Modern nutrition and dietetics are two very practical sciences. Food products are today classified into seven large basic groups. Up to 20 or 30 years ago, foods were classified into three basic classes-namely, proteins, starches, and fats. The modern classification goes as follows:
Class 1 Green and yellow vegetables.
2 Oranges, tomatoes, grapefruits, and salad greens.
3 Potatoes, bananas, beets, grapes, and corn.
4 Milk, cheese and other milk products.
5 Concentrated proteins such as nuts, peanuts, and eggs; vegetable nut-meats such as protose or nuttose. (I disapprove of animal meats and fish, which foods are included in ordinary dietetic classifications.)
6 All starchy foods such as breads, cereals, dry beans, peas, and lentils.
7 Fats such as butter, sour cream, sweet cream, oils, and alligator pears (avocados).
Diets prescribed by the conventional schools are still very limited in the use they make of vegetables and fruits, in menus for both the sick and the healthy. Even hospital diets do not contain enough green vegetables and raw fruits. Hospital diets (in our time) still include animal meats and fish. From the writer’s point of view, animal matter as food is a hindrance to recovery from disease. It is also a hindrance to the maintenance of good health in the healthy or nearly healthy body.
Conventional food craftsmen also include too many packaged desserts in daily bills of fare. These are full of sugar, artificial flavorings and colors. Conventional desserts deplete the body of its vital elements and thus undermine health.
Vegetarians often ask, regarding the feeding of children, “Is it necessary to have milk in their daily diet? Can children be raised on a complete and strict vegetarian diet, excluding dairy products?”
There are large sections of the world where many millions of people never see any milk or other dairy products. India, China, and Japan have very little milk. Nevertheless, in these countries there are many sturdy people with great endurance. During childhood they were raised on foods other than dairy products after they were weaned from mothers’ milk. For thousands of years in the Orient “milk” has been made from soybeans.
The writer believes in the use of milk as an optional food. Proper substitutes can be used in the feeding of children. Soybean powder, properly diluted, can be used. In fact, it is being so used in the Oriental countries.
Freshly ground nuts, diluted and liquefied, can be made into a very palatable and easily digestible beverage for children. Liquefied nut products can be mixed with freshly made fruit juices. The Iatter would enhance the digestibility of nuts as well as their good taste.
Dairy milk is really synthetic vegetables. Perhaps in time the human race will achieve independence from the need to use animal products for any purpose.
All foods of the plant kingdom contain tissue-building elements. Look at the herbivorous quadrupeds. They subsist on grass and grain, which make a balanced ration for them. The cow, the horse, and the sheep are vegetarian animals. The human species can similarly thrive on plant foods exclusively.
How fortunate the human species is, for indeed it has at its disposal hundreds of varieties of delicious fruits. nuts, vegetables, and grain foods! If this world were not such a troubled place for humans to live in, good health could indeed be built and possessed by living on the right foods. And the right foods are plant foodsthe vegetables and the fruits.
In certain ailments (even mild ones), we must sometimes forbid the use of dairy products-as, for example, in cases of inflammation of the nose, throat and stomach, and in skin diseases. Since the elimination of dairy products helps to cure disease, why not eliminate them from the diet in order to prevent disease?
On the same subject of disease causation by foods, we must consider the eating of dead animals, known by respectable society as meat and fish. Dead animal substance, when taken into the human economy, is treated as objectionable matter. Much of the meat and fish eaten decomposes into putrid wastes in the intestinal canal and elsewhere in the body. Should the eliminative channels of the body fail to eject them, they accumulate in the tissue cells and fluids and undermine health and well-being.
Many a mystery in the nature of disease to which the human race is susceptible will be solved when dead animal matter is eliminated from the dietaries of mankind. There are outstanding authorities in the medical world who base the above conclusion on clinical studies and statistical health and food surveys throughout the world.