, and points out with unerring certainty the best, the cheapest, and the easiest way to live. Health was originally called "ease." People who did not have health were in disgrace or "dis-eased." HOW TO MAKE HUMAN NUTRITION A SCIENCE Human nutrition cannot be made a science under the conventional methods of omnivorous eating--eating anything and everything without thought or reason. Nutrition can only be made a science by limiting the articles of food to such things as will reproduce all the chemical elements of the human body, mentioned at the beginning of this lesson. The further we remove foods from their natural state, the more difficult becomes their analysis, their reliability, and a knowledge of their chemistry, therefore the menus that appear in this work include only the foods that will give to the body the best elements of nutrition. [Sidenote: Prepared foods unscientific]