AN ENGLISH PLEA FOR SIMPLER FOODS.
THE famous English athlete, author, and tennis champion, Eustace H. Miles, M. A. (Cambridge), has recently told his personal diet experience in a book entitled “Muscle, Brain, and Diet: a Plea for Simpler Foods,” published by the Macmillan Company, New York. At the age of twenty-eight, being threatened with Bright’s disease, the author was ordered to give up alcohol. In his efforts to abandon alcohol, he temporarily discontinued the use of flesh foods. Of the effects produced upon his system by the new régime, he says:— Before long I grew more learned in such matters; and as time went on, I found that the desire, or even the liking, for alcohol was departing—a thing I had never imagined possible. I found that I was spending far less on my food and drink; that I was saving a great deal of time in various ways; that much of my superfluous fat had disappeared; that my skin was getting a healthier color; that in exercise and at games my clearness of eye, my skill, my endurance, and—a strange thing, surely, between the ages of twenty-seven and thirty-two—my activity and flexibility were all gradually increasing; that my brain work was far better in respect of range of subjects, of sheer quantity, of quickness, and of quality than it had ever been before; that I was somewhat suddenly developing a most satisfactory memory, especially for history and “general” subjects; that I was acquiring for the first time a power of “observation,” and a power of quickly arranging my subjects; that I saw many new analogies between one subject and another; that I could work for long stretches of time without a breakdown. In fact, I may say that brain work has become almost as natural a thing to me as breathing, except at night. Even when I go for a holiday, I seldom rest my brain—I usually find it enough rest to change my work. All this will sound very like self-illusion. “You imagine all this,” the skeptic will say, “but it needs proof.” In reply I appeal to statistics: That during the last year I have coached nearer to one hundred and fifty than to one hundred honors pupils, that since last January I have had the schemes of more than ten books accepted by various well-known publishers, and, in the intervals of my coaching, have already written nearly all of them, as well as a good many articles,—all this I can prove. It is less easy to prove that I have never felt so happy as I do now; that I feel altogether better in every way than I used to; that my motives in life are higher than they used to be. First of all comes an extraordinary change of motive, such as I believe no historian has ever recorded. I began to drop the flesh foods as an experiment; I soon continued to do so because the discontinuance of their use was taking away my desire for alcohol (and so was probably saving my life), and because it saved money and time. The motive here would be self-preservation and the desire to save and gain money and time. Then I continued, not only for the foregoing reasons, but also because my work was improving, my feelings were improving, and my enjoyment of life was increasing. Here the added motive was the desire to increase what was positively good. Then, while these motives (including self-preservation) still continued to move me, there was added the desire to set an example and to help others; this is a higher motive than the others, and was utterly absent at the start. It is one of the chief of the motives that have led me to write this book. Secondly, as to fatigue, depression, and many other distressing symptoms, I find that they are almost entirely in proportion to the error of food, and not in proportion to the work done. In other words, it is far less tiring for me to do twelve hours a day of the most severe brain work, while eating the proper kinds and amounts of fleshless foods, than to do two hours a day while eating flesh with my meals. Thirdly, and this will astonish many readers, the better the “condition” I am in, and the better my games and work are, the more I feel errors of diet. I can not help thinking that this must be because my blood is purer, and therefore like a glass of pure water; that is, more likely to be considerably changed by a little “mud” than a glass of muddy water would be; or I might say that I am analogous to a man with a pure mind—he feels an error more sensitively than a hardened sinner would. But even when I am guilty of some error in diet, I do not think that my state falls much below my state three years ago. It is hard to say. Fourthly, as to stimulants, repeated experiments have given results which at first surprised me, but now seem quite to fit in with all the other results. Tea and alcohol have “picked me up,” at any rate for the time being, and have left little appreciably bad after-effects, when I have been overtired; for instance, after a hard match played on a more or less empty stomach. But when I have been in the pink of condition, when I can take more exercise and do more work without fatigue than any one of my acquaintance, then tea and alcohol positively depress me. So far from improving my condition even at the moment, both the immediate effects and the after-effects are wont to be almost misery. Meat, and flesh foods in general, produce depression and tiredness, and pains in one or more of my joints, within a very short time, but more especially so when (for example at a dinner party) I have felt perfectly fit to start with. This point may be worth noticing: Tea, with me, has usually produced the desire for more tea later on (say after four or five hours). Alcohol, with me, has almost invariably produced the more or less immediate desire for more alcohol or tea. Lastly, the flesh foods, with me, have quite invariably produced, immediately, the desire for one or all of the three,—tea, alcohol, and flesh foods. . . . Lastly, whereas it might be thought that I should have to eat huge quantities of food to keep up my strength, I do not eat nearly so much as I used to, probably not a quarter, certainly not a half; in fact, so long as I eat the right things (especially proteids), the less I eat and drink—the less I need to eat and drink. I insist on good health being not merely an absence of certain more or less definite signs of illness or bad health, but on its being also a positive and active tendency toward whatever is good, the tendency to develop, as God meant man to develop, in every direction—physical, mental, and moral. If a man not only looks healthy and satisfies the doctor’s tests, but also is enabled to get out of himself nearly the most possible good in whatever noble direction and for whatever noble end he chooses, then, and not till then, I call him “healthy;” for such a man is bound to feel a tendency and a desire to bring every one else into a similar state of good health. Thus, in the things of the world, they of the world who strive for the mastery must be temperate in all things: how much more, then, should those who are “not of the world”? For they do it “to obtain a corruptible crown; but we an incorruptible.”