Do not give the child any processed starches, refined sugars, so-called "breakfast foods." Corn flakes, puffed rice, puffed wheat, bran foods, cream of wheat, cream of barley, wheatena, etc., are not good foods for child or adult. All the great claims made for them are false. For heaven's sake never feed these things to your child. Oatmeal is perhaps the worst of all cereals for child or adult. Cereals are among the most difficult of foods to digest. These certainly do not belong in the diet of infants and young children when the ability to digest starch is so low.

The cracker-habit usually follows the sucking habit. Baby discards its nipple and takes up the cracker. If he is taken to church, to the theatre, to the park, to a friend's house or goes to see grandma, he must have his cracker. Mother carries a whole box of crackers--nice white ones, well salted, or "graham" crackers, well sweetened--along with her, for baby must have a cracker every few minutes. If he does not get a cracker he is pulling at mother's dress and crying and fretting. The cracker is given him to solace him and keep him quiet. Poor mother! Poor child! They are both undisciplined and ignorant. Mother is the slave of her badly spoiled child and is as badly spoiled as the child.

The whole program of living of such children is wrong and in need of correction from the ground up. Can such mothers be induced to make the needed change? Have they the moral courage to let the baby "cry it out" and adjust himself to a better life? I fear not. Their emotions would get the best of them.

Children are given tea, coffee, cocoa and chocolate to drink and eat, doctors often advising these poisonous substances. These things are properly called drugs and produce definite "physiological" effects when taken into the body. It is certainly not desirable to start children off with poison-habits of this kind. No good can come from the over-stimulation, loss of sleep and overwork of the kidneys these produce.

Sugar: Dr. Wm. H. Hay says: "Without a doubt the greatest curse of the early years of child life is the general impression that sugars are good for active children, furnishing many calories of energy, either this or the use of pastries and the two evils are one, for the same objection that holds against the sugars holds equally against the pastries."

One's heart must grow faint when he sees the children of this country stuffing bon-bons, cakes, crackers, bread and jam, candy, ice cream, soda-fountain slops, and similar stuff down their throats at all hours of the day. What do parents mean by giving these things to their children?

Children soon cultivate a "sweet-tooth" and are not long in learning that they can get what they cry for, if they only cry loud enough and long enough. How many mothers and fathers have the moral courage to listen to a baby's cry? Not many. They are ruled by sentiment and emotion, rather than by knowledge and reason. It is so hard for them to listen to the cry of the baby; they feel so sorry for the poor child. They don't want their baby to cry. It is so hard on their nerves to listen to baby cry. They are just moral cowards and sentimental jelly-fish, who injure their children physically, mentally, emotionally, socially and morally, because they have not disciplined themselves to do what is right. They take the easiest course for the present, little reckoning that they have to pay for it later.

Baby soon learns that if it will only cry for a few minutes it does not have to eat spinach, but can have cake instead. Mother will give it ice-cream or candy if it only cries for it. What a terrible moral lesson to teach a child!

Morse-Wyman-Hill say: "There is no food which causes more disturbances of digestion in childhood than sugar. As money is said to be the root of all evil, so sugar may be said to be the root of all disturbances of digestion in childhood. Further than this, sugar is a very common cause of loss of appetite, and destroys their appreciation of proper food. It also, more than any other one thing, is responsible for the decay of children's teeth. Candy, therefore, should never be given to children. It can do them no good and may do them much harm. It is idle, of course, to claim that two or three pieces of candy a day will disturb the average child's digestion or prevent its normal development. Children that have two or three pieces, however, usually want more, and are quite likely to get more. It is true that some kinds of candy are richer and more indigestible than others, but they are all made of sugar, and plain sugar is bad for children. Children should be brought up not to eat sugar on anything. There is no objection to putting a little sugar in the food during its preparation, but no sugar should be put on it when it is served. (This is a case of splitting hairs--sugar is just as harmful when put in the food as when put on it. H. M. S.)

"It is often said that sugar is a necessary article of diet for children. This belief is fostered by the manufacturers of sugar and candy. It is, however, not true. Carbohydrates are advisable for children as a source of energy. They are not absolutely necessary, however, as is shown by the fact that Eskimo children grow up without them." (Eskimo children do not grow up without carbohydrates. H. M. S.)

Sugar, candy, syrup, etc., inhibit gastric secretion and impair digestion. This is true of cakes, pies, etc. It is just as true of brown sugar, maple sugar and cakes and cookies made of wholewheat flour and brown sugar or honey, as of white sugar and white flour products.

Two or three pieces of candy a day may not perceptibly injure children; but when it is added to the cookies, cakes, pies, jams, jellies, white bread, denatured cereals, saturated with white, or even brown sugar, mashed potatoes, pasteurized milk and other denatured products, it only adds to an already preponderantly acid forming diet and further leeches the child's body of its precious alkaline elements.

Many candies contain poisonous dry-stuffs, adulterants, flavors, etc., as well as nuts, milk and other things that form, with the sugar, bad combinations.

Ice-cream is an abominable mixture of canned milk, powdered milk, pasteurized milk, gelatin, sugar or syrup, coloring matter, flavoring extracts and often canned fruits. It is no good for child or adult.

The following is quoted from The Ice Cream Field, the national journal of the ice-cream manufacturers, for July, 1928; and is headed, "Baby Specialist Favors Ice Cream:"

"Ice cream has been prescribed for infant food for several years by Dr. Luther R. Howel, of Columbus, Ohio, one of America's leading baby specialists. Dr. Howel states that ice cream has proven an ideal food for undernourished babies and in several instances was a means of saving their lives. He says that the homogenization of milk and cream, as carried out in the manufacturing process of ice cream, makes the food particularly digestible, an important factor in infant feeding."

This is just plain ordinary bunk and known to be false even by the man who made the statement. In McCall's Magazine, July, 1926, Dr. E. V. McCollum wrote: "These is no more attractive way of serving milk to your family than in good ice cream. We have constantly emphasized the importance of drinking more milk, for the average amount consumed per person is still far too low. The more frequent serving of ice cream at the family table is one of the easiest ways of getting milk into the diet, especially for children who do not like milk and for persons who demand food with marked flavors."

Men who have been stung by the milk-bug don't care how they get milk into you, so long as they get you to take it. Why do children cease to like it? If milk is so necessary, why does nature cut off both the supply and the demand? In opposition to this rank nonsense about ice-cream, I offer the following words of Morse-Wyman-Hill, who say:

"Ice-cream, ice-cream soda and other sweet drinks * * * * are always inadvisable for and usually harmful to children. They are harmful chiefly because of the sugar which they contain, partly because they are too cold, partly because they are too rich, and partly because they are usually taken between meals. Children would be better off without any of them. Ice-cream is probably less harmful than the others. Vanilla ice-cream is not as rich as the other kinds. The majority of people are so willing to take the chance of injuring their children's health in order to give them temporary pleasure that we have found it useless to attempt to cut ice-cream entirely out of the diet of children. We therefore compromise and allow the children to have plain vanilla ice-cream without any sauce on it once a week."

It was asserted at a dental meeting a few years ago that slaughterhouse offal and scraps are now bought up and the fat rendered out of these and used in ice-cream instead of the cream of milk--cooked animal tallow, suet and lard are now sold to your children in ice cream!, while subsidized ex-spurts lure you on to "eat a plate of icecream every day," and tell you that ice-cream is a "health food."

Give no sugar, salt or soda with anything. The practice of neutralizing the acid of lemons, by adding soda to the lemon juice, is both useless and injurious.

Meat should never be fed to a child under six years of age, and better never at all. Meat broths have practically no value. They act as excitants rather than as nutriments and should not be fed to children. Eggs are not good foods for children any more than for adults. Pickles are indigestible and unfit for food.