To say that food is curative in disease is not correct. We must insist on our former statement that the only cure for disease is by the body's own regenerative processes.

Food is causative in disease, but the only way food can cure disease is by ceasing to cause it.

It is through food that we live, without it we would die, but not so soon as most people think, for we carry habitually, stored about the body in many crannies, material on which we can live for a long time, cases who have gone ninety days entirely without food of any kind not being unusual, while eighty days without food is very common.

The forty day fast is very usual, and excites no comment except among those who persistently refuse to consider that the body can subsist so long entirely without nourishment of any kind, and who frankly disbelieve the tales of prolonged fasts.

This will be referred to again under the chapter on fasting, but when we think of food in its connection with disease we also naturally think of the fast.

Food is the most abused of all Nature's gifts, without the least doubt.

We abuse fresh air because we ignore this too often, as also we abuse sunshine by neglecting to take advantage of it on every possible occasion.

We abuse rest either by resting too much, or by neglecting to take necessary rest, just as we abuse exercise by either taking too much or too strenuous exercise or by almost totally neglecting to take any exercise at all.

These are all abuses of Nature's good gifts to man, but among all there is none so totally misunderstood or abused as are her most necessary foods.

Why do we eat, and what is food for? Simply this: Food is replacement material wholly, material with which Nature provides replacement for the dying body itself or for its used fuels.

However we view the subject of foods, we can arrive at no other solution of the question as to the intent of Nature toward us in regard to the use of so-called foods.

Now replacement material must replace wanted material else it is in no sense food.

Thus, if food is taken when none is required this is not in any sense food, but a task to be elaborated by the digestive organs, the assimilation, the metabolism, and again by the organs of elimination, a bootless task, asking the body to work when it should be resting, giving the body nothing but work, when it needs no repair material.

There are those who profess to be able to treat successfully specific diseased conditions with equally specific foods, but no one is smart enough to tell just what materials are needed so cannot possibly know what foods to prescribe for this shortage.

This is carrying the food game too far, and is bringing the whole subject of foods in the treatment of disease into evil repute with those who see the impossibility of this connection.

The body itself knows what materials are needed; we do not, so all we can do is to offer daily those foods that represent everything the body can require, and leave the rest to body intelligence, for each cell of our bodies has an intelligence, else scientists are all wrong.

Call it instinct if you wish, but we can in no other way account for the selective action of the cells lining the intestinal canal, for instance, which select out of the materials passing down through the intestinal tube in the form of chyme those materials needed by the cells higher up, or farther away from this canal, and refuse to take up other materials that are not needed.

This is called the selective action of the intestinal cells, and is admitted by physiologists generally.

We can recognize the shortage of lime in some cases by the bony development or the teeth, and we use lime-rich foods to meet this evident shortage of this most necessary of all our alkalies, but we can scarcely go farther than this in specific dietary prescribing.

Food may almost be said to be curative in such deficiency conditions, for its use is followed by cure, and yet even here it merely furnishes the raw material, and the body itself performs the cure, else it could not have been accomplished.

McCollum, Howe and many others have proved that practically all disease to which the human race is subject may be produced by deficient feeding, not feeding foods in deficient amounts, but foods in any amount, if deficient in some one particular, or some one body chemical.

These deficiencies are referred to as vitamine starvation, but to date no one knows what a vitamine is, no one ever having segregated or seen one, and there is a growing suspicion that after all these elusive things are merely certain definite relationships among the various essential salts or chemicals of the body, a relationship that is broken up by absence or marked paucity of one or more of these, whether through processing or the application of heat.

Whatever they are, or whatever happens to food that is deprived of certain of these salts, the feeding of the little laboratory animals is followed by the development of certain physical characteristics which we denominate deficiency conditions, and these can be restored to normal in a very short time by addition of the missing element or elements.

The role of food in health is that of furnishing replacement material daily for the action of the digestive organs as a pabulum on which the body feeds, nothing more than this; but in disease food plays a major role.

In a later chapter we will go into the subject of the mechanism of digestion, showing just how food enters into the development of disease through a misunderstanding of the processes of digestion itself, and foods that are deficient play a still more important role in development of disease through failing to supply necessary replacement materials for the body as these are required.

There are vast numbers of mass feeding experiments on the human, as in the digging of canals or construction of railroads far from the base of food supply, where those foods only that could be kept for long intervals without spoiling were available, and in every such case disease breaks out in many forms, chiefly beri beri, which is due to the absence of sufficient fresh fruit and fresh vegetables.