The importance of avoiding constipation will be obvious to those who have followed this account of the process of autointoxication; one should see that his daily bill of fare contains a generous supply of laxative foodstuffs, such as sweet fruits, ripe figs and prunes, acid fruits and fruits juices, fresh vegetables, fats and all grain preparations. It is of the utmost importance that the bowels should move regularly once a day. There is another reason for eating food in the shape of fruits or salads, which is that the body may have a sufficient supply of mineral salts.
Nuts and fruits are a splendid combination, since the fat of the nuts and the sugar of the fruits supply the energy and heat producing substances. Fruit sugar indeed is merely a digested form of starch—the digestive process having been accomplished by the heat of the sun in the ripening of the fruit. Fruits contain no fat and practically no starch, and with the exception of the fig, the banana, and a few others, they contain so small an amount of proteid that that element may be considered practically missing. Fruits are used for the sugar, the acids, and the water they contain. Nuts and fruits may be eaten and digested raw by persons who have sound teeth, and who will thoroughly masticate these foods.
Bananas should never be eaten until they are completely ripe, this condition being shown by the appearance of black or dark brown spots on the skin. When in this condition they are usually thrown into the garbage can by the fruit dealer.
Before eating them, one should scrape off the outside fluff, which is next to the skin, as experiments have shown this to be highly indigestible. Eaten when ripe no fruit is more nutritious or delightful than the banana. The only way in which unripe bananas should be used is baked, the same as apples, when they make a succulent and nutritious dish.
Sweet apples will digest more quickly than any other raw fruit substance; but if eaten raw, apples should be thoroughly ripened, and most thoroughly masticated, else hard pieces of apple will enter the stomach and give rise to fermentation. A mealy apple is considered by physiologists as a food substance almost completely predigested, and ready for absorption. If such an apple is reduced to a smooth pulp by chewing, it will pass out of the stomach within an hour. Baked, sweet apples are digested by persons whose stomachs will not tolerate any other fruit.
The acid of sour apples is an excellent corrective for foul conditions of the stomach, such as exist in biliousness. The germs of typhoid, of cholera, and others likely to produce acute disease, are quickly killed by solutions of citric and malic acids, the acids of the lemon or the apple. The juice of a lemon added to an ounce of water will render that water sterile within half an hour, even though it may contain the germs of typhoid fever and cholera. The antiseptic properties of fruit juice render it exceedingly valuable as a means of killing the germs in the stomach and the alimentary canal; a fact which explains the benefits derived from various “fruit cures,” which have been for many years practiced in Europe, and more recently have been employed in various parts of the United States.
The indigestion which many people complain of as arising from the use of fruit comes not from fruit in itself, but from its improper use in combination with other foods with which it does not agree. It is sometimes supposed, for instance, that fruits conduce to bowel disorders; but the truth is that an exclusive diet of fruit is one of the best known remedies for chronic bowel disorders. Care should be taken, however, to avoid fruit juices which contain a large amount of cane sugar; only the juices of sweet fruits should be employed, or else a mixture of sour and sweet fruit juices without sugar. Raisins, figs, prunes, sweet apples and sweet pears may be mixed with sour fruits. Fruit that is sweetened with sugar to a large extent is indigestible, since cane sugar often proves an irritant: while the combination of cream and sugar which is so often used with many fruits is a very bad one. Fruits should be eaten with vegetables only if both are thoroughly masticated, for the reason that the cellulose in vegetables takes a long time to digest, while fruit takes a very short time, and is held in the stomach and ferments. Fruit combines well with cereal foods, breads, and the like, and with nuts.
Cooking does for grains what the sun does for fruit; it performs a preliminary digestion. In undergoing digestion the starch in food passes through five stages: first, it is converted into amylodextrin, or soluble starch; second, erythrod extrin; third, achroödextrin; fourth, maltose; and fifth, levulose, or fruit sugar. Cooking can carry the starch through the first three of these processes, rendering it ready for almost instant conversion into maltose, on coming into contact with the saliva in mouth and stomach. In the intestine maltose is converted into levulose or fruit sugar and the process of digestion is completed. Modern science has shown by experiments that the preliminary digestive work done by cooking varies greatly with the method of cooking adopted. There are practically three methods used in the cooking of cereals, kettle cooking (that is, boiling and steaming), over cooking, or roasting, and toasting, or dry cooking. Kettle cooking changes the raw starch into soluble starch; in other words, it carries the starch through the first step of the digestive process. Baking, or very prolonged kettle cooking, will convert the starch into erythrodextrin, the second stage of starch digestion. Toasting, or dry cooking, in which the starch is exposed to a temperature of about 300 Fahrenheit, advances the starch one step farther, yet.
One important thing to remember in connection with cooking is that fried foods, the use of which is so prevalent in America is an unmitigated evil. “Of all dietic abominations for which bad cooking is responsible, fried dishes are the most pernicious,” says Dr. Kellogg. “Meat fried, fricasseed, or otherwise cooked in fat, fried bread, fried vegetables, doughnuts, griddle cakes, and all similar combinations of melted fat or other elements of food are most difficult articles of digestion. None but the most stalwart stomach can master such indigestibles. The gastric juice has little more action upon fats than water. Hence a portion of meat or other food saturated with fat is as completely protected from the action of gastric juice as is a foot within a well-oiled boot from the snow and water outside.”
This same reason explains why rich cake, shortened pie crust and pastry generally, as well as warm bread and butter disagree with sick stomachs and are the cause of many diseases. Not only does the interfering with the digestion of the food by its covering of fat set up fermentation, but the chemical changes occasioned in the fat itself develop exceedingly injurious acids which irritate the mucous membrane of the stomach, causing congestion and sometimes even inflammation. The frying-pan is an implement that should be banished from every kitchen in the land.
For many years past America has been deluged with various breakfast foods, the virtues of which have been loudly trumpeted. Yet in the ordinary process of cooking these breakfast foods, oatmeal, cracked wheat, etc., it is seldom that more than half the starch completes even the first stage of conversion. Hence it cannot be acted upon at all by the saliva, which does not begin the process of digestion with raw starch. The use of imperfectly cooked cereals is without doubt responsible for a great share of the dyspepsia prevailing among Americans. Oatmeal porridge, and similar preparations, unless most thoroughly cooked, are not wholesome foods, and when cream and sugar are added, there is a combination calculated to create a marked form of dyspepsia. Cereals must be cooked dry in order to be thoroughly cooked, and when prepared by dry cooking or toasting, they are well adapted to the human stomach, are easily digested and in combination with fruits and nuts, constitute a good dietary. Cereals must not only be cooked dry in order to be promptly digested, but they should also be eaten dry. Experiments show that an ounce of dry, well cooked cereal food when well masticated will produce two ounces of saliva; whereas mush, gruel, and other moist cereal foods cause the secretion of only a very small quantity of saliva, less than one quarter of the amount produced by the same food in a dry state.
In connection with the cooking of cereals, it is well to remember that the chief vegetable proteid, gluten, is also rendered very much more easily digested by thorough cooking. On the other hand, the digestibility of animal proteids, in the form of both meat and eggs, is greatly diminished by cooking.
The potato is another important foodstuff; when it is well cooked it is one of the most nutritious and wholesome of all foods. The starch of the potato is more easily digested than that of cereals, as has been shown by numerous experiments conducted of late in Germany and in America. A good way of preparing potatoes so as to increase their digestibility is to cut them into slices after cooking and then place in an oven until slightly browned; but the admixture of fat of any sort should be avoided.
On the other hand, cabbage is one of those vegetables which is less likely to create stomach trouble when eaten raw than if cooked. The food value of cabbage, however, is so small that it is hardly worth eating, save as a relish. The same remark may be made as to such other foods as celery, spinach, and greens of all sorts. They are only valuable for the sake of the small quantity of mineral salts they contain, and for the sake of adding another taste to the bill of fare. Onions have a higher nutritive value, but this is offset by their containing an irritating volatile oil, which when onions are used too freely may harm the mucous membrane. The onion plays its best part in cookery when used as a flavoring substance.
The mushroom is another article of food, popular among those who can afford it, which modern science shows to be practically unfit for human use. Paradoxically enough, although chemical analysis of mushrooms show them to be so rich in proteids as to earn for them the name of vegetable beefsteak, yet researches have shown that these proteids are not available by the body, and hence that mushrooms have no nutritive value whatsoever.
Milk is commonly considered a wholesome and easily digested food, but this is true only in a modified sense. Thousands of infants die annually because of indigestion set up by the use of cows’ milk, and hundreds of adults are more or less injured by the too free use of unsterilized cows’ milk, which produces biliousness, sick headache, inactive bowels and a variety of other disturbances. These are not alone due to the toughness of the curds which are formed by milk, and which set up fermentative and putrefactive processes in the stomach unless the milk is thoroughly cooked beforehand.
Federal departments at Washington were, not long ago, almost crippled by the prevalence of typhoid fever among the employees; and the public health service under Surgeon-General Walter Wyman traced more than ten per cent. of the cases to the milk supply. Professor Lafayette B. Mendel of the Sheffield Scientific School of Yale University, told one of the writers of this book that he went to a certain city that had suffered an epidemic of typhoid, and made a map showing each house that had contained a case of typhoid fever. He made a similar map showing the houses where certain milkmen stopped—and the two maps were almost completely identical. It has also been established beyond a doubt that tuberculosis is communicated from the cow to the human being, and in certain sections of the world it is believed that milk from tubercular cows is the chief channel of infection. It has been shown that even if the udder of a cow be healthy, a tubercular cow may give infected milk, and that the presence of a single tubercular cow in a herd may be responsible for the infection of the milk of healthy animals. Several international medical congresses have lately declared that all milk should be boiled in order to kill the germs.
The United States Department of Agriculture issued in Circular No. 111 of the Bureau of Animal Industry, and in Circular No. 114, the recommendations made by a conference of some twenty of the foremost scientists of the United States, and few more important documents concerning the public health have ever been issued by a government. In brief, these recommendations may be thus stated: Raw milk is highly dangerous. Boiling or pasteurizing kills the disease germs and makes the milk safe without seriously impairing the taste or digestibility. Milk produced under the most ideal conditions, such as “certified” milk, is only relatively safe. Pasteurization, when properly done, makes the milk absolutely safe.
Butter, of course, is subject to all the arguments that can be advanced against milk, with the additional one that it is even more subject to infection with germs than milk itself, since the time that elapses between its manufacture and its consumption is usually far longer than the time that elapses between the drawing of milk from the cow and its use. Only butter that is made from sterilized cream should be used.
Cheese, of course, is open to all the objections urged against unsterilized milk and butter, and in addition has a disagreeable quality all its own. The cheese eater may at any time swallow a serious or even a fatal dose of “cheese poisons,” which are substances produced in cheese by the action of germs. These are not ordinarily present in sufficient quantity to render their presence apparent; nevertheless, a great number of cases of cheese poisoning are annually reported by various boards of health all over the country. Cheese made from sterilized milk is less open to these objections. A delicious cottage cheese may be made from Yogurt milk.
The too free use of sugar at the table and in cooking, not only in its pure form, but in the shape of preserves, syrups and sweet beverages, has been shown to be a most prolific source of injury to the stomach. Sorghum, maple sugar, and maple syrup are essentially the same as cane sugar and molasses. It has been shown that if we eat freely of fruits we will obtain all the sugar our system requires in a form that is easily digestible.
The constitution needs quite a good deal of fat; wholesome fats are contained in nuts, and in cereals, and are also provided liberally by ripe olives and olive oil. Emulsified fats are those in which the minute particles are broken up; and these are far more readily absorbed by the tissues of the body. The fat in ripe olives is emulsified fat—as likewise is olive oil when used in mayonnaise dressing. It should not be mixed with vinegar, however, as vinegar is an irritating substance that works harm, when used freely, to the mucous membrane of the stomach. Lemon juice is not only much safer, but makes a much more delicious dressing.
The objection which applies to vinegar, applies also to pepper, mustard, and other condiments and spices.
The too free use of salt, of which nearly everyone is guilty, is another habit upon which modern physiologists frown. While salt is essential, it is contained as an element in many foods, and there is no more reason why it should be sprinkled upon each and every article of food that is taken than we should have castors containing all the other kinds of inorganic salts, that the system needs, and which are supplied to it in fresh foods. Salt using is merely a habit, and a disastrous one, since it has been shown to be one of the factors in the causation of kidney troubles, such as Bright’s disease.
The large use of glucose in the form of candy, syrups, adulterated honey, and various sweets which are in common use, is said by physiologists to be responsible for a large number of cases of diabetes, a disease which is rapidly increasing in America. There is now produced a malt sugar, called malt honey or “meltose,” which can be used freely for all the purposes that cane sugar is used.
The case of food reform against fish would merely lead to the relating of the arguments against meat. Fish contains nearly seven per cent. of uric acid. It is exposed like meat to the presence of tape worms and other parasites. Even when fresh out of the water its flesh is filled with fatigue poisons, the result of its struggles to escape from the net or the hook; and Mosso of Turin and other authorities have shown that these fatigue toxins have a bad effect upon the body. No food will so quickly decompose and putrefy as fish, and unless perfectly fresh it will always be found full of the putrefactive bacteria which are the active agents in causing autointoxication.
It may be stated, however, that the person who follows that careful and helpful mode of eating recommended and practiced with such marked benefits by Horace Fletcher and his converts, will assuredly minimize the dangers that lurk unsuspected by the uninformed in many of our commonly used foods, and will derive a greater benefit from all food than it is possible for those to gain who eat in the hasty and careless fashion characteristic of most Americans.