Fourth Month to One Year
I
do not believe in feeding children very much other than milk in
the first twelve months. Those who have normal, healthy mothers
should thrive very well for the first year if kept entirely on the
mother's milk, plus fruit and vegetable juices. After a child is
three months old, it should be taking a feeding of fruit and vegetable
juices daily.
It should have orange juice, or a combination
of spinach, tomato, and lettuce juices. The spinach and lettuce
should be run through a vegetable-mill, or bruised, and the juice
extracted. A teaspoonful of this vegetable juice, with a teaspoonful
of orange juice, in four to six teaspoonfuls of water, can be given
preceding the ten o'clock feeding. From week to week the amount
of vegetable juice is to be increased, and the amount of nursing
decreased, until from the fourth or sixth month the child will be
taking nothing except fruit and vegetable juices at this time of
day. At a year of age, vegetable and fruit pulp may be given. By
that time various vegetables can be used--carrots, turnips; in fact,
any fresh, succulent vegetables. The standbys, however, are lettuce,
tomato, and spinach, with orange juice. In the summer time, during
the corn season, a cob of corn can be scraped, and the juice expressed
and used with the other vegetable juices.
Children fed plenty of fruit and vegetable
juices, at least once a day, will thrive very much better than children
who are kept exclusively on the mother's milk, or fed on cooked
cereals. Catarrh, enlarged tonsils, adenoids, gastritis, colds,
"flu"--in fact, all the "diseases peculiar to children"--are
built by the acid of cooked cereals dressed with sugar. Butter,
sweet foods, and candy are catarrh-builders; then add to this improper
feeding the stupid custom of removing effects (tonsils and adenoids),
and continuing the cause, and we have a picture of today's doings.
Teeth are removed, sinuses drained, and
other operations performed, made necessary by feeding baby wrongly;
and health is expected to return without removing the cause--wrong
living. This is stupidity. Children whose mothers have eaten a large-sized
vegetable salad every day during their pregnancy will be better
off than children who are born of mothers who eat in the conventional
way.
