Advice on Fruit-Eating

Pacific Press Publishing Company · Oakland, California · Dec 4, 1901

FromSigns of the Times, Vol. 27, No. 49.

Advice on Fruit-Eating.

The curative value of fruit is becoming more and more insisted upon by those who make a study of dietetics. Grapes are recommended for the dyspeptic, the consumptive, the anemic, and for those with a tendency to gout and liver troubles. Plums, also, are said to be a cure for gouty and rheumatic tendencies. The acid fruits, especially lemons and oranges, are particularly good for stomach troubles and rheumatism.

It is not sufficient, say the advocates of the fruit cure, to eat a small quantity at breakfast or dinner. One should eat from two to eight pounds of grapes a day; or, if oranges are the curative agency, the number to be eaten in a day may vary from three to six.

“A healthy condition of the body depends upon a perfect balance of foods taken. There are many other factors entering into the question, but this feature must not be forgotten,” says The Syracuse Clinic. “Few people there are who can keep healthy without fruit.”

“‘How absurd!’ some one says, ‘to be told to eat fruit when everybody eats it.’ Yes, but how do you eat it? Do you take a definite amount of it, the same as you do of meat and potatoes, or do you eat it as you do candy?”

“If you suffer from an acute attack of indigestion after a dinner of soup, meats, pickles, sauces, salad, cakes, pastries with spices and condiments enough to blister the skin, to say nothing of the delicate lining of the stomach, pray do not aver that indigestion arises from the morsel of fruit taken at the end.”

“Be honest with your stomach for a month. Eat no more than you need of simple food, into which the true luxuries of nature, such as apples, oranges, pears, or other fruits shall enter. Try, if only as an interesting experiment, to eat sparingly of the cruder articles of diet, and more of those suited to your real needs, and see to it that fruit forms a part of each meal.”

“‘But there are so many kinds of fruit that I can not eat.’”

“There it is again. Because you can not eat seventeen kinds of food at one meal ending with fruit, it, of course, was the apple or the strawberries that did the harm.”

“‘But doesn’t fruit make the blood thin?’ It certainly does, and we are glad of it. Ask any doctor who has practised medicine for ten years with his eyes open, and he will tell you that the majority of grown-up folks have blood too thick.”

“The minerals and natural acids of the fruit are the very best conceivable remedies for this thickened condition of the blood. Fruit, then, becomes both a food and a medicine—a necessity and a most delightful luxury.”—New York Tribune.