Part 6

And I have known others to have this same experience. Bernarr Macfadden, in particular, told me that he could not get along upon the nut and fruit diet while closely confined in his office, and that he found the solution of his problem in milk. Inasmuch as there is nothing that poisons me quite so quickly as milk, I had to look farther for my solution. As a matter of fact, I had been looking for this solution for more than ten years, though it is only quite recently that I had come to understand the problem clearly. It is a problem which every brain-worker faces; and I am sure, therefore, that there will be many who will find the report of my experiments and blunders to be of interest to them. I have tried, under these circumstances, all kinds of the more digestible foods--toast, rice, baked potatoes, baked apples, milk, poached eggs, and so on; always I have found that these foods digested perfectly, but they poisoned my system because of their constipating effect; and this was a dilemma which I was never able to get around.

I now read Dr. Salisbury's book, "The Relation of Alimentation to Disease." Many of his experiments I found extremely interesting. Dr. Salisbury described the consequences of the ordinary starch and sugar diet as making a "yeast-pot" of one's intestinal tract. I found in my own case many of the symptoms which he described, and I determined to see what would be the effect of the meat diet in my case.

I began the experiment with reluctance. I had lost all interest in the taste of meat, and I had a prejudice against it; I hated the smell of it, and I hated the feeling of it, and I was prepared for the direst consequences, according to the prophecies of my vegetarian friends. I should not have been at all surprised if I had been made very ill by my first meal. I was prepared to allow for that, supposing that after three years I had perhaps forgotten how to digest meat. To my surprise, however, I found no difficulty at all. I soon gave up preparing the meat according to the elaborate prescription of Dr. Salisbury, and contented myself simply with eating good lean beef-steak. I continued the experiment for two weeks, living upon meat exclusively. I found that all my symptoms of stomach trouble disappeared, and I had no headaches whatever. I got quite weak upon the exclusive diet, but this was according to Dr. Salisbury's statement; just as soon as I added a little shredded wheat biscuit and dried fruit to the menu this trouble disappeared, and I gained in weight with great rapidity, and was soon back where I had been before.

I did not continue the diet, owing partly to distaste for it, and partly to the inconvenience of it. I had accustomed myself to the raw food way of living, and any one who knows what this means can understand my distaste for washing plates and scraping frying-pans, and going to the bother of getting fresh meat and keeping it and cooking it. Also, of course, there was the item of expense. Upon the raw-food diet I had been able to live for ten cents a day. I am never accustomed to spending more than thirty or forty cents a day, even when indulging in abundant fresh fruit.

Perhaps I ought also to specify that a good deal of the success of the diet may have been owing to the hot-water regimen which is a part of it. An hour or two before every meal one is supposed to sip at least a pint of very hot water, which has the effect of cleansing out the stomach, and stimulates peristaltic action to a remarkable degree. I had been accustomed to drink hot water while fasting, but I had never taken it systematically, as I did at this time. It is a trick well worth knowing about.

I ought also to mention the fact that I suggested to several others that they try this meat diet. One of them, a friend who had been eating raw food at my suggestion, with the very best results, began the experiment and continued for three days, and the results were most disappointing. This friend, a woman in middle years, became very ill, with all the symptoms of stomach trouble, diarrhoea, and general poisoning. She wrote me that she gave up the diet at the end of three days, because she saw no use in making herself desperately ill. She added: "I followed the regimen in every smallest detail, precisely according to Dr. Salisbury's direction. You know me, and you know that when I do a thing I do it thoroughly, so there is no need to say any more about that." Which only goes to show that, as the proverb has it, "One man's meat is another man's poison."

Dr. Salisbury recommends the meat diet especially in cases of tuberculosis. He finds that the predisposing cause of this disease is "vegetable fermentation." He declares that the excessive starch and sugar diet leads to the production of yeast spores and other ferments in the intestinal tract, and that these are absorbed into the circulation and ultimately clog the small capillaries in the lungs. Dr. Salisbury's theory was set forth over thirty years ago, and that was before Koch had made his discovery of the tubercle bacillus. This discovery would seem to put Dr. Salisbury's theory out of court altogether; but as we physical culturists are inclined to suspect, there are causes of disease lying behind the attack of the specific bacillus. These causes are a depleted blood supply and a weakened system; and it seems to me, from what I have observed of consumptives and their diet, that Dr. Salisbury's theories fit in very well indeed with the Koch theory.

I wrote recently to Professor Chittenden to ask him what, in his opinion, would be the effects of the meat diet upon tuberculosis. He replied that he knew no reason for believing that it would be of special benefit but that the whole subject of diet in tuberculosis seemed to him to be one concerning which there was urgent need of experiment and investigation. This is unquestionably the case. I know no two physicians who seem to agree in the diets they prescribe to consumptives, and I have never met two consumptives who followed the same regimen. The general idea seems to be to stuff as much food in your system as you possibly can, especially milk and raw eggs; and it seems to me quite certain that, whatever system may be correct, this system is incorrect.

This much seems to me to be clear: tuberculosis is a disease brought about by under-nourishment. It is a disease to which the poor are especially liable; and while this is undoubtedly in part due to bad air, it is also due to bad feeding. And when ignorant people wish to live cheaply, the foods they eat are the sugar and starch foods. I remember in Thoreau's "Walden" he sets forth how he lived for many months upon five or six dollars' worth of food. He does not give the amount of the food by weight, so of course we cannot tell exactly; but he gives the prices he paid, and the leading articles in his diet were flour, rice, corn-meal, molasses, sugar and lard. One is, therefore, perfectly prepared to learn that Thoreau died of consumption. And the same thing, I believe, will happen to a good many enthusiastic vegetarians of my acquaintance. They have given up meat, and they have made up for it by increasing their consumption of bread and crackers, rice and potatoes, and prepared and predigested cereals, which they eat with cream and sugar. Even when they use high proteid food, it is in some form such as beans, which contain a great deal of starch, and in a form which is difficult of digestion. As a result of this, they are thin and anæmic looking--they do not seem to be able to put on flesh by means of intellectual fervor and an optimistic philosophy. The result of my meat-diet experiment has been to convince me yet more firmly that the cooked-vegetable diet is the worst diet in the world for myself. (I am content to phrase it that way, and leave it for others to find out about their own case.) There has been some agitation in vegetarian circles since the report has gone around that I have become a backslider, and have gone back to the flesh-pots. I state the facts here for what they may be worth to others. I shall never call myself a "vegetarian" again--though I shall be a vegetarian the greater part of the time.

For it should be noted, of course, that the objections which I have brought against the cooked vegetarian diet do not apply at all to the raw-food diet, which is entirely a different matter. If one lives upon nuts, whole grains boiled or shredded, salad vegetables and fruits, he does not get an excess of either starch or sugar, but a perfectly balanced dietary, every article of which is rich in natural salts--in which the starchy foods, and especially the prepared cereals, are fatally deficient. Such a diet can be followed by any person in normal health, who is leading a physically active life. I have known a number of people, old and young, to start out upon this way of life without any preliminaries, and they have noted a great gain in health and efficiency, and have had no trouble of any sort. This diet is as cheap as the bean and white flour and rice diet of the ordinary "vegetarian," and it is, by all odds, the simplest and most convenient diet in the world.

I have been accustomed all my life to think of meat as a very "heavy" article of food, an article of food suited for men doing hard physical labor; it is a curious fact that the view I am setting forth here is precisely the opposite. So long as I am doing hard physical labor, whether it is walking ten miles a day, or playing tennis, or building a house, I get along perfectly upon the raw food; but when I settle down for long periods of thinking and writing--often sitting for six hours without moving from one position--I find that I need something else, and nothing has answered that purpose quite so well as beef-steak. It appears to be, so far as I am concerned, the most easily digested and most easily assimilated of foods. And because the work that I am doing seems to me to be important, I am willing to make the sacrifice of money and time and trouble which it necessitates. My diet at such times will consist of beef or chicken, shredded wheat biscuit, and a little fruit. If any one is disposed to follow my example and make this experiment, I beg to call his attention especially to the fact that I name these three kinds of food, and none others; and that I mean these three kinds and none others. The main trouble with advising anybody to eat meat is that he proceeds to eat it in the everyday world, where it means not the eating of broiled lean beef, but also of bacon and eggs, and of bread and butter, and of potatoes with cream gravy, and of rice pudding and crackers and cheese and coffee. Please do not proceed to eat these things and then hold meat-eating responsible for the consequences.

I do not for a moment wish to give the impression that I believe that meat-eating is necessary to a normally active person, or that humanity will always continue to eat meat. No invention of science can ever make meat as cheap a food as nuts and fruit, and nothing can ever make it as beautiful or attractive a food, nor as clean a food, nor as easily prepared a food. I believe that children can be brought up without knowing the taste of meat, and can be trained to lead normal and active lives from the very beginning, and can live on the raw-food diet and thrive. What I am discussing here are my own experiences, and I do not regard myself as a normal specimen of humanity, because I work a great deal harder than anybody has a right to work. I do that because there are so many idle and useless people in the world at present--and some have to make martyrs of themselves, until conditions of injustice and cruelty have been done away with.

APPENDIX

SOME LETTERS FROM FASTERS

LONDON, ONTARIO, May 2, 1910.

DEAR SIR,--Your article in a recent magazine very greatly interested me. My sister, on her way home from a five-and-a-half-weeks' visit in Boston and New York, where she had been endeavoring to discover the causes of her frightful headaches, bought that number of the magazine and read your experience, with, as you can well imagine, a deep interest. In Boston she had consulted one of the two physicians supposed to head the profession (as consultants) in that city. This man told her she had Bright's disease and leakage of the heart, and he gave her ten years to live--if she was very careful. As she has five children under twelve years of age, this was a sad outlook. She weighed 122 pounds when she left--and this was the lowest weight since early girlhood--but on her return, weighed on the same scales in the same clothing, she was only 108 pounds. She looked _very_ bad, and her spirits were at zero.

Your article appealed to her, and she would have unhesitatingly tried your remedy, but that she was pregnant, and thought it would probably mean the child's death. The Boston obstetrician, who was consulted, said, if the other doctor's diagnosis was correct, the child would have to be taken at eight months.

After reading your experience, I said to my sister: "You cannot perhaps follow Mr. Sinclair's example, but you can approximate to it. If you go to your own doctor he will undoubtedly send you to some sanatorium where the patients are fairly stuffed. Suppose you come over to my place each noon and take dinner, having eaten only _a very light breakfast_; then rest from two to five, take a long bath when you rise, go for a walk from six to six-thirty, and then to your own home for tea, taking only a shredded wheat biscuit for that meal."

My sister consented, and on Saturday was weighed. On that light diet, and in twelve days, she had gained fourteen pounds. Her color is returning, she does not tire as she did, and we are full of hope that she may recover.

My object in writing was to thank you for your frank recital of ills and aches and their cure, and to get from you the names of the books to which you referred.

Several of my friends have read your articles on my recommendation, and one at least is seriously considering a lengthened fast. Reading the article took me back to the "no-breakfast régime," which I followed for five years, and then, for no especial reason, abandoned. Already I feel much better.

Sincerely and gratefully, M. R. T.

SKOWHEGAN, MAINE, May 30, 1910.

DEAR SIR,--I read your article in the _Cosmopolitan_ with deep interest, and am to-day on my seventh day's fast. My sensations thus far are exactly like yours. I shall fast until hunger returns, if it take a month.

My age is forty-eight, and I have enjoyed the best of health nearly all my life. Even now my digestion is all right, but for five years or so I have been troubled with rheumatism, not the painful, swelling sort, but lame joints.

I tried "Fletcherism," and for the last nine months have done my best to live up to his suggestions, but fell down, exactly as in your own case. I can't tell what to eat, or when I have eaten enough.

Whether this fast of yours does me any permanent good or not, my joints certainly move better to-day than for six months, and I have every confidence in the theory. The physicians here to a man all laugh at me, likewise my friends. I had lost ten pounds in weight at the end of the sixth day; I lost three the first, two each for the next two days, and a pound a day for the next three days.

You speak of an unmistakable appetite. I could eat, of course, now, though I have no appetite, and I am wondering how I shall know when a real appetite returns. Mrs. W. is as keen to try the fasting cure as I, and her condition is very like Mrs. Sinclair's, but I thought one member of the family was enough for the first try-out. Please pardon a total stranger for encroaching upon the time of a busy man, but in the hunt for health, without which life is not worth living, one will do things he would not otherwise think of. For your information I will say that I have attended to my office and business every day since my fast began, walking to my home and back at least three times daily, for the exercise; driving a touring-car nights and Sunday, for pleasure, exactly as though there had been no change in my habits. The strangest part of the experience is that I feel so well, and except for a slight faintness, feel perfectly well to-day. Say--but I was hungry for the first two days!

Yours truly, HERBERT WENTWORTH.

CLYDE PARK, MONT., May 17, 1910.

DEAR SIR,--I was much interested in your article in the _Cosmopolitan_ on "Starving for Health's Sake." For some time before I read it I had been troubled with a coated tongue and a nasty, bitter taste in my mouth. When I read the article my complaint was probably at its worst. I consulted a doctor, who gave me some capsules to clean out my intestinal canal, so he said. I asked him what I could eat and he said, "The less you eat the better." So I ate nothing for a week. Everything connected with my fast for that week was just as you described it--a ravenous hunger on the second day and after that no hunger at all. However, the coated tongue was still there, and when I next saw the doctor I mentioned your article and said you recommended rectal injections. He said he read your article and approved of it, and said after a thorough examination that I had an impaction of the colon. He said he would give me something to work on my colon and also added that if I fasted long enough the impaction would move out of itself. He also recommended injections. On the 25th day, although the coated tongue and nasty taste were still with me, I commenced eating again, as there was so much work to do on the ranch, and I had to do it, as hired help was scarce. I drank nothing but tepid water and very thin lemonade, slightly sweetened, during my fast of twenty-four days. I dropped from 175 pounds to 143 pounds.

It is a week now since I broke my fast and I am rapidly gaining weight. Yesterday I weighed 152 pounds. However, as I said, I still have the coated tongue, although not so bad as formerly, and when I regain more weight, I'm going to begin another fast. I am fifty-three years of age, and have never used tea, coffee, whisky, or tobacco. I want to read up on the subject, so that when I begin again I'll know what to do. Your article was all the literature I had on the subject, and it may have been incomplete in a great many important particulars.

Respectfully yours, ROBERT AITKIN.

CHICAGO, ILL., May 22, 1910.

DEAR SIR,--I think you will be interested to learn the experience of my wife, who tried your fast, with the same results as your wife, over which we are very much delighted.

Allow me to say that it was all done on the quiet, and no one knew of it until it was all over. And then, of course, every one thought she was raving crazy, but she has since shown her friends that it was just the thing to do.

In the first place it appealed to her, and she went into it with _faith_. She fasted for eleven days, after the second day was never hungry at all, and really began to take nourishment before she was hungry.

The whole thing came out exactly as in your cases and was most interesting. She had temperature the first two days and ate crushed ice. After that, hot or cold water as desired. The tongue was coated very badly and her breath very bad. The tongue cleared very slowly and was quite discouraging, but after a few days was clear again. She lost over ten pounds, all of which has been regained and more, too, and she is gaining all the time. Complexion very clear, and the picture of health. Appetite great, eats everything, no aches or pains of any kind, and, best of all, no constipation, which was what she tried the fast for. She lost no strength to speak of and didn't have to take to bed at all; in fact, did everything about the house as usual.

Everything has been fine now for three weeks, and if the troubles return, she is to fast again and do it right, and will take no nourishment until the tongue clears.

She took internal baths nearly every day, and was astonished at the results when nothing but water was being taken. While we don't recommend it for every one, it certainly has been a godsend in this case, and I believe because it was done right and with faith that it was just the thing for her. You certainly have one convert, and if this interests you, shall be pleased to know it.

Yours very sincerely, C. D. F.

KNOXVILLE, TENN., June 5, 1910.

DEAR SIR,--I wish to acknowledge my indebtedness to you for a restoration to such health of body and clarity of mind as I have not known since my sixteenth year, when first I entered the high school. That was twenty years ago.

I read your article, "Starving for Health's Sake," in the _Cosmopolitan_, and, as you may recollect, asked you for information as to certain books treating of the fast as a cure for disease.

Instead of answering me fully, you referred my case to the Bernarr Macfadden Institution in Chicago, for which I thank you, but I did not go there because I had neither time nor money for that purpose.

Through a local book-dealer I ordered a copy of "Fasting, Hydrotherapy and Exercise," but after two weeks of waiting it failed to arrive, so with your _Cosmopolitan_ article as my only guide and sum total of knowledge as to the fast, I quit eating on May 13 and did not take anything except water until the morning of May 26. Even then I was not hungry, but as I did not care to remain away from work any longer I broke the fast on the morning of the 26th. I lost thirteen pounds in weight, but was never too weak not to move around. I worked in the office for seven days, and the balance of the time remained at home, basking in the sunshine and reading constantly.

My health and appetite are in such perfect condition I can eat anything without fear of ulterior consequences.

As a result of the fast, I have sloughed off all my impedimenta of disease. Constipation of ten years' standing is gone as if by magic. Piles and resulting pruritis of eight years' tearing torture are nightmares of the past. Bronchitis and eczema of scalp have vanished. Asthma, due to nervous sympathy with the pneumogastric nerve, is no more. Catarrhal deafness, sore throat, intestinal catarrh, and a general neurasthenic condition have left me. Work was never so pleasant. I cannot get enough of physical exercise, it seems; my muscles seem to grow stronger as the exercise proceeds, and my weight is going upward about a pound daily. I am now three pounds heavier than I was before my fast began.

Life was never so beautiful, hope and joy never so green, the future for me and humanity's great movement toward a better day and higher good of existence never seemed so reasonable and possible of every realization as now, in the full possession of physical health and mental strength which have come back to me.

Heretofore my work has been wrought out in pain.

I am through with drugs. I graduated from allopathy long ago, then took up homeopathy and have now discarded it. I have spent over $500 in the last ten years trying to get well on medicines. These professional quacks bled me for a living and knew not how to cure me. Your article was written in the spirit of wishing to help suffering man. It cost me only thirty cents to use your method, viz.: six feet of rubber tubing to make a siphon to take two enemas daily. For that thirty cents I obtained relief a million-fold more beneficial than from $500 worth of medicine. Nay more, from your fasting idea I got rid of $500 worth of poisoning during ten years of medical superstition.

Sincerely yours, H. E. HOOVER.

NORTHWEST SOCIETY ARCHAEOLOGICAL INSTITUTE OF AMERICA

WASHINGTON UNIVERSITY, SEATTLE, WASH. Nov. 5, 1910.

EDITOR _Cosmopolitan_ MAGAZINE.