Too often this complication means the beginning of the end, the onset of premature old age. It is on this account, and not from any desire to advocate vegetarianism, that I have emphasised the necessity of diminishing the quantity of butcher’s meat, once the period of early manhood has gone past. In fact, it would be to the benefit of all, young and old alike, to take nothing heavier than fish or fowl at least one or two days a week. [Sidenote: Starchy foods.] Carbohydrates or starchy foods. These include bread, sago, tapioca, rice, and underground vegetables such as potatoes. Bread is the most important of these. It is called the staff of life, and yet it accounts for more dyspepsia than all other causes put together, and for more miserableness than all the incidental troubles and misfortunes of life in one. For there is nothing which depresses a man’s spirits so effectually as dyspepsia, and an overwhelming proportion of cases of this complaint are due to the imperfect digestion of starchy foods, of which bread is the most common. [Sidenote: The saliva.] Starchy foods are dealt with by the saliva, and this, in order to do its work properly, must penetrate to the heart of the granules. And this it cannot do if something else has got there first. People are often surprised when they get indigestion after partaking of bread and milk; that is, bread soaked in hot milk. But the milk has permeated the starch granules, and as two things cannot be in the same place at the same time, the saliva cannot get there. This explains why bread is the source of so much discomfort. For bread, as it is usually made in this country, is more or less moist, and consequently the saliva has the same difficulty to encounter as in the case of bread and milk. The water has arrived first and keeps the saliva out. If the process were carried on to a further and drier stage, as in the hardbake of the Colonial, we should be able to assimilate it with ease. We are apt to envy the Oriental his capacity for digesting starch. Yet his powers in this direction are due not so much to any inherited faculty on his part as to the way in which the rice is cooked. The glutinous material on the outside of the granules prevents the saliva from penetrating. The Oriental gets rid of it by washing the rice in cold water half-way through the cooking, rubbing it between his hands at the same time. The writer once recommended this plan to a lady who complained of indigestion after eating rice, and told her that if she insisted on its being carried out she would have no further difficulty in the matter. She replied that there would be a great difficulty--the cook would immediately give notice. [Sidenote: The slow poison of dyspepsia.]