Moderately strong, freshly made tea or coffee may be consumed in reasonable quantity.
Vegetable salads are excellent if compounded with liquids other than vinegar or salad oil, and of ingredients other than cucumbers, radishes, and the like.
Take little starchy food and sweetmeats. It may surprise those with "a sweet tooth" to learn that, to the end of the Middle Ages, sugar was used only as
a medicine. Meat must be eaten—if at all—in the very strictest moderation, and never more than once a day. Eggs, fish and poultry—in moderation too—take its place.
Healthy children need very little meat, while it is a moot point if children of unstable, nervous build need any at all. The diet at homes for epileptics is usually vegetarian, and gives excellent results.
Never swallow skin, core, seeds or kernels of fruits, many of which, excellent otherwise, are forbidden because of the irritation caused to stomach and bowels by their seeds or skins.
Bromides are said to give better results if salt is not taken. A little may be used in cooking, if, as is usually the case, the patient has to eat at the common table, but condiments are unnecessary and often irritating to delicate stomachs.
The diet of nervous dyspeptics must be very simple, and though it is trying and monotonous to forgo harmful dainties in favour of wholesome dishes, it is but one of the many limitations Nature inflicts on neuropaths. Many an epileptic, after believing himself cured, has brought on a severe attack by an imprudent meal. La Rochefoucauld says: "Preserving the health by too strict a regimen is a wearisome malady", but it is open to all men to choose whether they will endure the remedy or the disease.
Most men eat six times the minimum and twice the optimum quantity of food per day. For every one who starves, hundreds gorge themselves to death. "Food kills more than famine", and the poor, who eat sparsely from necessity, suffer far less from gout, cancer, rheumatism and other food-aggravated diseases than the rich.
Most books give detailed lists of foods to be eaten and to be avoided, but this we believe is productive of little good.