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Diet

"'Tis the art of eating which makes for years," says a sage proverb, and nothing can better promote this art for personal benefit than a sufficiently accurate knowledge of food elements, and their respective uses in the body. Broadly speaking, the sustenance on which we depend for the support of our lives comprehends animal and vegetable substances, besides our beverages. The more readily and thoroughly these substances are absorbed for supplying our physical needs, the better adapted are they for the purposes required. Residual matters are voided as excrementitious, the fact being; nevertheless, that the fæces passed by stool consist not simply of the remains of unabsorbed foods, but also to a considerable extent of superfluous digestive secretions, and the débris of intestinal linings On a purely animal diet (of milk, eggs, and beef, or mutton) there is but little primary food-constituent (nitrogen) lost in the excrement; but when vegetable foods are mainly taken (carrots, potatoes, peas, and the like) the waste of nitrogen is very considerable, amounting, as, for instance, in the case of carrots, to nearly 40 per cent of the whole primary elements consumed.

The foodstuffs, again, which provide bodily warmth, and serve to fatten, are termed by chemists carbohydrates, containing twice as much hydrogen as oxygen; these include fruitsugar, cane-sugar, milk-sugar, starch, and the same when made 66 soluble by the saliva, being then known as dextrine; also cellulose, the basis of vegetable structures. Starch, and the sugars, are almost completely digested by a healthy person, and are sucked up into the blood nearly to the last particle; it being at the same time an important circumstance that a relatively larger amount of primary food-constituents is excreted by the bowels on a vegetable than on an animal diet. Why these primary constituents of vegetable foods should be so much less completely absorbed than the other ingredients is difficult to say." Human saliva is peculiarly rich in the ferment (diastase) which changes insoluble starches of foods into soluble dextrine, being richer apparently than the saliva of any other animal. The human stomach and the human brain are justly said to be the only analysts which never make mistakes.

It is on material food, comprising the particular constituents now discussed, reliance must be placed for supplying vital energy, and bodily health; nitrogen as primary nourishment, and carbon as fuel, being the chief elements. Nitrogen enters the body as such, and leaves it as waste urea; carbon enters the body as fat, starch, and sugar, leaving it in carbon dioxide. Gain or loss of nitrogen signifies gain or loss of flesh-tissues, whilst gain or loss of carbon signifies gain or loss of fatty deposits, and of bodily warmth. In dealing with weak or impaired digestions the cook can render valuable aid by carrying out as regards the food one or other of three distinct processes; each of these serves to commence the digestion of food by culinary skill before it is given to the invalid, so that the digestive powers are thus considerably economized: First, by malting, or predigesting the starches; secondly, by mixing with the meat foods and albuminoids some pepsin, or such ferment as converts these foods into soluble peptones; and, thirdly, by making an emulsion with sweetbread-juice of the fatty food which has to be digested after leaving the stomach, whilst within the first bowels. 66 We may live without poetry, music, or art, We may live without conscience, and live without heart, We may live without friends, we may live without books: But civilized man cannot live without cooks."

Witty Mr. Punch has lately anticipated the substitution of clean, clever electricity for cooking, in place of black, smutty, clumsy kitchen coal, with its dust, and its difficulties of transport. Then, instead of a hot, fiery task, disastrous to the temper, and comfort of the cook, it will be a recreative amusement for ladies to prepare the daily dinner. "You need only turn a handle, and the soup is boiling hot, Appetising odours rising from the hospitable pot.

Turn another, and the salmon in its mayonnaise lies fair; Press a button, and the mutton, with the currant jelly's there; Press again, and sweets, and entrées will at once appear in sight, And you'll fall to, on them all too, with a first-class appetite." "So A diet of lean meat exclusively will build up the tissues, but if nothing else be taken, then the fat already stored up in the body will be fed upon, and consumed, so that the person will become thinner. Bismarck, by the advice of his physician, reduced his bulk in this way without any loss of energy, or any sense of illness. Again, we have to depend upon what we eat and drink for mental power, and intellectual capabilities. many factors," says the Century Invalid Cookery Book, "enter into the make-up of a thought, that it cannot be said that any particular kind of food will ultimately produce a poem; but of this we may be sure, that the best work, the noblest thoughts, the most original ideas, will not come from a dyspeptic, underfed, or in any way ill-nourished individual." Swift, as a writer, was fully alive to this fact. "I wish you a merry Lent," quoth he, in a letter to Stella (March 5th, 1711). "I hate Lent ! I hate different diets, and furmity, and butter, and herb porridge, and sour devout faces of people who only put on religion for seven weeks." Not that a highly elaborate diet is essential for vigour of brain. "Hominis cibus utilissimus simplex," said Pliny authoritatively. 66 "Nam variæ res Ut noceant homini credas, memor illius escæ Quæ simplex tibi sederit."

For, divers meats do hurt; remember how When to one dish confined thou healthier was't than now." Horace Walpole, writing from Norfolk (1743) to his friend John Chute, put the matter thus: "Indeed, my dear Sir, you certainly did not use to be stupid; and till you give me more substantial proof that you are so, I shall not believe it. As for your temperate diet, and milk, bringing about such a metamorphosis, I hold it impossible. I have such lamentable proofs every day before my eyes of the stupefying qualities of ale, beer, and wine, that I have contracted a most religious veneration for your spiritual nouriture. Only imagine that I here every day see men who are mountains of roast beef, and who only seem just roughly hewn out into the outlines of human form, like the great rock at Pratelino! I shudder when I see them brandish their knives in act to carve, and I look on them as savages that devour one another. I shouldn't stare at all more than I do if your Alderman at the lower end of the table was to stick his fork into his neighbour's jolly cheek, and cut a brave slice of brown and fat! Why, I swear I see no difference between a country gentleman and a sirloin; whenever the first laughs, or the second is cut, there run out just the same streams of gravy." In Moxon's Life of Edmund Kean, the famous actor, we are told that Mossop, another stage celebrity, chose his dish to suit the character he was about to assume: Broth," said he, "for tone; roast pork for tyrants; steaks with 'Measure for Measure'; boiled mutton for lovers; pudding for Tancred, etc." James Howell, contemporary with Sir Kenelm Digby (1603), commended to Lady Wallis a Spanish cook "who hath intellectuals, and senses; mutton, beef, and bacon are to her as the will, understanding, and memory are to the soul. Cabbage, Turnip, Artichoke, Potatoes, and Dates are her five senses, and Pepper the common sense. She must have marrow to keep life in her, and some birds to make her light." 66 As to the question of how to maintain the body properly nourished under adverse conditions, "Like all divine truths," said Dr. K. Chambers, "to love your neighbour as yourself is found to be taught by material nature as well as by revelation. Respecting the effect of practical benevolence, and philanthropy, upon our race, the fact is highly convincing that directly a man begins to care for others in preference to himself alone, his cares cease to wear and exhaust him. There rather seems to be herein a sustaining force. This is the reason why in sieges, and famine, medical men have often remained sleek, and plump, while their neighbours pined; and perhaps also why military officers bear short rations better than the men." As to regulating the food in quantity, or precise chemical constitution, according to tables of percentages, and the like, which are dry calculations (in a double sense) rather than of any sure practical use for individual consumers, we may take a lesson from the Captain Gulliver of Swift's tale; "for whom a coat, waistcoat, and breeches were constructed on abstract principles by the pragmatic tailor at Laputa, these garments turning out therefore the worst suit of clothes ever had in the Captain's life." It will certainly prove a similar failure to overlook the numberless contingencies in the daily life, and the numberless personal peculiarities of those who seek advice about their diet, and daily regimen. Dr. Talmage, of New York City, preached the doctrine that a man's food, when he has opportunities of selecting it, suggests his moral nature: "Many a Christian tries to do by prayer that which cannot be wrought except by correcting his meat and drink."

To sum up the whole question of a man's diet, "surely the teaching of pathology amounts to this, that the fortifying of the general resistance of the individual against illness, and disease, is the most important indication of all to be fulfilled. Real true advances in the prevention, and cure, of diseases always tend to simplification; and the truest fundamental therapeutic remedies are fresh air, sunshine, excellent plain food in ample quantities, and regulated exercises mainly out of doors. This, certainly, is the innermost purpose of what is now called the Sanatorium treatment." Also, "the food of a nation," writes Dr. Andrew Wilson, "is largely determined by its geographical boundaries; dyspepsia seems to be often a matter of geography. The Northman can eat, enjoy, and assimilate what would certainly kill the Southerner; and conversely the food of the latter would fail to nourish the former. When one is in Rome, or South Africa, or Finland, it is best as far as possible to adapt one's feeding arrangements to the environments, unless of a very temporary nature. This plan will be found to work out better than adherence to the customary home-diet rules. It is quite possible therefore to imagine persons who must perforce pursue a strictly careful dietary regimen at home, getting along famously well on biltong and coffee when settling down in South Africa." "A widow has cold pye; Nurse gives you cake; From gen'rous merchants ham, or sturgeon take.

The farmer has brown bread, as fresh as day, And butter fragrant as the dew of May."

Art of Cookery (1708).

A well-known physician of Bradford says (Medical Aphorisms) : "The meaning which doctors intend when enjoining care about diet should be interpreted thus: If you are excessively careful you will eat only once a day, say about eight ounces of mixed diet; if you are very careful you will eat twice daily, eight ounces at one meal, and four ounces at the other, of ordinary mixed diet; if you are moderately careful you will eat thrice a day, eight ounces at one meal, and from four to six ounces at each of the other two; say at 8 a.m., at 1 p.m., and at 7 or 8 p.m.; if you are careless you will eat four times a day, from two to three pounds in all of ordinary food; if you are reckless you will eat five times daily, to the amount of four or five pounds of ordinary mixed diet. I know not what epithet to bestow on those who eat oftener than five times a day, and yet I have met with persons who ate eight times daily, and one person who ate ten times."