Natural Diet.

Tuapeka Times, Volume XXIII, Issue 1672, 8 March 1890, Page 6 (Supplement)

Natural Diet.

The food whioh is most enjoyed is the diet we call bread and fruit. In all my long medical career, extending over 40 years, I have rarely known an instance in which a child has not preferred fruit to animal food. I have many times been Galled upon to treat children for Btomaahia 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 cf fruit in the dietary. I say it without the least prejudice, as a lessen learned from simple expeiisnce, that the most natural diet for the young, after the natural milk diet, is fruit and wuola-meal bread, with milk and water for drink. The desire for this came mode of sustenance is often continued into after years, as if tho resort to fle3h were a forced and artificial feeding, which required long and persistent habit to establish its permanency as a part of the system of everyday 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 id retained to be ta&ted and relished. Animal food, to use a common phraso, is "bolted." There ia a natural desire to retain the delicious fruit for full mastication ; there ia no such desire, exo&pt in the trained gourmand, for the retention of animal substauce.

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 diiSoulty. Neither is this a mere fanoy or fad peculiar to sensitive men or oversentimental 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 suoh 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 c:ive it up in consequence ; but I have found even these (without exception) deolare 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.