Happily trophologic knowledge increases and spreads from week to week. As time passes ever increasing numbers of people become interested in the proper care and feeding of their bodies. Unfortunately, those who are seeking increased knowledge are flooded with such a mass of conflicting theories and practices and confronted with so much disagreement between those who pose as leaders in the field of dietary science and are the loudest in trumpeting their own horns, that they often become confused and discouraged and give up in disgust.

The market is flooded with cook books and menu books, the newspapers and magazines carry innumerable menus and recipes. Food manufacturers issue free cook books, the recipes and menus of which all contain their own products as essential ingredients.

For the most part, the authors of these books and newspaper and magazine articles are busy multiplying stimulating dishes for the palsied tastes and waning appetites of gluttons. In most such works, the greatest effort of their authors seems to have been to mix and mingle together the greatest number of articles of foods, seasonings, saltings, spicings, greasings, etc., into a single dish; and jumble the greatest possible variety of heterogenous substances into the stomach at a single meal.

To counteract, therefore, to some extent at least, the misinformation and the demoralizing tendency of the ordinary cook book and the great mass of rubbish that is written on diet, and to aid the young particularly, in an understanding of the true relations of food to health, this chapter has been prepared.