“Bread [from wheaten flour], when considered in reference to the amount of nutritious matter it contains, may with justice be called the staff of life; but in regard to the amount of earthy matter, we may with equal justice pronounce it the staff of death.... It is quite right to suppose that nutritious food is necessary to support and strengthen the fœtus; but the nutritious and the solid earthy matter in food are very different substances. Wheaten flour, on account of its containing so much earthy matter, is the most dangerous article a female can live upon, when pregnant. The other grains are bad enough, but better than wheat.... Persons of a dull, cadaverous appearance, with harsh rough skins, who are thin and bony and continually troubled with some complaint or other, I have always found to be greatly attached to a food of a solid, earthy nature, such as bread, puddings, pies, tarts, cakes, and flour preparations in general.... Heavy, clumsy persons, whose movements—when they do move—are stiff and awkward are always great consumers of solid food, especially of bread and pastry of all kinds.... Among children and young persons too, it may be seen that the dull, heavy, ill-tempered ones are mostly great consumers of solid grain foods; while the more active and lively are less anxious for food of a solid character, but mostly fond of light, fluid, saccharine substances.... These facts and many others which could be advanced, all tend to support and prove the position that food and drink alone are the source of the calcareous earthy matter which is generally deposited in the body, and which by degrees brings on a state of induration, rigidity and consequent decreptitude—which ends in a total cessation of consciousness, or death. We have seen that different kinds of food and drink contain these earthy elements in different proportions; and we cannot avoid the conclusion that the more we subsist upon such articles as contain the greatest amount, the sooner shall we choke up and die; and the more we live upon such substances as are comparatively free, the longer will health, activity and life continue.” In the twenty-second and twenty-third chapters of the third book of Herodotus, describing a visit of some Persian ambassadors to the long-lived Ethiopians (Macrobii), the Ethiopians asked what the Persian king was wont to eat, and to what age the longest-lived Persians had been known to attain. They told him that the king ate bread, and described the nature of wheat—adding that eighty years was the longest term of man’s life among the Persians. Hereat, he remarked: “It did not surprise him, if they fed on _dirt_ [bread] that they died so soon! Indeed he was sure that they never would have lived so long as eighty years, except for the refreshment that they got from that drink [meaning the wine], wherein he confessed that Persians surpassed the Ethiopians.”