How to Eat: A Cure for "Nerves"Hinkle, Thomas C. (Thomas Clark)
Science
How to Eat: A Cure for "Nerves"
Hinkle, Thomas C. (Thomas Clark)
Diet in disease; Nervous system -- Diseases; Nervous system -- Hygiene
Personally I do not believe in Christian Science--physicians of the
Regular school do not believe in it; but do you know that when a
physician says to a sufferer from "nerves," "It's all nonsense about
what you eat hurting you; eat anything you want and then forget about
it," that physician is fully endorsing Christian Science. He is telling
the person to whom he is talking that there is no such thing as physical
suffering. Of course, such a physician is nothing but a fool. Yet that's
why so many of these people turn to Christian Science. Yes, that is
exactly why they try it. It bolsters up a sufferer for a time just as
contact with a magnetic and hopeful personality may for a time bolster
one up. But such persons almost always go back to the sanitariums.
"Nerves" is not a mental disease; that is, the seat of the trouble is
not mental but physical, and the mental phase of "nerves" is only a
symptom, or rather one of the symptoms of the disease.
We people who have gone down into the dark valley have experienced a
million, more or less, different kinds of feelings. I fully believe one
half of the American people are the offspring of nervous parents. This
means that there are fifty-five million of this nervous type of
Americans. This type includes people all the way from the man in an
office who gets angry quickly, to the individual who is in a state of
complete collapse. And the man who is afflicted with nothing more than a
quick temper, or is living under high nervous tension, is liable to
beget children who will suffer from the malady in a far worse degree
than ever he will, unless, indeed, he eats only the things he should eat
and observes a number of other rules besides the two I have already laid
down.
Now, the ideal diet for nervous people is a slightly modified vegetarian
diet. To be specific, it is a Lacto-vegetarian diet minus eggs. There
are, however, two things included in this diet that I would warn one in
the beginning to eat of sparingly. These are bananas and cooked cabbage.
If they agree with you, well and good; but if they do not, let them
strictly alone.
Eat all kinds of vegetables, both fresh and cooked. Eat all kinds of
fruits, especially fresh fruits. There is an old saying and a good one,
"An apple a day keeps the doctor away."
There are a thousand ways to prepare vegetables and fruits for the
table, and there are a number of books that give good recipes. If a
nervous individual has never yet had a breakdown I believe he can safely
eat most of the vegetarian dishes that have eggs in them, but it would
be a serious mistake to select the special dishes that contain eggs and
live on those just because they contain eggs.
I believe, too, that after a nervous person is restored to health, if he
strictly observes the rules of eating sparingly and of chewing all food
to a cream, he may safely try out such courses as are found in
_Bardsley's Recipes for Food Reformers_ or _Broadbent's Forty Vegetarian
Dinners_.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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