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Page 25
It is settled, then, that to renew our muscles which are constantly
wearing out, we must eat the food containing the same constituents; and
these we find in meat, milk, eggs, and the entire gluten of grains, &c, as
in wheaten-grits or oatmeal.
Fat and heat must come to us from the starches and sugars, in sufficient
supply to "put a layer of wadding between muscles and skin, fill out the
wrinkles, and keep one warm." To find out the proportion needed for one's
own individual constitution, is the first work for all of us. The laborer
requires one thing, the growing child another, the man or woman whose
labor is purely intellectual another; and to understand how best to meet
these needs, demands a knowledge to which most of us have been
indifferent. If there is excess or lack of any necessary element, that
excess or lack means disease, and for such disease we are wholly
responsible. Food is not the only and the universal elixir of life; for
weak or poor blood is often an inheritance, and comes to one tainted by
family diseases, or by defects in air or climate in general. But, even
when outward conditions are most disastrous, perfect food has power to
avert or alter their effects; and the child who begins life burdened with
scrofulous or other diseases, and grows to a pale, weak, unwholesome
youth, and either a swift passing into the next world, or a life here of
hopeless invalidism, can, nine times out of ten, have this course of
things stopped by scientific understanding of what foods are necessary for
such conditions.
I propose to take the life of one who from babyhood up has been fed on the
best food, perfectly prepared, and to give the tables of such food for
different periods in that life, allowing only such digression as will show
the effects of an opposite course of treatment; thus showing the relations
of food to health,--a more necessary and vital form of knowledge than any
other that the world owns.
CHAPTER IX.
THE RELATIONS OF FOOD TO HEALTH.
We begin, then, with a typical baby, born of civilized parents, and living
in the midst of the best civilization to be had. Savage or even partially
civilized life could never furnish the type we desire. It is true, as we
have seen, that natural laws, so deeply planted that they have become
instincts, have given to many wild nations a dietary meeting their
absolute needs; but only civilization can find the key to these modes, and
make past experience pay tribute to present knowledge. We do not want an
Indian baby, bound and swathed like a little mummy, hanging from the pole
of a wigwam, placidly sucking a fish's tail, or a bone of boiled dog; nor
an Esquimaux baby, with its strip of blubber; nor the Hottentot, with its
rope of jerked beef; nor the South-sea Islander, with its half-cocoanut.
Nor will we admit the average Irish baby, among the laboring classes in
both city and country, brought to the table at three months old to swallow
its portion of coffee or tea; nor the small German, whom at six months I
have seen swallowing its little mug of lager as philosophically as its
serious-faced father. That these babies have fevers and rashes, and a host
of diseases peculiar to that age, is a matter of course; and equally a
matter of course that the round-eyed mother wonders where it got its
dreadful disposition, but scorns the thought that lager or coffee can be
irritants, or that the baby stomach requires but one food, and that one
the universal food of all young animal life,--milk.
Take, then, our typical baby, lying fresh and sweet in the well aired and
lighted room we suppose to be his birthright. The bones are still soft,
the tender flesh and skin with little or no power of resistance. Muscles,
nerves, all the wonderful tissues, are in process of formation; and in the
strange growth and development of this most helpless yet most precious of
all God's creations, there are certain elements which must be
had,--phosphates to harden the delicate bones; nitrogen for flesh, which
is only developed muscle; carbon,--or sugar and fat, which represent
carbon,--for the whole wonderful course of respiration and circulation.
Water, too, must be in abundance to fill the tiny stomach, which in the
beginning can hold but a spoonful; and to float the blood-corpuscles
through the winding channels whose mysteries, even now, no man has fully
penetrated. Caseine, which is the solid, nourishing, cheesy part of milk,
and abounds in nitrogen, is also needed; and all the salts and alkalies
that we have found to be necessary in forming perfect blood. Let us see if
milk will meet these wants.
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