1. DIET.
a. Choice of Food.—The young man who is boarding at a restaurant or in a boarding club can modify his diet only within the range of the menu provided. Fortunately, the young man can observe the most important rule of diet, i.e., to eat abstemiously. Wherever one is boarding he can eat temperately; he can avoid highly spiced foods, tea and coffee. The observance of these simple rules will go a long way towards simplifying his sexual problem. It has been discovered by the study of the influence of diet upon sexual appetite, that the heavy eating of rich and highly spiced foods, indulgence in stimulants and narcotics, all tend to excite the sexual desires.
The author presents a menu that would be looked upon as a temperate one for a student:
Breakfast.
Fruit
Well cooked cereal breakfast food with cream or a slice of bacon, an egg, with bread and butter
Glass of milk, cocoa or cereal coffee
Dinner.
Soup
Meat, potatoes and gravy
One vegetable
Dessert:
(Custards, tapioca pudding, rice pudding, gelatin pudding or bread pudding)
Water
Supper.
Creamed potatoes
Salmon or sardines
Bread and butter
Canned or stewed fruit
Cocoa or milk
If lunch is served at noon and dinner at night, the supper and dinner as given above would correspond with lunch and dinner when dinner is served at night.
If the young man is training heavily for foot ball or other heavy athletics in which a training table is provided, he may eat a much heavier diet than the one above outlined, having either eggs or meat three times a day instead of once or twice and larger portions of each food. However, even the man in athletic training needs less food than is customary for men in training to take. If the foot ball teams would eat somewhat less than they do and a smaller proportion of meat, they would be much less likely to "train stale."
b. Stimulants and Narcotics.—It will be noted that no provision is made for coffee or tea in the above menu. The general conditions of life in a student community serve as a sufficient stimulation. Tea and coffee are stimulants, and on general principles, it is not wise to use stimulants unless one needs them. The college student does not need any other stimulant than is afforded by the conditions in a college community.
It may be fairly said that stimulants never benefit anybody who does not need them. On the other hand, they may easily injure a person who does not need them. Coffee for example, or tea, not only does not assist digestion but actually retards it. All stimulants produce a quickening of brain activity which is uniformly followed by a reaction in which the brain activity is either slowed or confused. The coffee drinker is almost certain to experience within an hour after a cup of strong coffee an exhilaration, with heightened brain activity. If one could experience this stimulation without any reaction, it might be advisable, especially for those who need just such stimulation at just such a time. However, when one considers that he cannot experience stimulation without experiencing a compensatory depression, he will see that it certainly does not pay to get the one at the expense of the other, except under unusual conditions.
Now the question may naturally arise: What occasion would justify the drinking of a strong cup of coffee? Suppose that one were due in an examination and that he had only one examination in a day; suppose it came at 8 o'clock. Let the student retire early the night before, rise early, take a walk before breakfast and eat a very light breakfast. He may take a cup of strong unsweetened black coffee with the breakfast. He will find that this coffee proves a strong stimulant, particularly if he has not been using it regularly, and that it produces the stimulation just when he wants it. He will find that he is better able to marshal his thoughts and to recall the various facts that he may need to use in formulating his answers to the examination questions. Under such conditions the author believes that it is justifiable for a student to use coffee. But we must not forget that the coffee is a drug; used for its drug action; used to produce a physiological effect at a definite time. Having produced that effect, one may expect the depression to follow after the examination.
Now the natural tendency, and a tendency which causes many people to pass step by step into an excessive use of this stimulation, is to relieve the depression which follows the first cup of coffee by taking another cup and so on, taking coffee at each meal and perhaps occasionally between meals. While some people of phlegmatic temperament can stand such a drug habit for years without being very seriously injured, it is certainly a habit to be strongly discouraged. A person who does not use coffee or tea regularly, but wishes on rare occasions to get a stimulation, can resort to it to produce that effect, but after having gotten the effect let him get over the depression as best he can, and not relieve it by taking a second cup.