GENTLE DIET | AdventAI

Seventh-day Adventist Publishing Association · Battle Creek, Mich. · Apr 24, 1900

GENTLE DIET.

A physician communicated through Farm, Stock, and Home the following experience, which is commended to parents of cross and irritable children:—

“Three years ago a kind, conscientious mother said to me: ‘The greatest trial of my life is that my children quarrel so with each other. I can not understand the reason. Nothing they do annoys me so much; and by teaching, persuasion, and punishment I have been unable to change their habit.’ Hoping to give her aid, I asked many questions—among other things in regard to diet. She told me they were great meat-eaters. Her husband and brother must have meat three times a day, and the children often ate scarcely anything else. I told her of the bear that was kept in the museum in Gressen; when fed on bread only, it was quiet and tractable,—even children could play with it with impunity,—but a few days’ feeding upon meat would make it ferocious, quarrelsome, and dangerous.”

“She agreed to try the experiment upon her children, and did change their diet to fruits, grains, and vegetables,—milk toast, graham and cornmeal gems, wheatlet and oatmeal mush and milk, etc., for breakfast and lunch, with vegetables and graham bread at dinner, and fruit, fruit puddings, or mushes molded in cups with fruit sauce, for dessert. This required tact, study, and perseverance; but she was more than amply paid. In less than a month she could see a difference in the habits of her children, and a year later she testified that it could hardly be recognized as the same family. The children were cheerful, playful, gleeful, full of spirit; but instead of being fretful and quarrelsome, were kind, benevolent, and considerate to each other. They were also more than ordinarily exempt from acute attacks of fever and inflammation.”