Nervous Breakdowns and How to Avoid Them

by Charles David Musgrove

Proteids or meat foods, include fish, fowl, butcher’s meat, and vegetables, such as peas, beans and lentils. The problem of meat, and particularly butcher’s meat, is a vital one for all who are getting on in years. So long as people have no organic disease necessitating special diet they cannot go far wrong in regard to fowl, fish, tongue, ham or bacon. It is a different matter when we come to deal with butcher’s meat, for this contains a large proportion of fibre, which constitutes one of the most difficult forms of waste matter to get rid of.

Meat and gout.

And the ill-effects of this waste matter are more pronounced as people get older, for however healthy they may be, their systems become less capable of eliminating it. It is an excellent rule, therefore, for all persons approaching middle age, even for those who have got into the forties, to reduce their allowance of butcher’s meat, especially beef, taking it no oftener than once a day, and preferably at midday instead of in the evening. Digestion goes on very slowly, if at all, during the hours of sleep, and the habit of eating meat at late dinner or supper is one of the chief causes tending to gout and rheumatism of the gouty type.

It is this disease in some phase or other which is the starting-point of so many breakdowns in health. The harmful residue in the system affects almost every organ and tissue, and the arteries in particular. Its most serious effect is on the vessels of the kidney: when once they have become thickened, the elimination of waste matter is reduced to dangerous limits. Then the health of the whole system is imperilled, for one of the most important outlets has become blocked up.

Too often this complication means the beginning of the end, the onset of premature old age. It is on this account, and not from any desire to advocate vegetarianism, that I have emphasised the necessity of diminishing the quantity of butcher’s meat, once the period of early manhood has gone past. In fact, it would be to the benefit of all, young and old alike, to take nothing heavier than fish or fowl at least one or two days a week.

Starchy foods.

Carbohydrates or starchy foods. These include bread, sago, tapioca, rice, and underground vegetables such as potatoes. Bread is the most important of these. It is called the staff of life, and yet it accounts for more dyspepsia than all other causes put together, and for more miserableness than all the incidental troubles and misfortunes of life in one. For there is nothing which depresses a man’s spirits so effectually as dyspepsia, and an overwhelming proportion of cases of this complaint are due to the imperfect digestion of starchy foods, of which bread is the most common.

The saliva.

Starchy foods are dealt with by the saliva, and this, in order to do its work properly, must penetrate to the heart of the granules. And this it cannot do if something else has got there first. People are often surprised when they get indigestion after partaking of bread and milk; that is, bread soaked in hot milk. But the milk has permeated the starch granules, and as two things cannot be in the same place at the same time, the saliva cannot get there.

This explains why bread is the source of so much discomfort. For bread, as it is usually made in this country, is more or less moist, and consequently the saliva has the same difficulty to encounter as in the case of bread and milk. The water has arrived first and keeps the saliva out. If the process were carried on to a further and drier stage, as in the hardbake of the Colonial, we should be able to assimilate it with ease.