FRUIT AND THE LIQUOR APPETITE.
A WRITER in a European temperance journal calls attention to the value of fruit as an antidote to the craving for liquor. He says:— In Germany, a nation greatly in advance of other countries in matters relating to hygiene, alcoholic disease has been coped with successfully by the adoption of pure diet and natural curative agencies. I have said that the use of fresh fruit is an antidote for the drink craving, and this is true. I have met workingmen who have told me that fruit has often taken away the craving for drink. I met a clergyman recently who assured me that a diet consisting largely of fruit had taken entirely away an hereditary craving that had troubled him for years. It may be asked, How can fruit and pure diet do all this? The explanation is simple. Fruit may be called nature’s medicine. Every apple, every orange, every plum, and every grape is a bottle of medicine. An orange is three parts water—distilled in nature’s laboratory—but this water is rich in peculiar fruit acids medically balanced, which are specially cooling to the thirst of the drunkard, and soothing to the diseased state of his stomach. An apple or an orange eaten when the desire for “a glass” arises would generally take it away, and every victory would make less strong each recurring temptation. The function is not so much to provide solid nourishment as to supply the needful acids and salines for the purification of the blood. Once get the blood pure, every time its pure nutrient stream bathes the tissues of the body it will bring away some impurity, and leave behind an atom of healthy tissue, until in time the drunkard shall stand up purified, in his right mind.