EXPERIMENTS IN DIET
(Narrates the author's adventures in search of health, and his
conclusions as to what to eat.)
Students of the body assure us that every particle of matter which
composes it is changed in the course of seven years. It is obvious that
everything that is a part of the body has at some time to be taken in as
food; so the problem of our diet today is the problem of what our body
shall consist of seven years from now, and probably a great deal sooner.
I begin this discussion by telling my own personal experiences with
food. I am not going to recommend my diet for anyone else; because one
of the first things I have to say about the subject is that every human
individual is a separate diet problem. But I am going to try to
establish a few principles for your guidance, and more especially to
point out the commonest mistakes. I tell about my own mistakes, because
it happens that I know them more intimately.
I was brought up in the South, where it is the custom of people to give
a great deal of time and thought to the subject of eating. Among the
people I knew it was always taken for granted that there should be at
least one person in the kitchen devoting all her time to the preparing
of delicious things for the family to eat. This person was generally a
negress, and, needless to say, she knew nothing about the chemistry of
foods, nothing about their constituents or nutritive qualities. All she
knew was about their taste; she had been trained to prepare them in ways
that tasted best, and was continually being advised and exhorted and
sometimes scolded by the ladies of the family on this subject. At the
table the family and the guests never failed to talk about the food and
its taste, and not infrequently the cook would be behind the door
listening to their comments; or else she would wait until after the
meal, for the report which somebody would bring her.
In addition to this, the ladies of the family were skilled in what is
called "fancy cooking." They did not bother with the meats and
vegetables, but they mixed batter cakes, and made all kinds of elaborate
desserts, and exchanged these treasures and the recipes for them with
other ladies in the neighborhood. In addition to this, there were
certain periods of the week and of the year especially devoted to the
preparing and consuming of great quantities of foods. Once every seven
days the members of the family expressed their worship of their Creator
by eating twice as much as usual; and at another time they celebrated
the birth of their Redeemer by overeating systematically for a period of
two or three weeks. Needless to say, of course, the children brought up
in such an environment all had large appetites and large stomachs, and
their susceptibility to illness was recognized by the setting apart for
them of a whole classification of troubles--"children's diseases," they
were called. In addition to children's diseases, there were coughs and
colds and sore throats and pains in the stomach and constipation and
diarrhea, which the children shared with their adults.
I had a little more than my share of all these troubles. Always a doctor
would be sent for, and always he was wise and impressive, and always I
was impressed. He gave me some pills or a bottle of liquid, a
teaspoonful every two hours, or something like that--I can hear the
teaspoon rattle in the glass as I write. I had a profound respect for
each and every one of those doctors. He was wisdom walking about in
trousers, and whenever he came, I knew that I was going to get well; and
I did, which proved the case completely.
Then I grew up, and at the age of eighteen or nineteen became possessed
of a desire for knowledge, and took to reading and studying literally
every minute of the day and a good part of the night. I seldom let
myself go to sleep before two o'clock in the morning, and was always up
by seven and ready for work again. I did this for ten years or so, until
nature brought me to a complete stop. During these ten years I was a
regular experiment station in health; that is, I had every kind of
common ailment, and had it over and over again, so that I could try all
the ways of curing it, or failing to cure it, and keep on trying until I
was sure, one way or the other. I came recently upon a wonderful saying
by John Burroughs, which will be appreciated by every author. "This
writing is an unnatural business. It makes your head hot and your feet
cold, and it stops the digesting of your food."
This trouble with my digestion began when I was writing my second novel,
camping out on a lonely island at the foot of Lake Ontario. I went to
see a doctor in a nearby town, and he talked learnedly about dyspepsia.
The cause of it, he said, was failure of the stomach to secrete enough
pepsin, and the remedy was to take artificial pepsin, obtained from the
stomach of a pig. He gave me this pig-pepsin in a bottle of red liquid,
and I religiously took some after each meal. It helped for a time; but
then I noticed that it helped less and less. I got so that a simple meal
of cold meat and boiled potatoes would stay in my stomach for hours, in
spite of any amount of the pig-pepsin; I would lie about in misery,
because I wanted to work, and my accursed stomach would not let me.
All the time, of course, I was using my mind on this problem, groping
for causes. I found that the trouble was worse if I worked immediately
after eating. I found also that it was worse when I was writing books.
When I got sufficiently desperate, I would stop writing books and go off
on a hunting trip. I would tramp twenty miles a day over the mountains,
looking for deer, and I would come back at night too tired to think, and
in a week or two every trace of my trouble would be gone. So my life
regimen came to be--first the writing of a book, and then a hunting trip
to get over the effects of it. But as time went on, alas, I noticed that
the recuperation was more slow and less certain. The working times grew
shorter, and the hunting times grew longer, until finally I had got to a
point where I couldn't work at all; I would go to pieces in a few days
if I tried it. It was apparently the end of my stomach, and the end of
my sleeping, and the end of my writing books. My teeth were decaying,
not merely outside but inside; I would have abscesses, and most
frightful agonies to endure. I would lie awake all night, and it would
seem to me that I could feel my body going to pieces--an extremely
depressing sensation!
I had been trying experiments all this time. I had been going to one
doctor after another, and had got to realize that the doctors only
treated symptoms; they treated the "diseases" when they appeared--but
nobody ever told you how to keep the "diseases" from appearing. Why
could there not be a doctor who would look you over thoroughly, and tell
you everything that was wrong with you, and how to set it right? A
doctor who would tell you exactly how to live, so that you might keep
well all the time! I was studying economics, and becoming suspicious of
my fellow man; it occurred to me that possibly it might be embarrassing
to a doctor, if he cured all his patients, and taught them how to live,
so that none of them would ever have to come to him again. It occurred
to me that possibly this might be the reason why "preventive medicine,"
constructive health work, was getting so little attention from the
medical fraternity.
Two things that plagued me were headache and constipation, and they were
obviously related. For constipation, the world had one simple remedy;
you "took something" every night or every morning, and thought no more
about it. My stout and amiable grandmother had drunk a glass of Hunyadi
water every morning for the last thirty or forty years, and that she
finally died of "fatty degeneration of the heart" was not connected with
this in the mind of anyone who knew her. As for the headaches, people
would tell you this, that, and the other remedy, and I would try
them--that is, unless they happened to be drugs. I was getting more and
more shy of drugs. I had some blessed instinct which saved me from
stimulants and narcotics. I had never used tea, coffee, alcohol or
tobacco, and in my worst periods of suffering I never took to putting
myself to sleep with chloral, or to stopping my headaches with
phenacetin.
At the end of six or eight years of purgatory, I came upon a prospectus
of the Battle Creek Sanitarium. This seemed to me exactly what I wanted;
this was constructive, it dealt with the body as a whole. So I spent a
couple of months at the "San," and paid them something like a thousand
dollars to tell me all they could about myself.
The first thing they told me was that meat-eating was killing me. It was
perfectly obvious, was it not, that meat is a horrible feeding place for
germs, that rotten meat is dreadfully offensive, and likewise digested
meat--consider the excreta of cats, for example! I listened solemnly
while Doctor Kellogg read off the numbers of billions of bacteria per
gram in the contents of the colon of a carnivorous person. It certainly
seemed proper that the author of "The Jungle" should be a vegetarian, so
I became one, and did my best to persuade myself that I enjoyed the
taste of the patent meat-substitutes which are served in hundred calory
portions in the big Sanitarium dining-room.
There also I met Horace Fletcher, and learned to chew every particle of
food thirty-two times, and often more. I exercised in the Sanitarium
gymnasium, and watched the sterilized dancing--the men with the men and
the women with the women. I was patiently polite with the Seventh Day
Adventist religion, and laid in a supply of postage stamps on Friday
evening. Finally, and most important of all, I went once a day to the
"treatment rooms," and had my abdomen doctored alternately with hot
cloths and ice. By this means I kept up a flow of blood in the
intestinal tract, and stimulated these organs to activity; so my
constipation was relieved, and my headaches were less severe--so long as
I stayed at the Sanitarium, and was boiled and frozen once every day.
But when I left the Sanitarium, and abandoned the treatments, the
troubles began to return. Meantime, however, I had written a book in
praise of vegetarianism--a book which has got into the libraries, and
cannot be got out again!
I went on to a new variety of health crank, the real "nature cure"
practitioners. Vegetarianism was not enough, they insisted; the evil had
begun long before, when man first ruined his food and destroyed its
nutritive value by means of fire. There was only one certain road to
health, and that was by the raw food route, the monkey and squirrel
diet. I had gone out to California for a winter's rest, and decided I
would give this plan a thorough trial. For five months I lived by
myself, and the only cooked food I ate was shredded wheat biscuit. For
the rest I lived on nuts and salads and fresh and dried fruits; and
during this period I enjoyed such health as I had never known in my life
before. I had literally not a single ailment. I was not merely well, but
bubbling over with health. I had a friend who said it cheered him up
just to see me walk down the street.
I thought that it was entirely the raw food, and that I had solved the
problem forever; but I overlooked the fact that during those five months
I had done no hard brain work, no writing. I went back to writing again,
and things began to go wrong; my wonderful raw foods took to making
trouble in my stomach--and I assure you that until you try, you have no
idea the amount of trouble that can be made in your stomach by a load of
bananas and soaked prunes which has gone wrong! For a year or two I
agonized; I could not give up my wonderful raw food diet, because I had
always before me the vision of those months in California, and could
not understand why it was not that way again.
But the time came when I would eat a meal of raw food, and for hours
afterwards my stomach would feel like a blown-up football. Then somebody
gave me a book by Dr. Salisbury on the subject of the meat diet. Of all
the horrible things in the world, a meat diet sounded to me the worst; I
had been a vegetable enthusiast for three years, and thought of eating
meat as you would think of cannibalism. But there has never been a time
in my life when I would not hear something new, and give it a trial if
it sounded well; so I read the books of Doctor Salisbury, which have
long been out of print, and have been curiously neglected by the medical
profession. Salisbury was a real pioneer, an experimenter. He wrote in
the days before the germ theory, and so missed his guess regarding
tuberculosis, but he perceived that most of the common diseases are
caused by dietetic errors, and he set to work to prove it. He showed
that hog cholera and army diarrhea are the same disease, and come from
the same cause. He took a squad of men and fed them on army biscuit for
two or three weeks, until they were nearly dead, and then he put them on
a diet of lean beef and completely cured them in a few days. He did this
same thing with one kind of food after another, and in each case he
would bring his men as near to death as he dared, and then he would cure
them. He showed that meat is the only food which contains all the
elements of nutrition, the only food upon which a person can live for an
unlimited period. As Salisbury said, "Beef is first, mutton is second,
and the rest nowhere."
It was his idea that tuberculosis of the lungs is caused by spores of
fermenting starch clogging the minute blood vessels. He claimed that
there is an early stage of tuberculosis, in which the spores are
floating in the blood stream; he put large numbers of patients upon a
diet of lean beef, ground and cooked, and he cured them of tuberculosis,
and if one of them would break the diet and yield to a craving for
starch or sugar, Salisbury claimed that he could find it out an hour or
two later by examining a drop of their blood under the microscope. In
his books he described vividly the effects of an excess of starch and
sugar in the diet. He called it "making a yeast-pot of your stomach";
and you can imagine how that hit my stomach, full of half digested
bananas and prunes!
I tried the Salisbury diet, and satisfied myself of this one fact, that
lean meat is for brain-workers the most easily assimilated of all foods.
Salisbury claimed that you could not overeat on meat, but I do not
believe there is any food you cannot overeat on, nor do I believe that
anyone should try to live on one kind of food. We are by nature
omnivorous animals. Our digestive tracts are similar to those of hogs
and monkeys, which eat all varieties of food they can get. One of the
common errors of the nature cure enthusiast is to cite the monkey and
the squirrel as fruit and nut-eating animals, when the fact is that
monkeys and squirrels eat meat when they can get it, and the ardor with
which they go bird-nesting is evidence enough that they crave it. If
there is any race of man which is vegetarian, you will find that it is
from necessity alone. The beautiful South Sea Islanders, who are the
theme of the raw fooders' ecstasy, spend a lot of their time catching
fish, and sometimes they kill a pig, and celebrate the event precisely
as Christians celebrate the birth of their Redeemer.
From this you may be able to guess my conclusions, as the result of much
painful blundering and experimenting. So far as diet is concerned, I
belong to no school; I have learned something from each one, and what I
have learned from a trial of them all is to be shy of extreme statements
and of hard and fast rules. To my vegetarian friends who argue that it
is morally wrong to take sentient life, I answer that they cannot go for
a walk in the country without committing that offense, for they walk on
innumerable bugs and worms. We cannot live without asserting our right
to subject the lower forms of life to our purposes; we kill innumerable
germs when we swallow a glass of grape juice, or for that matter a glass
of plain water. I shall be much surprised if the advance of science does
not some day prove to us that there are rudimentary forms of
consciousness in all vegetable life; so we shall justify the argument of
Mr. Dooley, who said, in reviewing "The Jungle," that he could not see
how it was any less a crime to cut off a young tomato in its prime, or
to murder a whole cradleful of baby peas in the pod!
There is no question that meat-eating is inconvenient, expensive, and
dirty. I have no doubt that some day we shall know enough to be able to
find for every individual a diet which will keep him at the top of his
power, without the maintenance of the slaughter-house. But we do not
possess that knowledge at present; at least, I personally do not possess
it. I happen to be one of those individuals--there are many of
them--with whom milk does not agree; and if you rule out milk and meat,
you find yourself compelled to get a great deal of your protein from
vegetable sources, such as peas, beans and nuts. All these contain a
great deal of starch, and thus there is no way you can arrange your diet
to escape an excess of starch. Excess of starch, so my experience has
convinced me, is the deadliest of all dietetic errors. It is also the
commonest of errors, the cause, not merely of the common throat and nose
infections, but of constipation, and likewise of diarrhea, of anemia,
and thus, through the weakening of the blood stream, of all disorders
that spring from this source--decaying teeth and rheumatism, boils, bad
complexion, and tuberculosis. Starch foods are the cheapest, therefore
they form the common diet of the poor, and are responsible for the
diseases of undernourishment to which the poor are liable.
On the other hand, of course, there are perfectly definite diseases of
overnourishment; high blood pressure, which culminates in apoplexy;
kidney troubles, which result from the inability of these organs to
eliminate all the waste matter that is delivered to them; fatty
degeneration of the heart, or of the liver, or any of the vital organs.
You may cause a headache by clogging the blood stream through
overeating, or you may cause it by eating small quantities of food, if
those foods are unbalanced, and do not contain the mineral elements
necessary to the making of normal blood. Whatever the trouble with your
health, it is my judgment that in two cases out of three you will find
it dates back to errors in diet. I do not think I exaggerate in saying
that a knowledge of what to eat and how much to eat is two-thirds of the
knowledge of how to keep yourself in permanent health.