INTRODUCTION
THE problem of proper nutrition for the body is as vital as any study affecting the morals, health, and consequent power of a nation, since on the quality and quantity of food they assimilate, depend the sustenance, health, and strength of its citizens.
The food eaten by a nation largely determines the character of that nation.
No subject is so vital to the individual, to the family, the community, the nation, as health. No education is so vital as a knowledge of foods, sanitation, hygiene.
Health is the basis of happiness and the attainment of happiness is man’s chief pursuit. The very foundation of national life is the education of its citizens in its preservation. The nation seeks prosperity and happiness—yet true prosperity is based on these fundamentals.
Money can be expended for no object which will yield the nation, or the individual, greater returns than in the acquisition of a knowledge of how to keep well. Health specialists, in the future, will direct their work more to the prevention than to the cure of diseases.
The strongest powers are those which most fully guard the health of their citizens. The endurance of an army lies in the strength of the individual soldier.
The basic work for “preparedness” is in building the bulwarks of physical strength and endurance.
The study of life is of most vital interest. The enjoyment and maintenance of life is inbred. It is intuitive. The infant’s first instinct is the preservation of life; almost immediately he seeks for nourishment.
His body is an ever awakening wonder to him. He begins his education by testing his lungs, by studying his hands, his legs, and his flesh.
The human race spends more time in providing nourishment for the body than in any other line of activity. Yet we are wasteful; we have not studied to make the food yield its greatest nourishment and the body its greatest efficiency.
Unless the system is thoroughly nourished we miss much of the physical satisfaction of life; we miss the joys of mental development, the inspiration of soul, the sense of growth, of freedom, of expansion, and the self-satisfaction of accomplishing. The satisfaction resulting from greatest usefulness and the enjoyment of the results of usefulness, the greatest blessings and the largest measure of life come only to those whose nutriment is proper in quantity and quality, taken properly as to time, and is thoroughly assimilated, because both body and brain are thereby enabled to develop most fully.
The enjoyment of vibrant life, of bodily efficiency, is far beyond the fancied joys of the intemperate or the ascetic.
That one may thoroughly enjoy life in the freedom which comes from perfect activity of bodily functions, it is necessary that proper habits be formed, then the energy of thought is not constantly engaged in deciding what is best. Habit calls for no conscious expenditure of energy.
Nutrition is a broad subject. It means not only that the foods be supplied which contain elements required to rebuild body substance and to create heat and energy, but it embraces, also, the ability of the body to appropriate the foods to its needs.
The study of nutrition in its full sense, therefore, must embrace not only foods, but anatomy and physiology (particularly of the digestive system). A knowledge of chemistry is also necessary that we may know the changes foods undergo in being converted into tissue, heat, and energy.[1] This science is known as Dietetics.
Scientific research along the lines of electricity, psychology, metaphysics, medicine, and art has been tenaciously pursued for centuries; yet scientific study of the natural means of keeping the body in health, that the individual may be in physical, mental, and moral condition to enjoy and to profit by researches made in other lines, has been neglected.
The entire framework of the body—bone, muscle, blood, brain, and nerve—as well as the heat and the mental and physical energy necessary for every motion is supplied from food and drink, and from the oxygen breathed into the lungs.
We are learning that derangements of the body are largely caused by injudicious eating, yet, vital as it is, the subject of foods, except in recent years, has not had a place in the courses of study in our public schools.
We have given much attention to the “pound of cure,” but insufficient attention to the “ounce of prevention.” Man does not enjoy life to its full, nor do his physical or mental efforts yield him his best returns unless his system is thoroughly nourished.
Formerly, the physician gave general directions, or none at all, as to the diet. His directions, when given, were often indefinite because the subject was not definitely understood, due to the fact that the course of instruction in medical colleges contained practically nothing on the subject of foods. This study is not in the curriculum of all of our medical colleges to-day.
Our public-school curriculum contains no more important study than that of health and of the simple, hygienic laws which enable us to retain it. The science of foods in their relation to health, sanitation, and general hygiene should be among the foremost requirements of our public-school courses of study. Mothers’ clubs will find no more interesting or profitable study than Dietetics.
It is coming to be widely recognized that a far larger number of diseases arise from the food habit than from the liquor habit. Many who look with contempt or pity on the victims of alcohol, are themselves diseased of body through the unintelligent use of food.
Habitual overeating not only produces diseases of the digestive organs, from overwork and excessive secretory activity, but also of the excretory and glandular system, as the kidneys and the liver, and may give rise to functional disturbances of the heart.
Food, if taken in greater quantity than the digestive juices can handle, either passes out of the system without being absorbed or it ferments or decomposes, giving rise to constipation, diarrhea, or other intestinal disturbances.
If the stomach and intestines are active and can handle the excess of food, its absorption beyond what the system requires overloads the blood and causes obesity or diseases of the skin and kidneys. It thus brings about abnormal deposits as in gout, or the calculi found in the kidney or the gall-bladder. Biliousness and congestion of the liver may follow, with constant headache, coated tongue, foul breath, and languor of body and of mind.
Many habitually eat too much and take too little fluid, though, due to a greater spread of knowledge, overeating is becoming less common.
On the other hand, an insufficient or illy balanced diet will bring in its train disorders of the system scarcely less harmful. A large number, particularly of young girls, take insufficient food, eat irregularly, and are undernourished.
When one does not eat sufficient food or the proper kind and variety, the tissues of the digestive organs are undernourished and do their work imperfectly.
The undernourished are usually those who work at high tension, those who worry, or those who do not get bodily exercise proportionate to the mental.
Mental workers are liable to become preoccupied and forget to take food. Growing girls who are over-interested in studies, anxious concerning examinations, etc., neglect their meals. Parents are often to blame in these cases by unduly encouraging the intellectual effort.
Members of some religious sects practice undereating as a form of asceticism; many others from poverty are unable to procure a sufficient amount of food.
Too many, if not the majority of those concerned with the purchase and preparation of food, understand but little of food values and the importance of their proper combination. No matter how simple the menu, it should embrace the elements the system needs for its complete sustenance.
The problem of nutrition must be solved largely through chemistry. The health and efficiency of the individual and of the nation depend on careful study of the foods placed on the market, their chemical components, and their possible adulteration.
Happily the United States Government, realizing that its power as a nation depends on the strength and health of its citizens, has established experimental and analytical food departments. As a result of the findings of the government chemists, there was enacted in 1906, the Food and Drugs Act, which has raised the standard of food purity, by prescribing the conditions under which foods may be manufactured and sold. The law compels the maker of artificially colored or preserved food products to correctly label his goods. The national law instigated the passage of various state laws, which have further helped to insure a supply of pure food products; yet we need other laws which shall have greater efficiency and wider scope.
The strength of Germany as a nation is due very largely to the government supervision of foods manufactured and imported.
There is no more important branch of the United States Government than that which protects the health of its citizens.
The custom among some nations of retaining a physician to maintain the health of the family rather than to regain it, to avoid disease rather than to cure it, has its distinct advantages.
We should not be satisfied with anything less than perfect health and we are beginning to realize that this perfect health is a possibility for almost every individual.
In the maintenance of health, as well as in the cure of disease, diet is often more important than drugs.
To-day, scientific knowledge of hygiene and of food values is within the reach of all, and every mother and teacher may learn how to guard the health of those in her charge.
It is necessary to know the comparative values of foods as nutrient agents, in order to maintain our bodies in health and strength, and with economy of digestive effort, as well as efficiency.
There is no study, therefore, more important than that of bodily nutrition, which comprises not only the right proportion of food and drink, but also the manner in which they must be prepared in order to yield the best returns under varying conditions—age, employment, health, and sickness.
The body is certainly a marvelous machine! It is self-building, self-repairing, and, to a degree, self-regulating.
It appropriates to its use foodstuffs for growth and for repair.
It eliminates its waste.
It supplies the energy for rebuilding, and eliminating this waste.
It directs its own emotions.
It supplies the energy for these emotions.
It discriminates in the selection of food and casts out refuse and foodstuffs not needed.
It forms brain cells and creates mental force with which to control the organism.
It keeps in repair the nerves, which are the telegraph wires connecting the brain with all parts of the body.
It converts the potential energy in the food into heat with which to keep itself warm.
Withal it is not left entirely free to do its work automatically. It has within it a higher intelligence, a spiritual force, which may definitely hamper its workings by getting a wrong control of the telegraph wires, thus interfering with the digestion, the heart action, the lungs, and all metabolic changes. The right exercise of this higher intelligence, in turn, depends on the condition of the body, because when the mechanism of the body is out of repair it hampers mental and spiritual control.
About one-third of the food eaten goes to maintain the life of the body in its incessant work of repairing and rebuilding, the remaining two-thirds being held in reserve for other activities.
One of the most remarkable and the least understood of any of the assimilative and absorptive functions, is the ability shown by one part of the body to appropriate from the foods the elements necessary for its own rebuilding, while the same elements pass through other organs untouched. The body has the power, also, not only to make use of the foods, but to use up the blood tissue itself. Just how this is done is also a mystery.
There is surely a great lesson in industry here, and one of the most profound studies in economics, physics, and chemistry.
Habitual worriers use up force and become thin more quickly than those whose work is muscular. Those who spend their lives fretting over existing conditions, or worrying over things which never happen, use up much brain force and create disagreeable conditions within, resulting in digestive ills. These again react on the body and continue the process of impoverishment of the tissues.
Certain it is that improper foods affect the disposition, retard the spiritual growth, and change the current of one’s life and of the lives about one. Therefore the intelligent care of the body—the medium through which the soul communicates with material surroundings—is a Christian duty.
“The priest with liver trouble and the parishioner with indigestion, do not evidence that skilled Christian living so essential to the higher life.”
Man has become so engrossed and hedged about with the complex demands of social, civic, and, domestic life, all of which call for undue energy and annoyance and lead him into careless or extravagant habits of eating and living, that he forgets to apply the intelligence which he puts into his business to the care of the machine which does the work. Yet the simple laws of nature in the care of the body are plainer and easier to follow than the complex habits which he forms.
The “simple life” embraces the habits of eating as well as the habits of doing and of thinking.
The whole problem of perfect health and efficient activity is in keeping the supply of assimilated food equal to the demand, in keeping a forceful circulation that the nourishment may freely reach all tissues and the waste be eliminated, and in full breathing habits that sufficient oxygen be supplied to put the waste in condition for elimination.