p. 195 | Eating and Sleeping

The Seventh-day Adventist Publishing Association · Battle Creek, Mich. · May 19, 1863

Eating and Sleeping.

HALL's Journal of Health says: "For persons who eat three times a day, it is amply sufficient to make the last meal of cold bread and butter and a cup of warm drink. No one can starve on it, while a perseverance in the habit, soon begets a vigorous appetite for breakfast so promising a day of real comfort."

Yes, yes; and by omitting a third meal, the individual besides securing a night of sound sleep, will not find on awakening in the morning a bad taste in his mouth, so indicative of general foulness.

If one would always have a sweet mouth and a clean tongue, he can secure them both by simply ceasing to overtax his stomach. This frequent eating is an idle, mischievous habit, ruinous of both health and comfort; and it prevents the individual from receiving the great amount of enjoyment which it was intended he should receive from eating, and which is necessary to perfect nutrition.

Nothing should be eaten between the regular meals, whether these meals are taken either two or three times a day; nor should one eat so that the quantity ingested will induce heaviness or uncomfortable feelings.

The cook tastes the food she prepares; and by this frequent tasting she destroys both the relish for her meals, and her health. There are many house-keepers who have the same pernicious habit.

We know farmers who at the close of a long summer day, during which they have eaten heartily five times, and worked hard from four in the morning to nine at night, eat freely just before going to bed.

The stomach already enfeebled by constant working under disadvantageous circumstances, has now imposed on it an impracticable task, and the men lie down to sleep! Next morning they are nerveless—have scarcely slept all night—feel more wearied than when they lay down—and, on the whole, think a farmer lives a dog's life. So he does, so far as he sinks to mere animalism—living to eat—taxing his digestive apparatus at the expense of health, life and life's enjoyments. So on from day to day, till nature makes a desperate effort to rid the body of the superfluous food introduced into it, burning it up by fever, or expelling it by some different remedial effort.

Farmers, being so much in the open air, with abundant exercise, should be the healthiest people; but like others who are cursed with "abundance of bread," they are rheumatic, bilious, dyspeptic. This is a shame and a sin. Farmers, it is a sin. Your liver complaints, chill fevers, are as unnecessary as is the plague. Health and the sweet sleep will come to you when you need, unless by bad habits you drive them away. "Go and sin no more."