requires one thing, the growing child another, the man or woman whose
labor is purely intellectual another; and to understand how best to meet
these needs, demands a knowledge to which most of us have been
indifferent. If there is excess or lack of any necessary element, that
excess or lack means disease, and for such disease we are wholly
responsible. Food is not the only and the universal elixir of life; for
weak or poor blood is often an inheritance, and comes to one tainted by
family diseases, or by defects in air or climate in general. But, even
when outward conditions are most disastrous, perfect food has power to
avert or alter their effects; and the child who begins life burdened with
scrofulous or other diseases, and grows to a pale, weak, unwholesome
youth, and either a swift passing into the next world, or a life here of
hopeless invalidism, can, nine times out of ten, have this course of
things stopped by scientific understanding of what foods are necessary for
such conditions.

I propose to take the life of one who from babyhood up has been fed on the
best food, perfectly prepared, and to give the tables of such food for
different periods in that life, allowing only such digression as will show
the effects of an opposite course of treatment; thus showing the relations
of food to health,--a more necessary and vital form of knowledge than any
other that the world owns.




CHAPTER IX.

THE RELATIONS OF FOOD TO HEALTH.