And if I take Don Confrere right,
Pudding and beef make Britons fight.”
If, therefore, our meat has something to do with our morals, or if our food in some way affects our faith, it seems to me that many of our efforts at moral reform ought to be preceded by instruction in hygiene. In other words, efforts to make a man genuinely devotional ought to be prefaced by efforts to correct bad dietetic habits. A father, by prayer and precept and flogging, had done his best to reform his boy, whose staple diet was meat and sausage and pie and cake at his meals, with lunch between. The family physician said to the father, “If you will put a leech back of each of your boy’s ears once a week for a month, you will do more to reform him than your preaching and pounding will do in a year.” The father asked for the philosophy of this prescription. “Why,” said the doctor, “your boy has bad blood, and too much of it; he must behave badly or he would burst.” “Then,” said the father, “I’ll change his diet from beef and pie to hominy and milk.” In three months thereafter a better boy for his age could not be found in the neighborhood. The acrid, biting, evil blood had not become food for leeches, but it had done its wicked work and passed away, and a cooler, blander, purer, safer blood had been supplied from sweeter, gentler food sources.
In your use of animal food be very particular as to quality and quantity. Lamb and mutton are considered the most healthy by the authorities. Avoid as you would contagion the use of pork, unless you raise it yourselves, and feed it with good grain, and not the refuse of the house or barn, and keep the animals as clean as you do your pet dogs. Never fry your meat with hogs’ lard, but stew, bake, boil, or broil it. Use hogs’ lard in no form for cooking. Most of it is said to be reeking with scrofulous elements. Displace it in all your cooking by milk or butter. If you want to aid and not hinder the growth of your soul Godward, if you desire to have pure thoughts and a pure heart and a pure life, see that you make your blood out of pure food, or you will find that your soul will have an enemy within the castle of its body more treacherous and deadly than any of its enemies without.
There is another popular article of food among us, which has a vital connection with bodily disorders and bad exhibition of character. Good in proper quantities and in its sphere, when made the largest and chief article of diet, for every meal, the one kind of food upon which we depend most for building up the wastes of our bodies, it indirectly does great damage. I refer to the ordinary fine flour bread made out of bolted wheat meal.
It is proper to remember that the white flour from which our bread is chiefly made, and which is deemed the staff of life, is a purely artificial product—a selection from that perfect food combination which exists in wheat. A competent food chemist has compared the regular milling processes to one by which the fat part of an ox should be saved for food, and the lean part—the albuminous or nitrogenous portion—discarded and given to the dogs. The comparison is well based, since the starch of wheat, which is valued because of its whiteness, is a carbo-hydrate, chemically allied to the fat of meat; while the dark nutriment of wheat, which, because of its color, is discarded with the bran with which it is found in contact in nature, is a vegetable nitrogenous albumen, rich in mineral elements, and almost identical, chemically, with the lean or muscular tissue of beef.
The process of bolting or refining takes from the wheat most of the phosphates and nitrates, the elements that are chiefly required for making nerves, muscles, bones, and brains. The phosphates and nitrates being removed by bolting, very little remains in the flour except the starchy carbonates, the heat and fat producing elements. The use of fine flour bread as a staple article of food introduces too much heat and fat-producing elements into the system, and where there is too much carbon or heating substance, it tends rather to provoke the system to unnatural and abnormal action, and instead of serving as an element to warm the body, its tendency is to burn or consume, heating and irritating all the organs, getting one into that state which is popularly known as “hot-blooded.” The fine white flour ordinarily used has two-thirds of the nitrogenous and mineral nutriment that God put in the wheat taken out. Unless these deficiencies are made up by some other foods, the exclusive use of fine flour bread will leave the nerves and bones poorly nourished, producing in some systems nervousness, dyspepsia, and all the physical ills that follow these diseases, together with impatience, fretfulness, and irritability. God intended that all the nutritive properties He put in the wheat should stay in it for purposes of symmetrical nourishment. Fine flour bread may be used for purposes of producing heat in the system, but it does not feed hungry nerves or starving bones.
One reason why children fed chiefly on white bread feel hungry nearly all the time, and demand so much food between meals, is found in the fact that their bodies are insufficiently nourished. Their bones and nerves not receiving the nitrates and phosphates they need, are suffering from hunger.
When children are fed with food that thoroughly nourishes their whole system, they will seldom desire to eat between meals and thus retard the process of digestion and lay the foundation for dyspepsia and all its kindred evils.
Flour made of all the nutriment of pure white wheat, unbolted, yet without the shell or husk or bran, contains all the elements necessary for the nourishment of the body. The flour called Graham flour rarely contains these elements. There is a great deal of bogus stuff in the market, which has brought the genuine article into disrepute, and made many thoughtful people disgusted with everything in that line. Very much that is called Graham flour is made up of a mixture of fine bolted flour, and the woody fibre of the wheat, which has no nutriment in it at all. This wretched fabrication has tended to make all whole wheat products unpopular. The woody bran is worse than worthless as food, or to mix with food. You might as well eat the shells of nuts, or the husks of corn, or the skins of potatoes, as the silex coats of wheat. To overload the alimentary canal with such foreign indigestible matter has no other tendency but to weaken and debilitate it. Very few millers trouble themselves to make a perfect whole wheat flour. I know but one establishment in the world where wheat and other grains are treated precisely as they should be, with all the harmful part removed and the rest made digestible by harmless methods, and that is the Health Food Company of New York.[1]