Fruits as Food and Medicine

Review and Herald Publishing Association · Takoma Park Station, Washington, D. C. · Oct 5, 1911

Fruits as Food and Medicine

Now that the height of the fruit season is at hand, with pears, plums, grapes, peaches, and other fruit in the market, it is well to know something of their nutritive and medicinal value. Many persons who are accustomed to think of fruits simply as healthful perhaps, but not particularly germicidal, will be surprised to learn their health-giving properties.

Marion Harland writes of the value of fruits as food:—

“Currants, berries, rhubarb, peaches, apples, pears, melons, and grapes each brings to jaded appetites and bile-laden systems its own message. A too common blunder is in overlooking the benefits we might get from carrying the habit learned and practised when the mercury is up to blood heat on into the winter solstice. For bile gathers as surely if more slowly then, and the digestive organs are sluggish to congestion.

“Peaches are catholic in principle and benignant in action. They may be indexed as a capital, all-round fruit. They correct constipation, yet have a decided tendency to brace the intestines. Prussic acid, in minute quantities, is secreted in the fragrant cells of the luscious peach, and as a healer, not a destroying principle.

“Fruits contain predigested food elements which do not clog the system, and which are valuable in sustaining strength. They are foods and medicines, or rather foods which avert the necessity of medicine.

“After the sleep of the night and the inaction of the digestive organs, a sort of mucous film forms upon the coat of the stomach, indisposing it to do its proper work. The gentle acids remove this and awaken the organ to a sense of what is expected of it. One writer upon gastronomy asserts in round terms that he would ‘as soon cover the coat of his stomach with a viscid poultice as to compel it to take care of a bowl of oatmeal or hominy early in the morning.’

“Oranges have an advantage over the great majority of other fruits in being obtainable all the year. They are antibilious. So are lemons, but oranges are agreeable to the taste, and have nutritious qualities not shared by the more tart cousin.”

There are other varieties of fruit which are of great medicinal value. A South American is said to have cured eight cases of yellow fever by feeding

each patient half of a watermelon. The body became so drained of fluids by disease that the patient became ravenous for liquids.

As an aid to digestion — a really material aid — the pineapple stands alone among the fruits. Its vegetable pepsin neutralizes, or, perhaps, rather digests, albuminous substances in the stomach. Fresh pineapple, or, better still, the juice of one, placed in direct contact with eggs, or gelatine, or milk, will prove this fact conclusively by producing a bitter-tasting dish.

In case of catarrhal ailments of the throat and its downward connection — the alimentary canal or tract — pineapple can not be overestimated, and it acts with equal force in malarial affections.

Oranges and lemons are not only valuable by reason of their potash salts, but especially for their citric acid. A case of paralysis of the entire right side is reported in a medical journal to have been helped by the adoption of the juice of oranges as a regular diet.

The Woman’s World states that oranges are the only food used in the cure of aggravated cases of dyspepsia, with no other food allowed. The grape cure is successfully used in a great variety of cases, especially in wasting diseases, and bananas in the same way. In all of these fruit cures no other food is used, and no medicine.

Tomatoes, raw or cooked, stimulate a sluggish liver. According to the Banting estimate, five ounces of sugar a day will increase a man’s weight one pound a week.

The salts and organic acids in the apple tend to improve the quality of the blood.

Cabbage, cut up to thread-like fineness, and eaten with lemon-juice, is digested in one hour.

As for dates and plantains, they contain sufficient nutriment to sustain life.

In these days of impure drinking water, water famines, and filtered water, it is well to know that one of the greatest advantages of fruit is that it offers us pure water for which we do not need a filter, to the amount of nearly fifty per cent in berries and more than ninety-two per cent in watermelons.—Los Angeles Herald.