Part 2
We forget, my hearers, that the great law of nature, “Like produces like,” is universal. “Every seed after its kind is the law of all creation.” There is no exception to this law. This principle obtains not only in the production of life, but in the processes of its development. If my position about the intimacy of soul and body is true, then, if a man’s body is made up chiefly of flesh taken from diseased animals, and his whole physical frame is saturated with the irritating and exciting condiments of what is popularly called good food, the whole bias of his bodily powers will be toward animalism. All the impressions and impulses that the soul receives from such a body are beastly and debasing. Like produces like in the formation of physical tissue out of food, as well as in the generation of stock in the stall. Hence I hold that very much of the wickedness of mankind is the natural expression of physical beastliness rather than the outflow of innate viciousness. A body made up largely of all manner of nerve-goading, passion-producing, anger-generating elements, such as are found in the gross animal dishes with their stimulating adjuncts, just as surely drives the soul to sin as a tempest drives a feather before it.
As modern research has proved that bad or imperfect food when digested surely makes bad or imperfect blood, incapable of performing its appointed work of upbuilding and of reparation, so has science demonstrated that perfect food is one of the most potent among remedies for the relief of many diseased conditions. Since the blood is the life, and since blood is merely food emulsified, mingled with certain digestive fluids and colored by the oxygen with which it is brought in contact in the lungs—it is easy to understand how perfect food may create perfect blood, which shall presently supplant that which is feeble, that which is lacking in waste-repairing power, that which fails to give strength to the muscles or vigor to the brain, and may thus become the most effective medicine. A perusal of recent professional medical literature evinces the great stress which is now laid upon dietetics in the treatment of all diseases. The approach to this high altitude has been gradual, but sure. At first foods were made the vehicles for drugs; and cod-liver oil and malt-extracts, which are only concentrated foods of the hydro-carbon varieties, were loaded with lime and iron and strychnine and phosphorous and scores of other drugs. But perfect results were secured by the use of these foods without the drug additions, and so the foods were at last given the credit which all along belonged to them. And so it has come to pass that with advanced medical men, in a vast majority of cases of sickness, the support of the life-powers by proper nutrients is the foremost thought, the best food proving to be the best medicine.
The kind of food a man eats, and the time and manner of his eating it, are not merely a question of medicine, but one of the first questions of morals. The effects of food on the passions and feelings are thus described by Prior:
“Observe the various operations Of food and drink in several nations; Was ever Tartar fierce and cruel Upon the strength of water gruel? But who shall stand his rage and force When first he rides, then eats, his horse? Salads and eggs and lighter fare, Tune the Italian spark’s guitar; And if I take Don Confrere right, Pudding and beef make Britons fight.”
If, therefore, our meat has something to do with our morals, or if our food in some way affects our faith, it seems to me that many of our efforts at moral reform ought to be preceded by instruction in hygiene. In other words, efforts to make a man genuinely devotional ought to be prefaced by efforts to correct bad dietetic habits. A father, by prayer and precept and flogging, had done his best to reform his boy, whose staple diet was meat and sausage and pie and cake at his meals, with lunch between. The family physician said to the father, “If you will put a leech back of each of your boy’s ears once a week for a month, you will do more to reform him than your preaching and pounding will do in a year.” The father asked for the philosophy of this prescription. “Why,” said the doctor, “your boy has bad blood, and too much of it; he must behave badly or he would burst.” “Then,” said the father, “I’ll change his diet from beef and pie to hominy and milk.” In three months thereafter a better boy for his age could not be found in the neighborhood. The acrid, biting, evil blood had not become food for leeches, but it had done its wicked work and passed away, and a cooler, blander, purer, safer blood had been supplied from sweeter, gentler food sources.
In your use of animal food be very particular as to quality and quantity. Lamb and mutton are considered the most healthy by the authorities. Avoid as you would contagion the use of pork, unless you raise it yourselves, and feed it with good grain, and not the refuse of the house or barn, and keep the animals as clean as you do your pet dogs. Never fry your meat with hogs’ lard, but stew, bake, boil, or broil it. Use hogs’ lard in no form for cooking. Most of it is said to be reeking with scrofulous elements. Displace it in _all_ your cooking by milk or butter. If you want to aid and not hinder the growth of your soul Godward, if you desire to have pure thoughts and a pure heart and a pure life, see that you make your blood out of pure food, or you will find that your soul will have an enemy within the castle of its body more treacherous and deadly than any of its enemies without.
There is another popular article of food among us, which has a vital connection with bodily disorders and bad exhibition of character. Good in proper quantities and in its sphere, when made the largest and chief article of diet, for every meal, the one kind of food upon which we depend most for building up the wastes of our bodies, it indirectly does great damage. I refer to the ordinary fine flour bread made out of bolted wheat meal.
It is proper to remember that the white flour from which our bread is chiefly made, and which is deemed the staff of life, is a purely artificial product—a selection from that perfect food combination which exists in wheat. A competent food chemist has compared the regular milling processes to one by which the fat part of an ox should be saved for food, and the lean part—the albuminous or nitrogenous portion—discarded and given to the dogs. The comparison is well based, since the starch of wheat, which is valued because of its whiteness, is a carbo-hydrate, chemically allied to the fat of meat; while the dark nutriment of wheat, which, because of its color, is discarded with the bran with which it is found in contact in nature, is a vegetable nitrogenous albumen, rich in mineral elements, and almost identical, chemically, with the lean or muscular tissue of beef.
The process of bolting or refining takes from the wheat most of the phosphates and nitrates, the elements that are chiefly required for making nerves, muscles, bones, and brains. The phosphates and nitrates being removed by bolting, very little remains in the flour except the starchy carbonates, the heat and fat producing elements. The use of fine flour bread as a staple article of food introduces too much heat and fat-producing elements into the system, and where there is too much carbon or heating substance, it tends rather to provoke the system to unnatural and abnormal action, and instead of serving as an element to warm the body, its tendency is to burn or consume, heating and irritating all the organs, getting one into that state which is popularly known as “hot-blooded.” The fine white flour ordinarily used has two-thirds of the nitrogenous and mineral nutriment that God put in the wheat taken out. Unless these deficiencies are made up by some other foods, the exclusive use of fine flour bread will leave the nerves and bones poorly nourished, producing in some systems nervousness, dyspepsia, and all the physical ills that follow these diseases, together with impatience, fretfulness, and irritability. God intended that all the nutritive properties He put in the wheat should stay in it for purposes of symmetrical nourishment. Fine flour bread may be used for purposes of producing heat in the system, but it does not feed hungry nerves or starving bones.
One reason why children fed chiefly on white bread feel hungry nearly all the time, and demand so much food between meals, is found in the fact that their bodies are insufficiently nourished. Their bones and nerves not receiving the nitrates and phosphates they need, are suffering from hunger.
When children are fed with food that thoroughly nourishes their whole system, they will seldom desire to eat between meals and thus retard the process of digestion and lay the foundation for dyspepsia and all its kindred evils.
Flour made of all the nutriment of pure white wheat, unbolted, yet without the shell or husk or bran, contains all the elements necessary for the nourishment of the body. The flour called Graham flour rarely contains these elements. There is a great deal of bogus stuff in the market, which has brought the genuine article into disrepute, and made many thoughtful people disgusted with everything in that line. Very much that is called Graham flour is made up of a mixture of fine bolted flour, and the woody fibre of the wheat, which has no nutriment in it at all. This wretched fabrication has tended to make all whole wheat products unpopular. The woody bran is worse than worthless as food, or to mix with food. You might as well eat the shells of nuts, or the husks of corn, or the skins of potatoes, as the silex coats of wheat. To overload the alimentary canal with such foreign indigestible matter has no other tendency but to weaken and debilitate it. Very few millers trouble themselves to make a perfect whole wheat flour. I know but one establishment in the world where wheat and other grains are treated precisely as they should be, with all the harmful part removed and the rest made digestible by harmless methods, and that is the Health Food Company of New York.[1]
[1] See Appendix, page 30.
Bread leavened, or unleavened, made out of what is called the Cold Blast Whole Wheat Flour, makes more muscle and furnishes more food for the nerves than any other article of food given to man except the pure gluten of wheat. I am not now advocating the views of the extremists, the Grahamites, neither do I counsel the disuse of fine flour bread. This latter should be used in connection with unbolted flour, but should not be relied on to furnish you with all the nutritious elements that your bodies need. There is a golden mean between the extremes of vegetarianism and exclusive flesh diet which the common sense of thoughtful people will find. During the warm season a diet made up chiefly of fruits, grains, and vegetables will be most healthful for body and soul. Instead of the scrofula-breeding pork or ham for breakfast, use some one of the great variety of grains, especially oat-meal, than which there are few better foods for growing children and hard working adults. Instead of fried cakes, rich pastry, and candies, use fruit, of which there is an abundant variety, ten-fold more nourishing than pies or cakes, and very cleansing to the blood. Let brown bread, Johnnie-cake, and corn-meal pudding supplant fine wheat bread as much as possible. Eat your meals regularly and slowly, eating nothing between them. Eat sparingly of meat at mid-day, and let it be good fresh beef, mutton, or fish, well cooked. Let the evening meal be taken not later than six o’clock. Discard tea and coffee, and make your own coffee with browned crusts of bread, or burned whole wheat.[2] Follow these suggestions and you will find very many of the ills of your body departing and very many of the troubles you have in behaving yourselves, vanishing.
[2] The Health Food Company prepare a “Cereal Coffee” from Wheat Gluten and Barley, which not only makes a delicious beverage, but tends to greatly strengthen both body and brain. Those who would release themselves from the dangerous practice of tea-drinking, and the less injurious but still objectionable use of the commercial coffees, will do well to try this nutrient beverage.
Again, we derange our bodies and demoralize our souls by eating too much. The great end of life with many of us is to eat. The American dining-room has become, for the most part, a place for the indulgence of animalism, and not for the development of the affections or social qualities. A distinguished American physician said: “I am sixty-six years old, and I have eaten enough food to answer my wants for 100 years, and yet I am what most people call a small eater.” The popular habit of using, inordinately, appetizers in the shape of the ordinary table condiments, begets a false and unnatural appetite. The time comes when honest food palls upon the depraved senses. The pampered, jaded appetite no longer finds satisfaction in simple food-flavors; the palate must be prompted with pungent things. The cook, who is never a physiologist, responds to the demand for spurs to appetite, and finds them in mixtures of spices and peppers and mustards and acids and essential oils and chemicals, and multitudes of non-food substances. With these, and various biting alcohols, the delicate lining of the stomach is inflamed, inducing a desire for food which passes for what it is not, namely, honest appetite. The palate demands more food than the stomach can digest or the system assimilate. Poor nature, anxious to do the best she can, adapts herself to the unnatural situation, and forces all the other organs to do the same; and thus we become accustomed to over-eating and do not know it.
That all who accustom themselves to a stimulating diet, to spices and wines and other irritating things, consume too much food, cannot, I think, be gainsayed. The amount and kind of food needed depends upon the individual habits and the kind of waste to be supplied. A wholly idle man should thrive well on cucumbers and water-melons, which are chiefly water; while the hard-working hod-carrier would demand several pounds of solid carbon and nitrogen daily. It is the sedentary, the well-to-do, the man of leisure, who suffers most from over-eating; and it behooves him to carefully avoid all goads and spurs to appetite. With the simplest flavors he is nearly certain to over-eat and thus to suffer. With an appetite stimulated and induced, without corresponding out-door labor to create a genuine need and demand for it, digestive failure and assimilative bankruptcy is only a question of time.
The stomach, overloaded, performs its work imperfectly, and thus imposes on all the organs an extra amount of work, which breaks them down prematurely, causing diseases of every kind, such as nervous headache, sick headache, rush of blood to the head, apoplexy, sore eyes, deafness, erysipelas, neuralgia of the face, decayed teeth, catarrh, bronchitis, asthma, nausea, common colic, congestion of the liver, and a host of other diseases too unpleasant to mention. In some cases there is a disposition of too much fatty matter in the system; and many people suppose that fatness is a sign of healthfulness, which is false. No one needs any more fat on his body than is essential to form cushions for his tendons and muscles; if too much, there is a depletion of strength.
The crowded and overloaded condition of the system makes the body take on very many false manifestations. The irritation produced in an overcharged system manifests itself in different forms in different individuals. In some it produces nervousness, making them rack the flesh off their bones and keeping them poor; and in others it produces sluggishness, retaining defunct matter in the system, making them corpulent. As I have said, our highly-seasoned foods create morbid and abnormal appetites.
As a consequence we eat too much and too often, the system being borne down by overwork in its digestive department, there comes a demand for stimulating drinks and medicines to take off the depression and to keep up tone; and to make ourselves feel good, after having made ourselves feel bad, by improper eating, some of us resort to tea and coffee, and others to alcohol, and then the excitement produced demands a sedative, and some of us smoke and others chew a poisonous weed called tobacco. Thus the poor body, subject to these revulsions of unnatural action in overwork and stimulation and sedation, is goaded to abnormities and unnatural action, sending up to the soul no other influences but those which drive it to moral madness and vicious deeds.
Now, vice is a morbid exhibition of the will. The will is represented through the physical organ, the brain, and the brain is straightway affected by the condition of the body and the state of the blood. The will is that power of the mind by which we put forth volitions and perform actions. If the pressure of bad blood is on the brain, that same pressure is on the will; hence a sick man or a diseased man will do a great many bad things through the power of bad blood on the will. Vice, then, is both the result and cause of physical derangement. Hence that vice of vices, drunkenness.
Drunkenness may be caused by bad physical conditions, brought about by bad habits of eating. Would it not be well for us to look into bad table habits for one of the reasons why so many of our young men become drunkards? May there not be some cause working in the flesh of our youths, driving them to intemperance? May it not be possible that kind fathers and mothers for years have been filling up the awful gap of 40,000 dead drunkards annually by feeding their children upon stimulating, highly-seasoned, innutritious foods? There is no doubt in my mind that every man is a glutton before he is a drunkard. If nature’s laws are violated, a man’s sensations will be all abnormal, and the mainsprings of his life will be befouled, and the result will be irregular and vicious expressions of all the appetites, both for food and drink. I am, therefore, confident that the widespread appetite for intoxicating liquors is largely due to the false relations that the American people hold to their food. We cannot hope much from moral suasion and legal enactments so long as we overlook the physical condition of the drunkard. If you would cure disease or vice effectually, you must shut off that which nourishes them, instead of putting all your force in efforts to antidote them. “Let the wicked forsake his way,” and then turn unto the Lord, and he will have mercy on him, and to our God, and he will abundantly pardon him. There are 200,000 drunkards in the United States, 40,000 of whom go annually to premature graves. There are 20,000 prostitutes, whose average life in their profession is four years. Do you believe this vast army of immortals go willingly to ruin? There are causes lying back of mere perversities of soul in the common every-day dietetic habits of these forlorn ones.
Eating and drinking are always associated with the bar and brothel, and if you will take notice, the eating is always of that kind of food which goes straight for the animal nature, and wakes up in a man everything that is beastly.
The whole tendency of the food furnished at the popular bar-room restaurant is to stir the baser elements in humanity and keep up the demand for alcoholic stimulants. No wonder the drinking saloons can afford to give what they call a “free lunch.” Care is taken to furnish such food as fires the appetite for strong drink, and the rum-seller gets his pay for his “free lunch” through the sale of the whisky that must inevitably follow it. Those who, living on highly stimulating foods, but do not drink strong drinks, will find that the bias of their bodily powers, instead of being toward mental and spiritual spheres, will be toward animal indulgences, dragging the mind and soul into servitude to the flesh, and where there are any moral aspirations, making the conflict between the higher and lower nature so intense that a vast amount of moral force is wasted in self-conflict that ought to go into the world’s redemptive agencies for saving the lost.
I am confident that the American habit of eating sumptuous and late suppers, whether at our homes or church fairs or festivals, is damaging the physical, mental, and moral health of our nation more than any other one thing of its kind; more damaging, because it has the appearance of innocency, and the sanction of our fathers and mothers and some of our pastors.
Furthermore, the habit of eating hurriedly, or hastily, is preying upon the vital and moral forces of many of us. A meal eaten hastily or nervously, under the pressure of intense mental activity or nervous tension, or great weariness, begins its work of nutrition under the greatest possible disadvantage. All our meals should be eaten calmly and deliberately, so as to thoroughly masticate the food, and not impose on the stomach and viscera the legitimate work of the teeth. In the interest of health to soul as well as body I enter an earnest plea for more time for eating, and especially at noon, when most hard working people take their principal meal. Clerks, business men, and school teachers, mechanics, laborers, and our children who attend the public schools, need more time at noon to properly dispose of the chief meal of the day. No better investment could be made to secure the best possible physical, intellectual, financial, and moral returns than for all classes of people to take two hours at mid-day for resting and eating dinner. Selfish greed demands otherwise, and makes a show of gain; but the loss is sure to come in due time to all parties concerned.