The morning call., 1895-02-17
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DIET AND
Z DIETING.

1t seems as though there had never been
a time when the subject OF eating and
drinking so engrossed the minds OF our
people. He must be weak, indeed, in in
tellectual resources who has not an origi-
nal scheme of diet. One authority would
have US forego cooked food. Another
wages war against meat. A third urges
upon us the claims of the cereals, and a
fourth declares that fruit and nuts should
be the staple of human diet.
This last is, perhaps, the most attractive
OF all the theories. There is something
particularly agreeable to the esthetic sense
in the idea of subsisting upon fruit and
nuts. The eye, the touch, the palate
are alike appealed to by such diet.
In all probability these articles con-
tain enough Of the essential principles
of nourishment to maintain life
nerhaps to maintain it in a high
tivity. Because a thing is possible, how
ever, it does not necessarily follow
that it is desirable, and there are no really
good reasons to suppose that diet of
fruit and nuts would produce the highest
type of human being any more than there
is to believe that an exclusive diet of meat
would produce the lowest
1t is probably true that the progenitors
of the human being were at one time ex-
clusively nut and fruit eating creatures,
Just as study of human locomotion points
TO the fact that these same progenitors
were climbing, arboreal creatures. The
same modifying influences that have pro
duced a creature that walks the earth and
has articulate speech have also produced
creature whose mouth, teeth and, indeed,
his entire digestive apparatus proclaim
him something more than fruit-eater 1t
may, in fact, be soberly questioned whether
the advocates of diet of fruit alone are
taking forward or backward step.
The same may be said of the class of
theorists who have declared against bread,
potatoes and the whole order OF legumes
because they contain starch. 1t is rather
late in the day to do indiscrimlnate battle
against bread. 1t may, be remarked, en-
passant, that there is bread, and bread; ;
but of that later.
To say, however, as the opponents of
bread do. that starch is indigestible and
.rlnassimilable in the human body IS to
DENY a principle as easy of demonstration
as is the assertion that two and two make
four. 1t is true that starch, as starch, is
not assimilated, but the starch that IS
taken into the body does not remain starch.
1T Is converted lUUO sugar. mn IL
turn is transformed into glucose, IN which
form it is absorbed by the system.
Besides the fruit-eating, the bread-shun-
ming and the uncooked-cereal theorists we
have, also, the theorist who Will not eat
meat, and who looks to see the millennium
ushered in when all mankind shall have
eschewed animal diet.
As 10 the eating OF meat Unquestlon-
ably it is carried to excess in this country
In no other country in the world, save
among the peoples Of the Arctic region, is
meat so largely used as it IS by
Americans. But Americans are by no
means an ideally healthy people. The
peasantry of Ireland subsisting largely
upon potatoes, the sturdy Scotch laborers
whose staple of diet is oatmeal porridge,
the English workingman who eats meat
perhaps three times week, are all superior
physical types to the average American
.aborer, who usually eats meat at least once
day.
On the other hand, meat presents the