The Simple Life
which impair digestion, damage the nerves, and promote disease of the liver, kidneys, and blood-vessels. Cereal beverages and hot fruit juices are wholesome substitutes for tea and coffee.
11. Condiments—mustard, pepper, pepper sauce, cayenne, capsicum, vinegar, hot, irritating sauces, and spices of all kinds—must be wholly discarded. They irritate the stomach and cause gastric and intestinal catarrh and gastric ulcer, colitis, and damage to the liver and kidneys.
12. Common salt, or chlorid of sodium, should be used sparingly. According to Richet and others, the food naturally contains all the chlorid of sodium actually required by the body, so that the addition of salt to the food is necessary only to please a cultivated taste. A safe rule is, The less the better.
Persons who have dropsy, Bright's disease, arteriosclerosis, gastric ulcer, hyperacidity, obese persons and epileptics should discard salt.
13. Food combinations should be such as to give the proper proportion of the several elements,—proteins, carbohydrates, and fats. Fruits and vegetables, as well as other combinations of natural foodstuffs, agree perfectly when mastication is sufficiently thorough to reduce the food to a
liquid state in the mouth.
