Part 2

The former custom of employing a physician as a retainer had its distinct advantage, his duty being to instruct in right living so as to avoid disease rather than to cure it. To-day scientific instruction in food and hygiene is within the reach of all, and every mother and teacher is a retainer, or guard of the health of those in her charge.

Happily, the United States Government, realizing that its power as a nation depends upon the strength and health of its citizens, has established experimental and analytical food departments. As a result of the findings of the governmental chemists, there was enacted in 1906, the Food and Drug Act, which aims to raise the standard of food purity, by prescribing the conditions under which foods may be manufactured and sold. The law compels the maker of artificially colored or preserved food products to correctly label his goods. The national law was the instigation of state laws, which have further helped to insure a supply of pure food products.

Every particle of body substance is constantly changing. The new material for cells and tissues, the substance to supply the energy needed in the metabolic work of tearing down and rebuilding, the energy used in the digestive process of converting the food into condition to be assimilated, and the energy used in muscular, brain, and nerve movement, must all be supplied by food. Every brain effort in the process of thinking, every motion, and every muscular movement requires energy which the food must supply.

Brain workers, or habitual worriers, use up force and become thin quite as quickly as those whose work is muscular. The term “brain workers” is commonly applied to professional men or women,—to authors, editors, teachers, or to those engaged in business, but the woman who manages her household judiciously, or the woman who spends her life fretting over existing conditions, or worrying over things which never happen, uses quite as much brain force. The difference is that the former accomplish results outside of themselves, while the latter simply stirs up disagreeable conditions within, resulting in physical ills.

The whole problem of perfect health and efficient activity is in keeping the supply assimilated food equal to the demand, in keeping a forceful circulation that the nourishment may freely reach all tissues and the waste be eliminated, and in full breathing habits that sufficient oxygen be supplied to put the waste in condition for elimination.

The body is certainly a marvelous machine! It is self-building, self-repairing, and, to a degree, self-regulating.

It appropriates to its use foodstuffs for growth and for repair.

It eliminates its waste.

It supplies the energy for rebuilding, and eliminating this waste.

It directs its own emotions.

It supplies the energy for these emotions.

It discriminates in the selection of food and casts out refuse and food not needed.

It forms brain cells and creates mental force with which to control the organism.

It keeps in repair the nerves, which are the telegraph wires connecting the brain with all parts of the body.

It converts the potential energy in the food into heat with which to keep itself warm.

Withal it is not left free to do its work automatically. It has within it a higher intelligence, a spiritual force, which may definitely hamper its workings by getting a wrong control of the telegraph wires, thus interfering with the digestion, the heart action, the lungs and all metabolic changes. The right exercise of this higher intelligence, in turn, depends upon the condition of the body, because when the mechanism of the body is out of repair it hampers mental and spiritual control. Surely man is marvelously made!

The intelligent care of the body,—the temple through which the soul communicates with material conditions,—is a Christian duty. “The priest with liver trouble and the parishioner with indigestion, do not evidence that skilled Christian living so essential to the higher life.”

Certain it is that improper foods affect the disposition, retard the spiritual growth and change the drift of one’s life and of the lives about one.

Man has become so engrossed and hedged about with the complex demands of social, civic, and domestic life, all of which call for undue energy and annoyance and lead him into careless or extravagant habits of eating and living, that he forgets to apply the intelligence which he puts into his business to the care of the machine which does the work. Yet the simple laws of nature in the care of the body, are plainer and easier to follow than the complex habits which he forms. The “simple life” embraces the habits of eating as well as the habits of doing and of thinking.

FOOTNOTES:

It is impossible in this book to go into the anatomy and physiology of digestion exhaustively.—The reader is respectfully referred to Miss Cocroft’s book upon “The Vital Organs: their Use and Abuse.” This traces the food through the digestive canal, indicating the juices which act upon it, putting it into a necessary state to be absorbed by the body and appropriated to its various uses.

PURPOSES OF FOOD

The purposes of food are:

To supply the material of which the body is made.

To rebuild tissue, which is constantly being torn down and eliminated.

To produce heat, and to supply muscular and mental energy.

Let us discuss these purposes in above order.

By food supply is meant not only that the proper foods in kind and quantity be eaten, but that the body be in condition to digest, absorb, and assimilate the foods, and to eliminate the waste, otherwise the foods fail to supply the body needs. It is the nourishment which the body assimilates and appropriates to its needs which counts in food economy.