Food and Morals / 6th Edition

by J. F. Clymer

[1] See Appendix, page 30.

Bread leavened, or unleavened, made out of what is called the Cold Blast Whole Wheat Flour, makes more muscle and furnishes more food for the nerves than any other article of food given to man except the pure gluten of wheat. I am not now advocating the views of the extremists, the Grahamites, neither do I counsel the disuse of fine flour bread. This latter should be used in connection with unbolted flour, but should not be relied on to furnish you with all the nutritious elements that your bodies need. There is a golden mean between the extremes of vegetarianism and exclusive flesh diet which the common sense of thoughtful people will find. During the warm season a diet made up chiefly of fruits, grains, and vegetables will be most healthful for body and soul. Instead of the scrofula-breeding pork or ham for breakfast, use some one of the great variety of grains, especially oat-meal, than which there are few better foods for growing children and hard working adults. Instead of fried cakes, rich pastry, and candies, use fruit, of which there is an abundant variety, ten-fold more nourishing than pies or cakes, and very cleansing to the blood. Let brown bread, Johnnie-cake, and corn-meal pudding supplant fine wheat bread as much as possible. Eat your meals regularly and slowly, eating nothing between them. Eat sparingly of meat at mid-day, and let it be good fresh beef, mutton, or fish, well cooked. Let the evening meal be taken not later than six o’clock. Discard tea and coffee, and make your own coffee with browned crusts of bread, or burned whole wheat.[2] Follow these suggestions and you will find very many of the ills of your body departing and very many of the troubles you have in behaving yourselves, vanishing.

[2] The Health Food Company prepare a “Cereal Coffee” from Wheat Gluten and Barley, which not only makes a delicious beverage, but tends to greatly strengthen both body and brain. Those who would release themselves from the dangerous practice of tea-drinking, and the less injurious but still objectionable use of the commercial coffees, will do well to try this nutrient beverage.

Again, we derange our bodies and demoralize our souls by eating too much. The great end of life with many of us is to eat. The American dining-room has become, for the most part, a place for the indulgence of animalism, and not for the development of the affections or social qualities. A distinguished American physician said: “I am sixty-six years old, and I have eaten enough food to answer my wants for 100 years, and yet I am what most people call a small eater.” The popular habit of using, inordinately, appetizers in the shape of the ordinary table condiments, begets a false and unnatural appetite. The time comes when honest food palls upon the depraved senses. The pampered, jaded appetite no longer finds satisfaction in simple food-flavors; the palate must be prompted with pungent things. The cook, who is never a physiologist, responds to the demand for spurs to appetite, and finds them in mixtures of spices and peppers and mustards and acids and essential oils and chemicals, and multitudes of non-food substances. With these, and various biting alcohols, the delicate lining of the stomach is inflamed, inducing a desire for food which passes for what it is not, namely, honest appetite. The palate demands more food than the stomach can digest or the system assimilate. Poor nature, anxious to do the best she can, adapts herself to the unnatural situation, and forces all the other organs to do the same; and thus we become accustomed to over-eating and do not know it.

That all who accustom themselves to a stimulating diet, to spices and wines and other irritating things, consume too much food, cannot, I think, be gainsayed. The amount and kind of food needed depends upon the individual habits and the kind of waste to be supplied. A wholly idle man should thrive well on cucumbers and water-melons, which are chiefly water; while the hard-working hod-carrier would demand several pounds of solid carbon and nitrogen daily. It is the sedentary, the well-to-do, the man of leisure, who suffers most from over-eating; and it behooves him to carefully avoid all goads and spurs to appetite. With the simplest flavors he is nearly certain to over-eat and thus to suffer. With an appetite stimulated and induced, without corresponding out-door labor to create a genuine need and demand for it, digestive failure and assimilative bankruptcy is only a question of time.

The stomach, overloaded, performs its work imperfectly, and thus imposes on all the organs an extra amount of work, which breaks them down prematurely, causing diseases of every kind, such as nervous headache, sick headache, rush of blood to the head, apoplexy, sore eyes, deafness, erysipelas, neuralgia of the face, decayed teeth, catarrh, bronchitis, asthma, nausea, common colic, congestion of the liver, and a host of other diseases too unpleasant to mention. In some cases there is a disposition of too much fatty matter in the system; and many people suppose that fatness is a sign of healthfulness, which is false. No one needs any more fat on his body than is essential to form cushions for his tendons and muscles; if too much, there is a depletion of strength.

The crowded and overloaded condition of the system makes the body take on very many false manifestations. The irritation produced in an overcharged system manifests itself in different forms in different individuals. In some it produces nervousness, making them rack the flesh off their bones and keeping them poor; and in others it produces sluggishness, retaining defunct matter in the system, making them corpulent. As I have said, our highly-seasoned foods create morbid and abnormal appetites.

As a consequence we eat too much and too often, the system being borne down by overwork in its digestive department, there comes a demand for stimulating drinks and medicines to take off the depression and to keep up tone; and to make ourselves feel good, after having made ourselves feel bad, by improper eating, some of us resort to tea and coffee, and others to alcohol, and then the excitement produced demands a sedative, and some of us smoke and others chew a poisonous weed called tobacco. Thus the poor body, subject to these revulsions of unnatural action in overwork and stimulation and sedation, is goaded to abnormities and unnatural action, sending up to the soul no other influences but those which drive it to moral madness and vicious deeds.

Now, vice is a morbid exhibition of the will. The will is represented through the physical organ, the brain, and the brain is straightway affected by the condition of the body and the state of the blood. The will is that power of the mind by which we put forth volitions and perform actions. If the pressure of bad blood is on the brain, that same pressure is on the will; hence a sick man or a diseased man will do a great many bad things through the power of bad blood on the will. Vice, then, is both the result and cause of physical derangement. Hence that vice of vices, drunkenness.

Drunkenness may be caused by bad physical conditions, brought about by bad habits of eating. Would it not be well for us to look into bad table habits for one of the reasons why so many of our young men become drunkards? May there not be some cause working in the flesh of our youths, driving them to intemperance? May it not be possible that kind fathers and mothers for years have been filling up the awful gap of 40,000 dead drunkards annually by feeding their children upon stimulating, highly-seasoned, innutritious foods? There is no doubt in my mind that every man is a glutton before he is a drunkard. If nature’s laws are violated, a man’s sensations will be all abnormal, and the mainsprings of his life will be befouled, and the result will be irregular and vicious expressions of all the appetites, both for food and drink. I am, therefore, confident that the widespread appetite for intoxicating liquors is largely due to the false relations that the American people hold to their food. We cannot hope much from moral suasion and legal enactments so long as we overlook the physical condition of the drunkard. If you would cure disease or vice effectually, you must shut off that which nourishes them, instead of putting all your force in efforts to antidote them. “Let the wicked forsake his way,” and then turn unto the Lord, and he will have mercy on him, and to our God, and he will abundantly pardon him. There are 200,000 drunkards in the United States, 40,000 of whom go annually to premature graves. There are 20,000 prostitutes, whose average life in their profession is four years. Do you believe this vast army of immortals go willingly to ruin? There are causes lying back of mere perversities of soul in the common every-day dietetic habits of these forlorn ones.