Cereal (denatured) with cream (pasteurized) and sugar (white) is a staple breakfast in most households. A predominantly acid forming breakfast, a horrible combination--and plenty of sickness as a result. The physicians continue to tell us that germs cause our diseases!

Bread eating is one of the great curses of modern life. Made of cereals, largely of denatured cereals, mixed with salt, soda, yeast, lard and often other ingredients and subjected to a high degree of temperature, in cooking, and then eaten three and four times a day, in considerable quantities, mixed indiscriminately with all classes of foods and taken in addition to much other starch food, bread is one of our chief sources of woe.

The so-called enrichment of white flour has given people a false sense of security. Various states have passed laws requiring the "enrichment" of all flour manufactured in or shipped into them. The people are lead, by this requirement, to believe that the "enriched" flour is good food. Never was a greater fallacy entertained. These laws were lobbied through the state legislatures by the milling companies, in an effort to head off the rising demand for wholewheat flour. They seem to have temporarily succeeded.

This "enriching" process adds a small quantity of "synthetic vitamins" but does not return to the flour the minerals that have been extracted. Seventy-five percent of the minerals of the wheat are extracted in the process of making white flour. All of the vitamins, and not just one, are removed. The present process of "enrichment" is similar to the process of sixty and seventy years ago of adding phosphorus to the flour to replace the phosphorus extracted in milling.

In the milling process organic salts are extracted. These are not returned by the "enriching" process. In the milling process real vitamins are removed. Part of these are replaced, by the "enriching" process, with fraudulent or imitation vitamins. What folly to remove the vitamins in the first place! Why not leave them in the flour and why remove them at all?

Dr. Anton J. Carlson, noted physiologist of the Department of Physiology of the University of Chicago, recently uttered a warning about this very matter in which he said that the term "enriched" applied to white flour to which a little vitamin B is added is misleading. "Such flour is still impoverished," he said. Referring to the fact that the idea is "put across" that "enriched" flour is better than whole grain flour he pointed out that refining actually takes out salts, vitamins and proteins, only a small part of which are replaced by the "enrichment" process. The learned physiologist added that the theory that some races cannot physiologically tolerate whole grain is without foundation. He declared it to be not a matter of toleration but of acceptance, adding that food acceptance is a question of what a person is used to from childhood. "You cannot overnight change the diet of a healthy people," he declared, although, since he never saw a healthy people, it would be interesting to know how he came to this conclusion.

Grain alone was shown, by experiments conducted by the Defensive Diet League, to be a much safer food than grain and meat--the combination of these at the same meal being the chief trouble-maker. We know that too much bread, if taken alone, will break down one's health. But the combination of bread and meat causes even more trouble. Such a diet, when fed to experimental animals (young ones), resulted in high blood pressure, Bright's disease and troubles which usually accompany these conditions in man. Neither do the animals grow as they should.

Cereals are about the most difficult to digest of any habitual sources of starch except beans and peas. They are difficult for the infant and growing child. They ferment easily and cause much gas and intoxication.

Cereal starches require from eight to twelve times as long to digest as does potato starch. Grierson found that two full hours are required to digest the starch of wheat, corn and rice, and eighty minutes to digest the starch of oats, whereas the same amount of potato starch digests in ten minutes.

Doctors frequently recommend the feeding of cereals to infants and children. Densmore declared: "Cereal or grain and all starch foods are unwholesome for all human beings; but this diet is especially unfavorable for children, and more especially for babies. The intestinal ferments which are required for the digestion of starch are not secreted until the babe is about a year old; and these ferments are not as vigorous for some years as in adults. All starch foods depend upon these intestinal ferments for digestion, whereas dates, figs, prunes, etc., are equally as nourishing as bread and cereals, and are easily digested--the larger proportion of the nourishment from such fruits being ready for absorption and assimilation as soon as eaten." No starch and, more particularly, cereals, should be given any child before it is two years old.

Dr. Percy Howe, of Harvard University, says: "Mrs. Mellanby and Dr. Pattison, in England, have just concluded a very interesting experiment on 71 children in a bone-tuberculosis hospital, for a period of 28 weeks, which may help to establish the fact that cereals, especially oatmeal, exert an anti-calcifying influence." Calcification is the deposit of lime salts in the tissues. Cereals would prove a distinct evil in rickets, tuberculosis and in growing children, if this is proven to be true. Of course, these people had no right to experiment on these children, but since human vivisection goes on in every hospital and sanitorium in the world, they probably thought they had as much right to flirt with human health and life and produce suffering, as do the other physicians, surgeons and "research" workers.

We may state a few conclusions about cereals from the above facts:

(1) Cereals do not form any part of the natural diet of man and are not necessary to health and life. (I believe geologists and anthropologists are agreed that man did not become a cereal eater until late in his history).

(2) They are best omitted from the diet entirely and especially from the diet of infants and children.

(3) Where they are eaten, only the whole, undenatured, unprocessed cereal should be taken.

(4) They should form but a small amount of the diet and should be offset with an abundance of fresh fruits and green vegetables--properly combined.

(5) To insure the conversion of their starches into sugar they must always be eaten dry and not as porridges and mushes.