p. 10 | LEARN TO “CHEW.”

Pacific Press Publishing Company · Oakland, California · Dec 11, 1901

FromSigns of the Times, Vol. 27, No. 50.

LEARN TO “CHEW.”

WHEN the Lord of all made grain to have starch in it, He made also for man, the eater, a digester for starch. In the mouth it lies; and only when chewing has made those buccal glands give forth the saliva that deals with that starch can it be ready for the human stomach. But what do you do? You make it in pap. You call it cereal food, and you shower it with sugar and cover it with cream, and then put it down into the stomach. To eat a bit of bread with each mouthful would mean some secretion of those so-needed glands. But no. Down it goes, and deprived of what it most must have. Then it rebels. There is gas, and ever more gas, acid dyspepsia, all the diseases that mean your millions of pills and bottles. Why am I a physician but to know this? And that is but part. That acid eats enamel. The teeth depart from you. Best dentists in the world in this America. O, yes! But, then, suppose there need be no dentists at all? Do I need dentists? Not I. But if I had been filled with cereal, and never a chew, then certainly I would need them all, says Helen Campbell in Boston Cooking School Magazine.

Now what shall be done? For the child’s sake, I say, Parch your grains and grind or chew whole as you will, only chew! A wise man talked with me one day of the great Carlyle,—his power and the wonder of his work, his temper of the devil, and always a howl to all to be silent, he alone to speak. What did he eat? I say. Chiefly oatmeal, he says. And then I know. I have watched in a Scotch kitchen how they do. Their porridge is poison, gas-breeder, and temper-of-the-devil breeder. But they make antidote in their oat cake. That is to chew, and with thirty-two teeth, and no less. The teeth of Norwegian, of Swede and Finn,—of all people who make hard breads and chew,—are teeth indeed, and abide in the head that owns them. But Americans who drop them, gayly it would seem, have dentist and doctor and drug shop at every corner!—The Clinic.