Among the many problems awaiting solution, none is of greater
importance for the welfare of the individual and of the race than
that which relates to the proper nutrition of the body. Man eats to
live and to gain strength for his daily work, and without sufficient
nutriment the machinery of the body cannot be run smoothly or with
proper efficiency. The taking of an excess of food, on the other hand,
is just as harmful as insufficient nourishment, involving, as it does,
not only wasteful expenditure but, what is even of greater moment, an
expenditure of energy on the part of the body, which may in the long
run prove disastrous. While it is the function of food to supply the
material from which the body can derive the necessary energy for its
varied activities, any excess of food over and above what is needed to
make good the loss incidental to life and daily activity is just so
much of an incubus, which is bound to detract from the smooth running
of the machinery and to diminish the fitness of the body for performing
its normal functions.
A proper physiological condition begets a moral, mental, and physical
fitness which cannot be attained in any other way. Further, it must be
remembered that lack of a proper physiological condition of the body
is more broadly responsible for moral, social, mental, and physical
ills than any other factor that can be named. Poverty and vice on
ultimate analysis may often be traced to a perversion of nutrition.
A healthy state of the body is a necessary concomitant of mental and
moral vigour, as well as of physical strength. Abnormal methods of
living are often the accompaniment or forerunner of vicious tastes
that might never have been developed under more strictly physiological
conditions. Health, strength (mental and physical), and moral tone
alike depend upon the proper fulfilment of the laws of nature, and it
is the manifest duty of a people hoping for the fullest development
of physical, mental, and moral strength to ascertain the character of
these laws with a view to their proper observance. Poverty, crime,
physical ills, and a blunted or perverted moral sense are the penalties
we may be called upon to pay for the disobedience to Nature’s laws;
penalties which not only _we_ may have to pay, but which may be passed
down to succeeding generations, thereby influencing the lives of those
yet unborn.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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