THE NATURAL DIET | AdventAI

International Tract and Missionary Society · Oakland, California · Oct 21, 1889

FromSigns of the Times, Vol. 15, No. 40.

THE NATURAL DIET.

THE food which is most enjoyed is the diet we call bread and fruit. In all my long medical career, extending over forty years, I have rarely known an instance in which a child has not preferred fruit to animal food. I have many times been called upon to treat children for stomachic disorders, induced by pressing upon them animal to the exclusion of fruit diet, and have seen the best results occur from the practice of reverting to the use of fruit in the dietary.

I say it without the least prejudice, as a lesson learned from simple experience, that the most natural diet for the young, after the natural milk diet, is fruit and whole-meal bread, with milk and water for drink. The desire for this same mode of sustenance is often continued into after years, as if the resort to flesh were a forced and artificial feeding, which required long and persistent habit to establish its permanency as a part of the system of every-day life.

How strongly this preference taste for fruit over animal food prevails is shown by the simple fact of the retention of these foods in the mouth. Fruit is retained to be tasted and relished. Animal food, to use a common phrase, is "bolted." There is a natural desire to retain the delicious fruit for full mastication; there is no such desire, except in the trained gormand, for the retention of animal substance.

One further fact which I have observed—and that too often to discard it as a fact of great moment—is that when a person of mature years has, for a time, given up voluntarily the use of animal food in favor of vegetable, the sense of repugnance to animal food is soon so markedly developed that a return to it is overcome with the utmost difficulty. Neither is this a mere fancy or fad peculiar to sensitive men or over-sentimental women. I have been surprised to see it manifested in men who were the very reverse of sentimental, and who were, in fact, quite ashamed to admit themselves guilty of any such weakness. I have heard those who, gone over from a mixed diet of animal and vegetable food to pure vegetable diet, speak of feeling low under the new system, and declare that they must needs give it up in consequence; but I have found even these (without exception) declare that they infinitely preferred the simpler, purer, and, as it seemed to them, more natural food, plucked from the prime source of food, untainted by its passage through another animal body.—Longman's Magazine.