Radiant health depends on a number of factors. It is not a matter merely of adequate vitamins, or correct diet. Fresh air, sunshine, exercise, sufficient rest and sleep, emotional poise, freedom from devitalizing habits--these are all essential to recovery of health as well as to maintenance of health.

Every physico-chemical process of the body is correlated with others and any failure in one spells a corresponding failure in the correlated process. It is a symbolic principle that a failure in any of the functions of life, due to a failure of the conditions upon which function depends, results in a crippling of the symbiotic support which the (failing) function normally gives to all of the other functions of the body.

The normal activity of all the functions of the body is based upon the supply of all of the natural conditions upon which function depends and a failure in only one of these conditions reduces the effectiveness of all of the other cooperating and interacting conditions. Due to the interrelations and interdependencies of the organism any interference with the functions of an organ, either as a result of unnatural "stimulation," or as a result of a lack of natural "stimulation," is interference with all of them.

In a previous chapter we learned of the "synergistic actions" of the various food factors. It is necessary for nutritionists to learn the synergistic relationships that exist between other factors of living and food. Man does not live by food alone. He breathes, drinks, works, plays, sleeps, rests, thinks, emotes, reproduces, misbehaves, etc. He lives in the sun or in the shadows. He is not what he eats; he is the sum total of the effects of all the factors of life. Exercise improves his assimilative power. If he is fatigued or enervated, rest has the same effect. Sunshine helps him to assimilate his foods. It helps him to convert certain pro-vitamins into vitamins. A state of toxemia prevents due utilization of his foods. A fast is often the surest and only means of restoring normal nutrition.

Our dietitians have not yet learned to prescribe for their patients a balanced life, hence their patients miss the benefits that flow from the synergism of all the factors of living. Bear always in mind that in a simple, well-balanced and well-ordered life all the synergisms of all the factors of living are at work.

No doubt, too, all wrong factors of life have "synergistic actions," so that in a disordered life, all the synergisms of wrong living habits and wrong influences work together in tearing down and weakening the body.

Life is not purely a matter of food, as was shown in Vol. 1, and all efforts to treat man by diet alone must fail. It is significant that practically all the remarkable successes obtained with "diet cures" have been in experimental animals and children. It is equally significant that "diet cures" are far more successful in animals than in children.

There is a reason for this: A reason that is seldom suspected by the gum-willies of the "food research" laboratories and the cure-mongers of the ancient order of Aesculapius. With their specific and entitative diseases, produced by specific causes and requiring specific cures, they flounder hopelessly in a sea of confusion of their own making.

The life of a human being, child or adult, is much more complex than that of any experimental animal in the laboratory. His environment is more varied, his contacts greater in number, the influences to which he is subjected more numerous and the resources of that environment much greater.

Even the animal is not a mere test-tube. Statistical regularity is all that can be secured in experiments with these. "Because you get a result in animals with fair uniformity," says Dr. Howe, "it does not necessarily follow that you will inevitably and uniformly get identical results in humans from the same procedure. Every little while something occurs to show me anew that the animal is not a mere test-tube. He is apt to take a part in the process going on in his body, and he may sometimes take the part by means of a mechanism or a product about which we know little or nothing."

Faulty diet is the chief, though, by no means the sole cause of lowered resistance and disease in children; in adults it is one of a whole series of crippling influences of which it is often difficult to determine which is producing most harm, but all of which must be corrected before good health can be restored. Efforts to cure the effects of dissipation without correcting the dissipation, by administering a diet cure, is so ridiculously childish that it ought to appear so even to medical cure mongers, dietitians and other like cooties.

In the laboratory, the self-styled "research worker" takes a group of healthy, vigorous young animals, places them under the most hygienic conditions and, then, feeds them deficient diets. He proves that by a deficient diet he can produce certain types of disease, and by correcting the diet he can cure these so-called "diseases." Indeed, McCarrison found that by deficient diet he could produce, and by correct diet, remedy practically every "disease" from which man suffers.

The fact is that, while there is a fundamental unity in all animal life, from amoeba to man, there are specific differences, even between closely related species, that make animal experiments often misleading. There is only one experiment that can be relied upon in man and this must be performed on man, not on guinea pigs or rats.

The last experiment must always be upon man, testified Professor Starling before the British Royal Commission Investigating Vivisection. Why? Because what works on animals does not always work an man.

Pharmacologists follow, literally, the old advice to "try it on the dog" and try out their drugs on various kinds of animals. They long ago discovered that the same drug induced or provoked different reactions in different kinds of animals. The only way they can determine what action it will occasion in man is by trying it out on man.

A pigeon can take enough morphine to kill several men and fly away as though nothing happened. Hogs can take without apparent harm enough prussic acid to kill many men. Rabbits grow fat on belladonna, but if we included it in the salads fed our children, we would soon be without children.

What is known as the "biological test" in feeding, that is, trying it out on the dog, turns out as much fallacy as trying out drugs on the dogs. I have often wondered what the "biologists" would feed us if they used sewer rats as experimental animals. If they were to use buzzards in their experiments they would discover that rotting meat from a hog that had died of cholera is good food. Dogs eat bones and digest them with ease. It is doubtful that man could get away with a bone diet so easily. Tobacco worms live on tobacco--you try it, worm.