DO WE EAT TOO OFTEN?

Ladies' Mirror, Volume 3, Issue 11, 1 May 1925, Page 30

DO WE EAT TOO OFTEN?

TJR. CECIL WEBB-JOHNSON tells us in his useful and entertaining book, "Diet for Women,” that the vast majoritymen as well as women — engaged in “digging their graves with their teeth,” I applaud him as one of the few courageous ones who is not afraid to fling unpalatable truths in the teeth of his generation. It is not only, as he points out, that the human race is divided into those who eat too much and those who eat too little. Both classes of delinquents eat the wrong sort of food, and so, in his opinion, produce most of the diseases from which we ail, rich and poor alike, suffer. And this ill-chosen fare is, according to Dr. Webb-Johnson, often consumed at the wrong time. Women are, it seems, specially guilty of the crime of nibbling between meals. “I have found women,” he writes, “greedier than men.” Most of them “are fully alive to the pleasures of the table but whereas a man is satisfied with three meals a day, women eat oftener. The amount of chocolates and sweets that some women eat.between meals is enormous.” I’m afraid we must plead guilty to the chocolates. On the other hand women usually consume much less at the three orthodox meal-times than men. They also drink much less alcohol and so require, or think they require, the stimulant that sugar provides. MEAT, milk, and tea are first on . Dr. Webb-Johnson’s list of

foods which he would like to see eliminated from our daily fare, though he frankly confesses that the salads and uncooked fruit he would fain substitute for these overstimulating foods are apt to become monotonous. I agree with him in this, for I have tried his remedy. For a whole year I subsisted on a diet of fresh fruit and vegetables, with immense benefit to my health. But oh, how weary one gets of it! I can also speak from experience of the grape cure which Dr. Webb-Johnson recommends. It is a sovereign remedy for rheumatism and that dyspepsia which is the prelude to most maladies. A month of grapes will, I believe, cure one of almost anything, but there again, as in the case of all unvaried diets, the monotony of it makes the “pleasures of the table” a penance. The truth of the matter seems to be that if one must suffer in order to be beautiful one must also suffer in order to be healthy. To have the courage to renounce the unwholesome food upon which most of us live one must learn in infancy to like the wholesome fruits of the earth which is, so Dr. Webbson tells us, our natural food. Food, like everything else in life, is a matter of habit. We are most of us too old in folly to listen to counsels of perfection, as Dr, WebbJohnson realises. But in pointing to a better way and a better diet for women he has done brave service to our sex.