Digestive strain arises from eating food at wrong times, eating too often, eating in excessive quantity, insufficient mastication, eating food of poor quality, and eating foods in wrong combinations.

Gluttony is one of our greatest dietetic errors. The thoughtless believe that food and energy are equivalent. When exhausted, or nearly so, all that they consider necessary is to take food, more food, and still more food. Calories galore--this is the need; and, presto, change, the human boiler is filled to the guards; its maximum pressure is attained. But experience presents a different story, and general weakness is seen to be, not an expression of a lack of nutriment, not a result of failure to eat enough, but most frequently and in reality, a symptom that function is laboring under the handicap of too much food and too frequent feeding.

Eating when tired, when enervated, when excited, angry, depressed, or worried, eating when mentally and physically active, eating when feverish or in pain, eating when not hungry--these all tax digestion and enervate the body. The digestive tax produced by wrong combinations was fully shown in Volume II of this series.

Stimulating foods--all rich or concentrated foods are very stimulating--and all irritants--spices, condiments, salt, vinegar, etc.--tax, not only digestion, but the whole body. Habitually eating "strong" foods like onions, garlic, leeks, chives, radishes, etc., enervates the digestive system. Excess in eating; eating meat two and three times a day; eating starchy food two and three times a day, especially after thirty-five years of age; sugar in all forms; fancy cooking, overstimulate and produce enervation.

Parents should know what causes enervation in children, and know that an enervated child cannot digest food--any kind of food--as well as when not enervated. A child, when very tired, should not be allowed to eat a hearty meal. If possible, he should be sent to bed supperless, or given fruit juice only.