The Ely miner. [volume] (Ely, Minn.) 1895-1986, 1908-12-11
SIXTY DAYS ON PEA
NUTS AND LEMONADE.

W. ~ <7lvA AGlNOlv<7AEs
On October Is, 1907, began an ex-
elusive diet of peanuts and lemon
ade and subsisted on that alone for
60 days.
What did you do it for? Do you
still live on peanuts? How should
peanuts be taken? Have you changed
your mind about their food value?
These are some of the questions that
l am frequently asked.
Such was the novelty of my expert
ment, which was undertaken as a
scientific demonstration, that the av-
erage person refused to consider it
seriously. The newspapers treated it
largely as joke except that many of
them reported toward the end of the
time that had died-a result which
many were expecting.
For several years I had been test
ing the relative values of foods by
living for time on one alone and
recording the results. Incidentally I
had reached the conclusion, for rea-
sons which I shall give in a later ar
ticle, that cereal starch is the only
element of vegetable food improved
by cooking and that cereal starch is
unnecessary in our diet, and fire.
quently injurious, particularly in the
case of infants and children. I had
found that cooking Injuries the most
important element of food, albumen,
from which the cells of brain and
Drawn are built, and precipitates, to a
large extent, the mineral elements,
sulphur, phos. horus, magnesia, potash,
etc., so essential to vigorous, healthy
life, so that they cannot be absorbed
into the blood. I had come to believe
also after much investigation that
fruit should form large part Of our
diet, and I had been prescribing in
certain cases diet of uncooked pea
nuts and gluten, uncooked, in small
quantities with fruits, eaten separate
ly, and had seen remarkable improve
ment in some cases.
One day it was reported in an
Aurora (Ill.) paper q lived In Aurora)
nuts and at the same time the chair
man of the local board of health at
tributed case of poisoning to eating
peanut candy.
To prevent an undesirable counter
suggestion on the minds of those who
were eating peanuts by my advice,
more than to defend my own theories,
1 stated my view of these cases, call
ing attention to the great difference
between cooked and uncooked pea
nuts, and to show the firmness of my
belief in the correctness of my con-
illusions, said that 1 would be will
ing to live for 60 days on uncooked
peanuts and have the results care
fully recorded daily by the board of
health, and give my body for dissec-
ton and analysis, if 1 failed to survive
the experiment.
l had lived for several days on pea
nuts, on apples, on prunes, on starch,
on nothing, and / knew that by fasting
for a few days, when the indications
required it, I should have no diff
Guilty in performing the feat. But my
friends begged me to desist, urging
that was losing my professional dig
nifty and many of them accused me
of insanity, which 1 was, they said,
deliberately fostering by this strange
freak! / had studied on my theories
of feeding till I was half gone and
now 1 was going to finish the job!
The outcome, however, fully justi-
fed the confidence with which the ex-
pertinent was undertaken. / lost II
pounds in weight but continued my
usual work throughout the entire
period, and in fact did a greatly in
creased amount of mental labor, neces-
STATED by the increase in my CORE
spondence, interviews, etc., and on
the evening of the sixtieth day 1 gave
an address in the G.. A. r. hall of
Aurora on diet and morality, speak
Ing for three-quarters of an hour,
and followed that with Commute
talk to an audience at the Coliseum
on the relation of diet to strenuous
endurance.
OF course the peanut Is not COM
plete diet and to keep in good condi-
ton I tasted at intervals throughout
the so days total of about eight
days. Probably the extension of the
experiment to 100 days would not
have reduced my weight to the point
of physical collapse. My height is
feet liz inches and my weight
when 1 began was 165 pounds.
We live by what we eat; and the
character of our living depends upon
the kind of food we eat and the way
we eat it. "You can make man good
or bad" says Bishop Fallows, accord
ing to the way you feed him." "The
building Of brain-cell and mind
stuff" says Dr. Alexander Haig, the
distinguished English authority on
diet, "lies at the root of all the
problems of life
The mind is the measure OF the
man; what a man thinks he becomes.
But the mind manifests through the
physical, and the character of the
physical determines the character of
the mental as certainly as the mental
influences the physical. The body
is the expression of the mind, much
as a building is the expression of the
thought of the architect who designed
it. And you can no more build a
sound, beautiful. enduring body with
out good food than an architect can
build a beautiful temple without steel