Human nutrition cannot be made a science under the conventional methods
of omnivorous eating--eating anything and everything without thought or
reason. Nutrition can only be made a science by limiting the articles of
food to such things as will reproduce all the chemical elements of the
human body, mentioned at the beginning of this lesson.
The further we remove foods from their natural state, the more difficult
becomes their analysis, their reliability, and a knowledge of their
chemistry, therefore the menus that appear in this work include only the
foods that will give to the body the best elements of nutrition.
[Sidenote: Prepared foods unscientific]
There is but little difficulty in ascertaining the chemistry of natural
foods, but when they have been preserved, pickled, canned, smoked,
evaporated, milled, roasted, toasted, oiled, boiled, baked, mixed,
flavored, sweetened, salted, soured and put into the popular commercial
forms, it becomes very difficult, if not impossible, to know what we are
eating, or to estimate the results.
Man is the net product of what he eats and drinks. Food bears very much
the same relation to him that soil does to vegetation. The following
questions, therefore, should be solved by every one who believes that
success and happiness depend upon health and vitality:
1 How to select and how to combine foods which will give to
the body a natural result, which is _health_
2 How to select and how to combine foods so that they will
counteract and remove the causes of dis-ease
3 How to select foods which contain all the chemical elements
of the body, and how to combine and proportion them at each meal so
that they will chemically harmonize
4 How to determine the quantity of food to be taken each day,
or at each meal, that will give to the body all the nourishment it
is capable of assimilating
_Note_: Too much food, even of the right kind, defeats this purpose and
produces just the opposite result.
* * * * *
Upon this knowledge hinges the building of a natural body, the cure of
a vast majority of dis-eases, our ability to reach the highest state of
physical and mental vitality, the prolongation of youth and longevity.