EXCITEMENT, worry, nervousness, hurry, temper, despondency, criti-cising attitude, heated discussion at meals affect the system as positive poisons. No unkind word should ever be spoken at meals. The gastric secretions are as sensitive to conditions of the mind as the sensitive plate of the camera is to light. Joy exhilarates digestion; gloom depresses or vitiates it. Eating is a business in itself and should be separated from all other mental or physical engagements. To eat with the end in view of health, usefulness and service, insures the greatest return of strength and joy to the eater. Avoid:

Fruit with meat.

Fruit with cereals and mushes.

Fruit with starchy vegetables.

Mixtures of raw and cooked vegetables.

Mixtures of raw and cooked fruits. Potatoes in any other form than baked. Cereals and potatoes at the same meal. Drinking at meals. Alcoholic beverages.

Extracted, concentrated, fermented foods. Shortened, spiced, patent-sifted bread-stuffs. Grease, gravies, soups. Milk as a table beverage. Nuts, with meat, eggs or beans. Salmon, lobster, oyster, shrimp. Canned meats or fish. Candy or pastry in any form.

Remarks

In the preparation of foods or salads of any form, it is essential to realize that fruits and the starch-hearing foods such as tubers, grains and pulses, potatoes, beans, peas - should never be mixed together. Hence it is advisable never to combine fruit salads with any other foods than egg, nuts, cheese or thoroughly toasted soda crackers, as intense baking destroys the starch molecule, or rather converts it into the non-fermentable dextrin. To this, however, may be added the starch-free, sedative and neutral vegetable known as lettuce, rich in iron and magnesium, and containing a principle of attenuated nerve-soothing opium.

As to vegetable salads only the raw species should be used. This because of the fact that the vital electricity, constitutional to all raw fruits or vegetables, is depolarized into the opposite phase - magnetism, when exposed to a temperature exceeding 212° Fahrenheit. As raw food, owing to its storages of high tensioned vitality, yields quicker to the digestive process than in its cooked or depolarized form, it follows that the presence of the two types of foods at the same time in the stomach, often gives rise to unmanageable situations, which in the case of a weak digestion must lead to fermentation and distress.

There are vegetables, however, which should not, even in their raw forms, be used in the same meal. The high-tensioned onion, with its volatile oil, if mixed up with the starch-and-sugar-laden carrot, or the sulphur-and-phosphorus-charged turnip, gives rise to veritable physiological explosions. When cooked, however, these barriers are all removed, and the groups can be safely handled in the same kettle. Exception to this rule, however, we find in the tomato, which owing to its halfway position between the fruit and the vegetable, should never be cooked with either fruit or vegetable, though in its raw state it may combine with the lettuce, onion, parsley, cucumbers and nuts.

As to mush porridge, and breakfast cereals in general, it should be recognized that oatmeal and cornmeal being very heating, are serviceable only in cold weather, and should then be boiled for two hours, and always with an onion cut up and cooked into it. No milk should be used in connection with this mush, though cows' butter and sometimes even a little nut-butter may be enjoyed with it.

On the other hand all manufactured breakfast foods should be avoided. Any treatment of cereals such as flaking, sterilizing, pre-digesting, denaturing, crimping, malting, glutenizing, etc., without in any way lessening the digestive labors of the systern, offer nothing but devitalized husk in return. The ancient rule of union is right and applicable to all phases of life - in dietetics no less than in matrimony: "What God has united, shall men not separate."