I replied as follows: “The reason I recommend ripe uncooked fruit—in spite of its containing a certain quantity of sugar—is that it contains also purifying salts, and that for most people it is the pleasantest form in which these salts can be taken. Moreover, fruit sugar appears to be more wholesome than that formed from starch. When you say that ‘fruit is mostly sugar,’ are you not leaving the water of the fruit out of account? As the water often amounts to 90 per cent. this makes all the difference. Taking the fruits generally grown in this country the average proportion of sugar is seven per cent.
[This statement is based on the following figures given in Goodale's Physiological Botany:—
| Apples | contain | 7.73 per cent. sugar |
| Pears | " | 8.26 " " |
| Plums | " | 3.56 " " |
| Strawberries | 6.28 " " | |
| Gooseberries | 7.03 " " |
Grapes are stated to contain 24.36 per cent, but often contain much less and sometimes even more.]
“Now a person eating fruit ad lib., but allowed other foods, will hardly ever eat more than a pound or two a day (generally less). But suppose him to eat two pounds. Seven per cent. of this is 2¼ oz. If he eats only 1 lb. he takes 1⅛ oz. sugar. Now compare this with the amount he gets from starchy foods, say, bread, which contains fifty per cent. of starch and sugar. As the starch, if it is to be assimilated, must be (and as a general rule practically all is) converted into sugar during digestion, we get from 1 lb. of bread 8 oz. of sugar (to be exact, nearly 9 oz., because starch forms rather more than its own weight of sugar). But the weight of bread allowed for daily food, if no other starchy or sugary food is taken, is—according to orthodox physiology books—1 lb., 11 oz., yielding over 14 oz. of sugar. Now I reduce the starchy food to 8 oz. or less (No Rheumatism, p. 34), yielding at most about 4½ oz. of sugar. You see, then, that the patient can now afford to take even 2 lbs. of fruit, because this will bring his total of sugar up to only 6¾ oz., as against 14 oz. allowed by the orthodox. And if, as I recommend (p. 33), fruits containing but little sugar (especially cucumbers) are taken, his total sugar under my regime will be even less than 6¾ oz.
“As so many people fail to distinguish between fruit sugar occurring naturally in fruit and ordinary separated and concentrated cane sugar, or even beet sugar separated by various chemicals—‘shop sugar,’ in fact—I translate for you a passage from Dr Carton's Trois Aliments Meurtriers[20]:—
[20] Some Popular Foodstuffs Exposed, translated by D.M. Richardson. 1s. net. Daniel.
“‘Let us proceed now to the study of the third deadly food. The sugar contained in vegetables and raw fruits is a living aliment, physiologically combined with the protoplasm of the vegetable cells, associated with ferments and with vitalised chemical salts. The absorption of this natural sugar is effected by a harmonious contact, by an exchange of energy between the living vegetable cells and our living digestive cells.
“‘The sugar of commerce, on the contrary, is a dead food which has lost all association with vegetable protoplasm, with vitalised mineral salts and with oxidising ferments which would render it physiological. It is nothing more than a drug, a dangerous chemical, because Nature has nowhere presented it to us in this form.... Its absorption involves an anti-physiological irritation which over-excites the viscera, and when repeated ends by profoundly altering them.’”
“This is all very well,” cries Pseudo-Science, “but people may eat too much fruit.”