If I did not feel quite certain that the vast majority of those who shall peruse this paragraph would seek from the Health Food Company, or from some of its many agents in various parts of the country, the very able and interesting pamphlets which it mails free to all applicants, I should deem it my duty to allude to other and not less valuable applications of scientific thought to the vast problems involved in the preparation of foods for humanity, from infancy to old age. To adequately describe them all, would require a volume; let me content myself with an allusion to one or two of the many. There is a digestive element existing in the saliva and in the fluid called the “pancreatic juice,” which bears the name of “diastase.” This diastase exists nowhere outside of the animal economy, except in seeds during the process of germination, or sprouting. When the seed, or cereal, or vegetable, is exposed to proper influences of moisture and warmth, such, for example, as are supplied by the earth in spring-time, the process of germination begins, and from the germ diastase is liberated. The function of the diastase thus set free is the conversion of the food elements in the seed into assimilative nutriment for the young and tender plant. It is the digestant of food, whether the thing fed be plant or animal. Now, while physiologists have long been ready to concede that when, as is common in diseased conditions, this important digestant is absent from the saliva and pancreatic juice, the conversion of all starchy foods is suspended, it has not been supposed that diastase has any marked influence upon the emulsification and digestion of food-substances not containing starch, nor had any food-chemist availed himself of the diastase in cereals, if I except the development and possible subsequent retention, to some extent, of diastase in some of the preparations of malt. The Health Food Company develops and employs the cereal diastase in a most effective way. It removes the germinal molecules from wheat and barley, reduces them to powder, forms the powder into a dough, encloses it in a steam-tight vessel and subjects the vessel and contents for a protracted period to a temperature of 150ºF. The latent diastase is thus brought into being, while the low temperature and the close vessel completely prevent its volatilization and loss. The diastatic dough is subsequently dried and powdered, and is then packed and labeled, ready for use, demanding no cooking, and no other preparation than simple moistening with milk or water. Used with milk it is found to prevent that tough and curdy coagulation which renders milk so oppressive, “bilious” and indigestible in many cases. The name given to this diastatic food which I have mentioned, is “The Universal Food,” a name suggested by a leading physician, who believed it to be universally applicable to enfeebled conditions in which better nourishment was needed. It is admirably