“Nor on anything else. But if she craves sweets, why not let her have them at the proper time?”
“Well, in my day children ate plain food and were thankful.”
“Hm! I’m a little dubious about the thankfulness. And in your day children died more frequently and more easily than in ours.”
“They weren’t pampered to death on candy, anyway!”
“Possibly they weren’t pampered quite enough. Take the Cherub, here,” he tossed Betty in the air and whisked her to his shoulder. “She’s a perfect little bundle of energy, always in motion. She needs energy-producing food to keep going, coal for that engine. Sugar is almost pure carbon; that is, coal in digestible form. Of course she wants sweets. Her little body is logical.”
“But isn’t it bad for her teeth?” asked Mrs. Clyde.
“No; nor for her last year’s overshoes or her tin dog’s left hind leg,” chuckled the Health Master. “Sometimes I marvel that the race has survived all the superstitions surrounding food and drink.”
“In my father’s household,” said Mr. Clyde, “the family principle was never to drink anything with meals. The mixture of solids and liquids was held to be bad. Another superstition, I suppose.”
“At that rate, bread and milk would be rank poison,” said Dr. Strong. “Next to food, water has got the finest incrustation of old-wives’ warnings. Now, there’s some doubt whether a man should eat whenever he wants to. Appetite, in the highly nervous American organization, is sometimes tricky. But thirst is trustworthy. The normal man is perfectly safe in drinking all the water he wants whenever he wants it.”
“I can still remember the agonies that I suffered when, as a boy, I had scarlet fever, and they would allow me almost no water,” said Mr. Clyde.