"Ease" and "Dis-ease"
Since symptoms are really the language of Nature, if we learn to interpret them, we need never err in diagnosis, and consequently never err in getting directly at the causes, as we must do in order to "cure." A drug that could cure a disorder caused by wrong feeding would perform a miracle. It would reverse one of the fixed laws of the universe. It would produce an effect without a cause. Nature works along the lines of least resistance, and points out with unerring certainty the best, the cheapest, and the easiest way to live. Health was originally called "ease." People who did not have health were in disgrace or "dis-eased."
HOW TO MAKE HUMAN NUTRITION A SCIENCE
Human nutrition cannot be made a science under the conventional methods of omnivorous eating—eating anything and everything without thought or reason. Nutrition can only be made a science by limiting the articles of food to such things as will reproduce all the chemical elements of the human body, mentioned at the beginning of this lesson.
The further we remove foods from their natural state, the more difficult becomes their analysis, their reliability, and a knowledge of their chemistry, therefore the menus that appear in this work include only the foods that will give to the body the best elements of nutrition.
Prepared foods unscientific
There is but little difficulty in ascertaining the chemistry of natural foods, but when they have been preserved, pickled, canned, smoked, evaporated, milled, roasted, toasted, oiled, boiled, baked, mixed, flavored, sweetened, salted, soured and put into the popular commercial forms, it becomes very difficult, if not impossible, to know what we are eating, or to estimate the results.
Man is the net product of what he eats and drinks. Food bears very much the same relation to him that soil does to vegetation. The following questions, therefore, should be solved by every one who believes that success and happiness depend upon health and vitality:
1 How to select and how to combine foods which will give to the body a natural result, which is health
2 How to select and how to combine foods so that they will counteract and remove the causes of dis-ease
3 How to select foods which contain all the chemical elements of the body, and how to combine and proportion them at each meal so that they will chemically harmonize
4 How to determine the quantity of food to be taken each day, or at each meal, that will give to the body all the nourishment it is capable of assimilating
Note: Too much food, even of the right kind, defeats this purpose and produces just the opposite result.