Does Fruit Require Cooking?
COOKING increases the digestibility of all foods with the exception of meat, for raw meat is more digestible than cooked meat. Cooked gluten will digest in half the time required to cook meat. Raw meat is easily digested. Raw gluten is not easily digested, but cooked gluten is. Cooking vegetable food increases its digestibility. The acids and juices of fresh uncooked fruits are, however, somewhat more valuable as a means of destroying germs and of sterilizing the stomach than are the acids of cooked fruits. So if a person who is bilious or has a foul stomach, and wishes an aseptic diet, will adopt a fruit diet for the purpose of sterilizing his stomach, he will find the acids of fresh fruit better than those of cooked fruit. This is why the grape cure has been practiced with so great success in Switzerland and many other places. The whole secret of the grape cure is that the acids of the grape destroy or prevent the growth of germs in the stomach; and those people who are troubled with foul stomachs, especially persons suffering from prolapsus and dilatation of the stomach, find great aid in the fruit cure,—in eating nothing but fruit for a short time. Those germs that feed upon meats, cheese, and all kinds of animal foods, are starved out upon a fruit diet, because they have no food upon which they can grow and thrive. Professor Kiosoto, an eminent Japanese bacteriologist, Professor Koch, and others, have shown that the acids of lemons, apples, and other fruits—citric acid, malic acid—are capable of destroying all kinds of disease germs. Cholera germs are killed in fifteen minutes by lemon juice or apple juice, and typhoid fever germs are killed in half an hour by these acids, even when considerably diluted. If you squeeze a lemon into a glass of water containing cholera germs, and let it stand fifteen or twenty minutes, you may drink the water with impunity, as the germs will be dead; these juices will kill other disease germs. In the acids of fruits we have an antidote for every kind of disease germ. It is well to remember this. You have only to eat freely of fruits to drive out of the stomach every bad germ. Now, instead of telling a man to have his stomach washed out, we can tell him to drink orange juice, which will cleanse the stomach as thoroughly as a stomach tube, provided it is not a case of gastric catarrh. If we have to deal with gastric catarrh, in which there is a large amount of tenacious mucus adhering to the walls of the stomach, a stomach tube to dislodge it is required, but in ordinary cases of biliousness, foul tongue, bad breath, sick headache, and nervous headache a fruit diet is a wonderful purifier. The fruit diet will cleanse the stomach and the alimentary canal, and drive off disease germs, which are responsible for a large share of our ailments.—Good Health.