A NEW METHOD OF PROLONGING LIFE.

Poverty Bay Herald, Volume VI, Issue 662, 28 March 1879, Page 2

A NEW METHOD OF PROLONGING LIFE.

A German physician has started a new > theory with regard to food. He maintains that both the vegetarians and meat-eaters are on the wrong tack. Vegetables are not more wholesome than meat, or meat than vegetables, and nothing is gained by consuming a compound of both. Whatever nutritive qualities they may possesss, he says,, are destroyed in a great measure, and often entirely, by the process of cooking. All food should be eaten raw. If .this practise were adopted, there would be little or no illness among human beings. They would live their apportioned time and simply fade away, like animals in a wild state, from old age. Let those afflicted with gout, rheumatism, or indigestion try for a time the effect of a simple uncooked diet, such as oysters and fruit for instance, and they will find all medicines unnecessary, and such a rapid improvement of their health that they will forswear all cooked articles of food at once and for ever. Intemperance would also, it is urged, no longer be the curse of civilised communities. The yearning for drink is caused by the unnatural abstraction from what are termed "solids" of the aqueous element they contain — uncooked beef, for example, containing from 70 to 80 per cent., and some vegetables even a larger proportion of water. There would be less thirst, and consequently less desire to drink, if our food were consumed in its natural state, without first being subjected to the action of fire. Clothing, our adviser also thinks, is a mistake, but he admits that the world is not yet far enough advanced in civilisation to go about undressed. Whatever difference of opinion may exist as to this anticooking theory, there cannot be a doubt that in getting rid of the kitchen with , all abuses — including the cook — housekeepers would be spared a vast amount of worry, and probably on this account alone would live to a greater age than at present.