Fasting and Feeding.

New Zealand Mail, Issue 957, 4 July 1890, Page 9

Fasting and Feeding.

Spectator. If any gentlemen have a strong desire to benefit science, and amuse themselves by experiments in dietary, they have plenty of opportunity; and the experts in sanitation will, we doubt not, be quite ready to direct their efforts. In spite of the vast experience of the human race, and of the fact that the art of the trainer has been practised for at least three "thousand years, it is not yet certain that we know precisely what would he the best diet for a working community during the working period of life, —at least, if any physicians know, the general public does not. One would think experience enough had been collected in prisons, convict settlements, and armies ; but mankind still remains comparatively unenlightened. No two peoples feed themselves on precisely the same diet, nor has any class decided finally that such-and-such a dietary will yield uuder such-and such circumstances a maximum of strength. Even if we admit it to be settled, as it was by the experience of the Bombay navvies, that a certain quantity of flesh adds directly and at once to the strength and endurance of the human frame, there is still a conflict of opinion as to the most useful quantity ; while about the value of the cereals there are a hundred opinions. Wheat is supposed to be the most nourishing, but the Scotchman has strong evidence to bring forward in favour of oats, the North American Negro on behalf of maize, and the Negro of the Upper Nile, the biggest aud strongest of all human beings, on the side of millet and dal. There |are people, some of them by no means foolisn, who believe that mankind, in rejecting the husks of the cereals, which certainly fatten animais, are guilty of preposterous waste —we have a score of pamphlets somewhere, preaching that doctrine for gospel--while we have seen evidence, in which we partly believe, that strong men might be bred on a little flour and oatmeal and a great deal of haricot beans, a food which to many men, perhaps a majority, is sin-.-ularly appetising. Have the edible oils the effect in producing size which all Asiatics ascribe to them, and can children be made tall and stout, almost without reference to parentage, by an adequate supply of good milk? Thi German doctors believe, we are told, that their soldiers owe much of their fibre to the sausage, which is their main sustenance; while it is next to certaiu that the astounding habit of dying displayed by Russian soldiers in the field, a habit which has repeatedly produced important political consequences, arises from some defect in the heat-yielding quality of their rations. It ought to be possible to establish an unerring rule for each climate, and a hundred gentlemen, intelligent enough to record their experience, could hardly utilize their leisure better than by establishing it. They could settle, for instance, once for aii w’nafc the value of the potato really is as a strength-giver, and whether a man must always be weak on the green food on which oxen grow so strong. Suppose one of the Oxford or Cambridge Colleges, or, if that is too much to expect, say Harvard or Cornell, diets itself for six months on milk and oatmeal, and tells us the result of that. The undergraduates would not mind the discomfort, of course, any more than they would mind Succi’s, they would afford an invaluable object-lesson to the European and American worlds. They might even tell us somewhat, incidentally, on a much more curious, though we fear less profitable subject, the possible mental effect of differences in diet. There must be some effect, one would think, and it may possibly be considerable, and we shall never know what it is except from experiments continued over some time by a considerable number of the intelligent. Convicts can tell us nothing about that, and soldiers very little; while the few individuals who profess to know may be victims of individual illusion. Were the ancients so wholly wrong in attributing to diet certain mental effects? Nobody seems to know in our day anything about the subject, which is left so uncertain that there is doubt even as to the intellectual consequences of abstinence or repletion. You shall hear a cultivated man declare. as Lord George Bentinck used 4o do, that his mental powers were at their highest when he was starving; and then hear the same

man talk after dinner twice as brightly as he talked before. Seriouslv, there are questions of diet Which a group of cultivated men could settle, that are really of importance, and that will never bes ;ttled by experiments made solely upon the ignorant or the unwilling. One of them, the biggest, is : What -is the cheapest food that will keep & European in the fullest health and strength ? and another is : Does any food of the many varieties eaten by .large populations as their staple sustenance affect ftr good or evil the growth of mental power ? To answer those questions by solid evidence will be a work of humanity, which paying Succi to reduce himself for a time to a sort of living skeleton certainly is not.