Maintaining Health (Formerly Health and Efficiency)

by Rasmus Larssen Alsaker

The weaklings have a better chance to survive to old age, because many of them learn to be careful early in life. In reading the lives of eminent men who have lived long it is common to find that they were never strong.

At the age of one year the baby is generally weaned. The ordinary child needs the mother's milk no longer, for by this time the digestive power is great enough to cope with cow's milk and various starches. The most important problem now is how to feed the child. If no errors of importance are made it will enjoy uninterrupted growth and health. If the errors are many and serious there will surely be disease and too often the abuse is so great that death comes and ends the suffering.

Until the child reaches the age of two years the best foods are milk, whole wheat products and fruits. No other foods are necessary. The simpler the baby's food, and the more naturally and plainly prepared, the better. Adults who overeat until they suffer from jaded appetites, may think that they need great variety of food, but it is never necessary for infants or normal adults. Milk, whole wheat and fruits contain all the elements needed for growth and strength and health. By all means feed simply. Children are perfectly satisfied with bread and milk or simply one kind of fruit at a meal, if they are properly trained. The craving for a great variety of foods at each meal is due to parental mismanagement.

Children should not be fed more than three times a day. There should be no lunching. The children will get all that is good for them, all they need in three meals. Candy should not be given between meals, and fruit is to be looked upon as a food, not as a dainty to be consumed at all hours of the day. If they are not accustomed to lunching, there will be no craving for lunches. If children are used to four or five meals a day they want them and raise annoying objections when deprived of one or two of them. It is easy to get children into bad habits. We can not blame the average mother for giving her children lunches, for she knows no better and sees other mothers doing the same.

The children who do not get lunches thrive better than those who always have candy, fruit or bread and jam at their command. It is the same with adults. In the Dakotas and Minnesota are many Scandinavians and Germans. During the haying and harvest these people, who are naturally very strong, eat four and five times a day. The heat, the excessive amount of food and the great quantities of coffee consumed cause much sickness during and after the season of hard work and heroic eating. The so-called Americans in these communities are generally satisfied with three meals a day, and they are as well nourished and capable of working as those who eat much more.

Refined sugar made from cane and beets should be given to children sparingly. Refined sugar is the chemical which is largely responsible for the perversion of children's tastes. A normal taste is very desirable, for it protects the possessor. A perverted taste, on the contrary, leads him into trouble. Sugar is not a good food. It is an extract. It is easy to cultivate a desire for sugar, but to people who are not accustomed to it, concentrated sugar has an unpleasant taste.

The perversion of the sense of taste, generally begun with sugar, is made worse by the use of much salt, pepper and various condiments and spices. If the child is fed on unnatural food, highly seasoned, at the age of a few years its taste is so perverted that it does not know how most of the common foods really taste, and refuses to eat the best of them when the health-destroying concoctions to which it has been accustomed can be had.

It is natural for children to relish fruit, but some are so perverted in taste that they object to a meal of it if they can get pancakes or waffles with butter and syrup, mushes with sugar and cream, ham or bacon with fried potatoes, or fresh bread and meat with pickles. Many parents allow their children to live on this class of food to the exclusion of all natural foods. Children need a great deal of the natural salts, and when they live so largely on denatured foods there is always physical deterioration. It is true that to the average eye such children may appear healthy, but they are not in one-half as good physical condition as they could be.

Tea and coffee should never be given to children. They are bad enough for adults. In children they retard bodily development. The stimulation and sedation are bad for the nervous system. Coffee is as harmful as tobacco for the growing child.

To warn against alcohol may seem foolish, but some parents really give beer and whiskey to their infants. The beer is given as a beverage and the whiskey as medicine to kill pain and soothe the children. Those who have not seen children abused in this way may find it difficult to believe that there is such a profundity of ignorance. These children die easily.