PRACTICAL APPLICATION OF DIETARY RULES

While dieticians have ascertained the number of food units daily required by the average person, yet on no point do they reach more thorough agreement than in saying that the average person should not establish any hard and fast rules as to the quantity and kinds of food he consumes. It is really only an invalid, one who is in a physician’s care, who needs to have his food regulated in this precise fashion. The average person should be careful to practice thorough mastication, and should see to it that the proteid part of his meals is not excessive, but he should avoid worrying about his food habits. Any person who fusses and fumes about the kind of foodstuffs and the number of calories they contain, will be apt to cause himself harm; for science has proved by laboratory experiments, which we shall describe later on, that worry, in fact any of the unpleasant emotions, exercises a prohibitive effect upon the flow of digestive juices.

The really important thing to do is to follow a simple dietary, which at the same time is well balanced in its food elements, well cooked, and tastefully served. The housewife will see to it that the foodstuffs she chooses represent more of carbohydrates and fats than of proteids; her guiding rule in this matter being that the proportion of proteids to the other food elements be ten per cent. The United States Department of Agriculture has prepared a list of foodstuffs, comprising all those in common use, which shows the proportion of their constituents, and their total energy value, in calories, per pound of material.

This is “Bulletin No. 28, Revised Edition,” the work of two of the leading physiological chemists of America, W. O. Atwater and A. P. Bryant; and may be had on sending five cents to the Department. We have inserted in the Appendix a selected list of foodstuffs taken from this publication; and we give here a rough classification of foods, from which one can see at a glance their leading elements:

Foodstuffs which are Rich in Proteids

Foodstuffs which are Rich in Fats

Foodstuffs which are Rich in Carbohydrates

Pure Carbohydrates

Foodstuffs which are Rich in Proteids and Fats

Foodstuffs which are Rich in Proteids and Carbohydrates

Foodstuffs which contain all the Food Elements in Fairly Good Proportion

V
HOW FOODS POISON THE BODY

In our survey of the processes and organs of digestion, we saw that after food has traversed the stomach and small intestine it passes into the colon, where it must remain for some considerable time, while the absorption of its digested elements is completed. And this brings us to the most important of the discoveries of the new hygiene. It has been found that some of the foods which human beings eat are loaded with injurious bacteria, and with the poisons which these bacteria produce. And others of them are indigestible, and when they reach the colon, become a source of incubation for countless billions of other bacteria. It was demonstrated by Metchnikoff that these poisons are absorbed into the system, and are the cause of manifold evils. This is the process which is called “autointoxication.”

It would not be regarded as an exaggeration by the leading physiologists of the world to-day to speak of autointoxication as the primary source of nine-tenths of the afflictions from which humanity suffers. Any one would be prepared to admit that the banquet he had attended on the previous night was responsible for the headache which he has on the present morning; but the investigations of bacteriologists have revealed that the food habits of which banquets are typical are responsible for a chronic ailment, of which such diseases as gout, rheumatism, Bright’s disease, consumption, and pneumonia are merely symptoms.