TASTE OR THEORY?
Fruit and the Oxalic Acid Bogey.
Many and varied are the creeds of Health Reformers, but all may be included within two main camps. And the opposing battle-cries are Instinct versus Intellect, Taste versus Theory, à priori versus à posteriori, Motives versus Purposes. Some overlapping and confusion of creed may be found in both camps, but in the main one is filled with lovers of Nature, the other with devotees of Science.
“We believe in simplicity,” cries the Nature-lover from the meadow where he is taking a sun-bath; “you are so complex, so artificial.”
“We believe in being ‘sensible,’” retorts the devotee of Science from the cabinet where he is taking an electric light bath, “you are so extreme.”
“Not extreme—consistent. Your treatment varies every month as the decrees of ‘Science’ change.”
“But your treatment varies every minute as the wind and clouds change. I can keep mine constant with mathematical accuracy, or vary the light to a nicety by pressing a button.”
And so also is it with regard to diet. The person who talks learnedly about germs and calories (though he never saw a germ or measured a calorie in his life) will be found in the same camp with the electric light advocate, while this other who cultivates a taste in harmony with Nature by consuming what he likes best of her unaltered products, he is found arm in arm with the sun-bather. But Science will by no means allow him to eat his uncooked food in peace. “If we all adopt that diet,” her pseudo-disciples cry, “what is to become of the potatoes?”
Now, with regard to uncooked foods, it would seem that as little fault can be found with ripe fruit in its natural state as with any article of diet. Yet even here “Science” holds up a warning hand and is succeeding in scaring people away from one of the most harmless, most wholesome and most neglected of foods.
Leaving generalities, let us come to a specific case, an actual difficulty propounded to me by a sufferer, one who had spent her substance till she could spend no more in having various parts of herself examined and in learned prescriptions and processes of cure, but who found herself as far from health as ever. Obsessed by certain theories of “Science,” this lady had acquired a dread of sugar in every form. Hence her query addressed to me: “In your book, No Rheumatism, you say that sugar is to be avoided. Why, then, do you recommend fruit, which is mostly sugar?”