The Healthy Life, Vol. V, Nos. 24-28 | Page 4

to the handle-bar, scarcely to be seen because it is smaller than the end of the sausage. It is a complete tent tied up in its ground-sheet.
C.R. FREEMAN.

HOW MUCH SHOULD WE EAT: A WARNING.
_This article, by one of the pioneers of modern dietetics, is in the nature of a challenge, and is certain to arouse discussion among all who have studied the food question closely._--[EDS.]
When men lived on their natural food, quantities settled themselves. When a healthy natural appetite had been sated the correct quantity of natural food had been taken.
To-day all this is upside down, there is no natural food and only too often no natural healthy appetite either. Thus the question of quantity is often asked and many go wrong over it. The all-sufficient answer to this question is: "Go back to the foods natural to the human animal and this, as well as a countless number of other problems, will settle themselves."
But supposing that this cannot be done, suppose, as is often the case, that the animal fed for years on unnatural food has become so pathological that it can no longer take or digest its natural food?
Those who take foods which are stimulants are very likely to overeat, and when they leave off their stimulants they are equally likely to underfeed themselves. Flesh foods are such stimulants, for it is possible to intoxicate those quite unaccustomed to them with a large ration of meat just as well as with a large ration of alcohol. The one leads to the other, meat leads to alcohol, alcohol to meat. Taking any stimulant eventually leads to a call for other stimulants.
How are we to tell when a given person is getting enough food, either natural or partly natural? Medically speaking, there is no difficulty; there are plenty of guides to the required knowledge, some of them of great delicacy and extreme accuracy. The trouble generally is that these guides are not made use of, as the cause of the disaster is not suspected. A physiologist is not consulted till too late, perhaps till the disorder in the machinery of life is beyond repair.
Diminishing energy and power, decreasing endurance, slowing circulation, lessening blood colour, falling temperature, altered blood pressure, enlarging heart and liver, are some of the most obvious signs with which the physician is brought into contact in such cases. But every one of these may, and very often does, pass unnoticed for quite a long time by those who have had no scientific training. The public are extremely ignorant on such matters because the natural sciences have been more neglected in this country in the last fifty years than anywhere else in Europe, and that is saying a good deal. Hence diet quacks and all those who trade on the ignorance and prejudices of the public are having a good time and often employ it in writing the most appalling rubbish in reference to the important subject of nutrition.
Being themselves ignorant and without having studied physiology, even in its rudiments, they do not appear to consider that they should at least abstain from teaching others till they have got something certain for themselves.
If the public were less ignorant they would soon see through their pretensions; but, as it is, things go from bad to worse, and it is not too much to say that hundreds of lives have been lost down this sordid by-path of human avarice.
On one single day a few weeks ago the writer heard of three men, two of whom had been so seriously ill that their lives were in danger, and one of whom had died. The certified cause of death in this case might not have led the uninitiated to suspect chronic starvation, but those who were behind the scenes knew that this was its real cause. A further extraordinary fact was that two out of these three men were members of the medical profession, whose training in physiology ought, one would have thought, to have saved them from such errors.
The conclusion seems to be that they did not use their knowledge because at first they had no suspicion of the real cause of their illness. In other words, chronic starvation is insidious and, if no accurate scientific measurements are made, its results, being attributed to other causes, are often allowed to become serious before they are properly treated.
These three men went wrong by following a layman quite destitute of physiological training, who APPEARED to have produced some wonderful results in himself and others on extraordinarily small quantities of food.
If the above tests had been made at once by a trained hand the error involved in such results could not have escaped detection, and none of these men would have endangered their lives. I myself examined the layman in question and finding him