Bread and Milk For Children (Not an ideal Food- often a Posion)

Bread and milk eaten together is a dietetic error; for it is eating starch and protein together. When we go to nature for our food, we may eat her compounds of starch and protein with impunity; for her compounds are blends of starch and protein, plus palpable and impalpable digestive elements, the latter securing or insuring perfect digestion. But when nature's food is analyzed and synthesized in our laboratories and kitchens, the aids to digestion are lost. Then, when eaten, indigestion follows.

Almost daily someone calls my attention to inconsistencies in my writings, saying that I have changed my opinion on many things; that my present writings nullify and make void much that is in books and magazines which I have written before. Yes, I am moving on, and I intend to make my present work obsolete, if possible. No one knows this better than I do! but since when has it become a crime to grow, to move on? People who are consistent are not growing. I would rather retire from the practice of my profession than be compelled to give up the use of the discoveries I have made in the past two years. My book, "Toxemia Explained," boils down and abridges much that has gone before, and the Cook Book gives my latest views regarding food and food combinations.

I have taught the error of eating meat and bread together for a number of years, but I have not until recently made the rule apply to all protein foods and starches. The "Cook Book" gives but few menus containing starch and milk. This will cause a mild storm of protest from many ex-patients, old and new readers. Some, no doubt, will turn to other health teachers in their pique; but they will wabble back in time. The majority will pursue the even tenor of their way and continue milk or fifty-fifty with starch, declaring the old teaching good enough for them. The old, moss-grown antediluvians, with their protest that "what was good enough for my sires is good enough for me," will be heard; for they are in at every food reform, and they will be heard on every hand declaring: "Bread and milk have been eaten always; bread and milk have been eaten together since bread has been made and cows have been milked." Yes, and diseases that are built by starch and protein continue to fill hospitals.

Milk, when not tinkered with, is a perfect food, containing all the elements necessary for bodybuilding, and is digested by the mouth and stomach secretions. Starch is digested by the mouth secretions. When the two are eaten together, the starch ferments, acid forms, and catarrh is built. All so-called diseases begin with catarrh.

The human animal is endowed with vitality which, if wisely conserved, may continue its life from one hundred to one hundred and fifty years. From the fact that the average life is not fifty years it is obvious that something is radically wrong in our manner of living, bringing about the assassination of the entire human race every fifty years. If we could guillotine the assassin--the hydra-headed monster whose heads are in continuous consultation, conspiring and evolving new and subtle schemes for inveigling the human family into camouflaged debaucheries, causing disease, premature aging, and death--we could in a few generations have youth and virile manhood coming into its greatest efficiency from seventy-five to one hundred and twenty-five years of age. The sensualism taught by this old hydra is made plausible to minds befogged by the drunkenness of sensualism, when assured that disease is the will of God and unavoidable, and attacks the ascetic as well as the indulgent. Besides, apprehension is assuaged by the great Science of Medicine, assuring immunity to all who submit to being immunized in time!

Disease is the sequence of wrong eating and sensualism-- overindulgence and pleasure-madness.

The commonest form of overindulgence is in eating, which develops, sooner or later, a sensitization--a systemic antipathy or aversion--to some particular kind of food. For example The excessive use of bread and milk, or bread and meat, in enervated and toxemic subjects, brings on a catarrhal state of the mucous membranes. In children this state is marked by frequent colds and catarrhal fevers. All the so-called diseases of childhood, including the eruptive fevers, are variations of one and the same "disease."

If children were never overfed, or fed when enervated, tired, or emotionally excited, they would be able to digest milk and bread together; but this is an ideal, the carrying out of which is possible, but not probable. Hence, to insure better health, and avoid putrescent infection contingent on eating starch and protein together, children should be given toasted whole-wheat bread, and instructed in perfect mastication and insalivation. When the bread is eaten, it may be followed with fruit, or teakettle tea made of cream and hot water, not milk and hot water.

Milk has been the subject of more controversy than any other food. The hue and cry of public health officers has been "pure milk--milk free from germs--milk from healthy cows," etc., etc. Cleanliness is certainly next to godliness--and far ahead of most godliness; but there is a world of knowledge that enters not into the calculations of the genial host of the laborator--namely, what is the digestive capacity of the child that is to be fed pure milk? If fed too much, the milk will ferment; for every child's digestive apparatus contains bacteria, and if fed beyond its capacity with certified milk, pasteurized milk, or milk passed by censors of high or low degree, it will decompose, without apologies to the highest tribunal of milk inspectors on earth. And, when it does, it is as disease-producing as the vilest of the vile. The food inspector's jurisdiction ends at the mouth of the baby, and with the teeth, adenoids, tonsils, and immunization of school children; but when adenoids and enlarged tonsils arrest the attention of the doctor, who is an ally of the public health and pure food commission, it is long after pure milk has been regularly fed into a seething gehenna of fermentation beneath the diaphragm of the child.

Fermentation from starch and decomposition from protein--milk--establish gastric catarrh; which means that the mucous membrane of the throat and stomach has become the seat of vicarious elimination of toxin, which fails to be eliminated in the regular way. Those crises of Toxemia are diagnosed tonsilitis or gastritis; and when there is much putrescence from the protein of the milk or other animal food, the type of sore throat will be ulcerative or diphtheritic. Scarlet fever, measles, and whooping-cough are varying types of a few of the symptom-complexes or so-called "diseases peculiar to children," but which are basically Toxemia--the first, last and only specific disease that animal life is heir to. All other so-called diseases are crises or systemic revolts, in which toxin is vicariously expelled from the body, and along with it any extraneous toxic or infectious material that may have fortuitously gained entrance.

Bread is cheap, and, to encourage its consumption by everybody, it has been dubbed "the staff of life." White flour has received the condemnation of dietists of high and low degree; and, if it were not for its intrinsic merits, it would have been consigned to the limbo of oblivion long ago. White flour has better keeping qualities--it remains in status quo much longer than the flours made from whole grain, because it is freed, in bolting of extraneous elements that force degeneration. If millers could clean wheat--remove parasites, smut, and fungi--whole-grain flours would keep equally well with white flour.

People with full digestive power can protect themselves from a large intake of fungi, but there is a limit to even the most robust digestions. Large bread-consumers come to the end of their toleration, marked by digestive derangements; and there is no cure except to limit the amount to within their toleration. Nerve-energy must be equal to the demand required to keep elimination equal to disintegration of tissue, if not, this toxic waste is retained, bringing on Toxemia--the foundation of all so-called diseases.

When the system is continually taxed by endeavoring to overcome ferments of all kinds--all kinds of stimulants, from bread, alcohol, tobacco, coffee, tea, and food excesses--energy is used up, enervation checks elimination, and Toxemia results. Then all kinds of symptom-complexes so-called diseases--become imminent. What the type will be depends upon what organs or tissues are stressed most from habits and environments. Stomach derangements follow abuse to this organ.

When bread and milk are eaten together, the organism has two enemies to resist. (Food eaten to excess becomes an enemy.) If an excess of bread is eaten, and fresh fruit and vegetables follow, the latter helps the digestion of the starch by opposing fermentation. If milk is taken with the starch, both ferment, and catarrh follows. Milk, when not tampered with by pasteurization, and the cow not being poisoned by vaccination, has per se self-protection--resistance to fermentation; but when starch is added, it ferments easily. But fresh fruit and vegetables (uncooked) taken with milk help its digestion.

Delicate men, women, and children are continually suffering from periodic attacks of indigestion brought on from eating bread beyond their toleration. The whole grain carries a digestant which, if not ruined in cooking, will aid the mouth secretions in its digestion. If milk is taken, it stimulates gastric secretion, which is acid, and the mouth secretion is alkaline. One neutralizes the other, leaving the bread and milk to take on a pathological fermentation instead of a physiological fermentation, and indigestion and catarrh follow.

Most people remember that when they were children and asked for more chicken, meat, fish or eggs, they were told: "No, you cannot have more unless you eat bread with it." Natural hunger calls for one food--a mono-diet; but mixing food has been taught, and bread, the staff of life, has been urged, and even forced. Today, in restaurants, the bread supplied is a gluttonous amount, while other foods are served in such frugal portions that people are forced to eat bread or leave the table with appetite unsatisfied. Hunger and appetite are not the same. Appetite is built by overeating.