I used to think there was. I would discover this or that wonderful new
diet-wrinkle, and I would go round preaching it to all my friends, and
making a general nuisance of myself. And some one would try it, and it
would not work; and often, to my own humiliation, I would discover that
it was not working in my own case half so well as I had thought it was.
By way of setting an ideal, let me give you the example of a young lady
who for six or seven months has been living in our home, and giving
us a chance to observe her dietetic habits. This young lady three
years ago was an anæmic school-teacher, threatened with consumption,
and a victim of continual colds and headaches; miserable and beaten,
with an exopthalmic goitre which was slowly choking her to death. She
fasted eight days, and achieved a perfect cure. She is to-day bright,
alert and athletic; and she lives on about twelve hundred calories
of food a day--one half what I eat, and less than a third of the
old-school dietetic standards. Occasionally she will eat nut butter,
or sweet potato, or some whole wheat crackers with butter, or a dish of
ice-cream; but at least ninety per cent of her food has consisted of
fresh fruit. Meal after meal, day after day, I have seen her eat one
or two bananas and two or three peaches, or say, a slice of watermelon
or canteloupe; at some meals she will eat only the peaches, and then
again she will eat nothing. A dollar a week would pay for all her food;
and on this diet she laughs and talks, reads and thinks, walks and
swims with my wife and myself--a kind of external dietetic conscience,
which we would find it hard to get along without. And tell me, Dr.
Woods Hutchinson, or other scoffer at the "food-faddists," don't you
think that a case like this gives us some right to ask for patient
investigation of our claims? Or will you stand by your pill boxes and
your carving-knives and the rest of your paraphernalia, and compel us
to cure all your patients in spite of you?
THE USE OF MEAT
I am asked many questions as to my attitude toward the question of
meat-eating. I was brought up on a diet of meat, bread and butter,
potatoes, and sweet things. Four years ago when I found myself
desperately run down, suffering from nervousness, insomnia, and
almost incessant headaches, I came upon various articles written by
vegetarians, and I began to suspect that my trouble might be due to
meat. I went away on a camping-trip for several weeks, taking no meat
with me, and because I found that I was a great deal better, I believed
that the meat had been responsible for my trouble. I then visited the
Battle Creek Sanitarium, and became familiar with all their arguments
against meat, and thereafter I did not use it for three years. I called
myself a vegetarian; but at the same time I realized that I differed
from most vegetarians in some important particulars.
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