Years ago, the late Dr. Forbes Ross told me that, when he was medical
superintendent of a certain Asylum, he found that the patients were
very violent on Thursday afternoons. On Thursdays, at the mid-day
meal, they had Beef-Extract. He forbade this, and at once the Thursday
afternoon violence ceased. In my own case, the depression of years
ceased when I gave up flesh-foods and meat-extracts more than 23 years
ago.
This does not mean that such foods are a cause of non-happiness in all
cases. Still less does it mean that they are the sole cause, or even
the main cause, in all cases. Many haphazard “vegetarians” have been
miserable.
It rather means that some better Diet may be an important factor in
Happiness.
The general idea of Diet, for producing or increasing mental and
physical Well-Being, which includes Happiness, would surely be to get
first such a régime as shall clear out the clogging and depressing or
irritating toxins and waste-matters, and shall not add to them, but
shall re-build a clean and healthy body and mind by a better _Balance_
of the various Food Elements.
The Drinks, in order to increase the Well-Being and the subsequent
Happiness, should be cleansing, and should include the minimum of
undesirable elements (whether overstimulating, or narcotic).
There is no need here to explain how Food and Drink affect the mind.
We all know some of the depressing effects of “Liver,” Indigestion,
Constipation, etc., and the partial dependence of these troubles on the
Food and Drinks. But few who have not studied the subject as I have
been enabled to do, thanks partly to my work with the leading Clinical
Analytical Expert, Mr. C. H. Collings,[C] could guess how some of the
most common and respectable errors of Food and Drink--such as excess
of starchy and sugary stuff, of fruit, of tea or coffee or cocoa, and
so on--can produce non-Health and consequent Non-Happiness, partly
by affecting the Brain and the Solar Plexus through tissue-storage of
toxins and Toxœmia or an acid and poisoned bloodstream.
There are thousands who imagine that, because most of their “civilised”
acquaintances regularly take certain meals as a matter of course,
therefore these meals must of necessity be “all right”; not knowing
that Nature does not withhold from us her results according to
Law--often called her “punishments”--merely because large numbers of
other individuals are making similar mistakes! To be orthodox in life
is not the same thing as to be immune from the effects of orthodox
mistakes.
I could show letter after letter that tells how, beside better Foods
and Drinks, simple Water-treatments, and various Exercises have tended
to Health and Happiness. There are Exercises (like those in “Economy
of Energy,” pp. 79, 83, 86, 87, 90, 94, 97) which help improve the
Position of the body, the fulness and the rhythm of the Breathing, the
economy of the muscles, by Relaxing and so forth. There are Stretching
Exercises, Foot-Exercises, Trunk-Exercises, Athletic Exercises, and so
on.
But one or two items must suffice here, as mere examples of how
attention to physical acts may influence the state of the mind.