This varied or general diet idea has been and is being greatly overworked, both as regards children and adults. At no previous period in history did man have the great variety of foods he now has. But he does not need to eat every food that grows just because they are now available.

Children quite naturally eat monotrophic meals. They like to make a meal on one thing. Parents usually do not permit them to do this, being under the variety "spell" and being convinced that we must have our variety all at one meal. If children were given natural foods they could safely be left to follow out their instinctive monotrophic practices. But to permit a child to make a meal on jam and bread, or on cake, or on cheese, or macaroni, would be no good.

Adaptation

My observations have led me to believe that children adjust themselves to the diet the mother has taken during pregnancy and lactation, more readily than to other diets. Certain experiments with insects have shown this to be positively so among these. Further study will show whether or not my observations of infants are accurate. If they are accurate they open the way for parents to adjust their children to the best diets.

Instinctive Eating

It would be safe to turn children loose and let them eat what and when they will, just as animals do, provided they are supplied with natural foods, are not urged to overeat and their sense of taste has not previously been perverted and the stuffing habit has not been cultivated in them. Don't season and sweeten their foods to stimulate a false appetite and induce them to over eat.

Supply them with plain, wholesome natural foods and no other kind and leave it to their natural instincts to teach them to eat foods that are good for them. Set them a good example--they will follow a good example as readily as they will a bad one.

Forced Eating

One of the most common crimes against children is that of compelling them to eat when there is no desire nor demand for food. Many mothers complain that their children will not eat. They have to coax or force children to eat. If there is no desire for food, none should be given. Children may be depended upon, always, to take food, if and when they are hungry. If the child is not hungry let him go without food. His own sense of hunger is a better guide as to when he should eat than all the science of all the ex-spurts in the world, who know all about the thing, and know it all wrong.

Morse-Wyman-Hill say children "must be made to eat what is given them, * * * whether they like it or not, because it is most important for older children and adults to eat a general diet. * * * A baby should be made to eat its foods as they are given to it, even if its nose has to be held in order to make it swallow."

This is criminal advice and if followed, is a sure way of creating in the child an antipathy towards its food or some food and a spirit of antagonism. The spirit of children is not so easily broken and subdued as these authors assert. They resist coercion long after an adult has submitted himself to the yoke and become a slave.

Children who refuse to eat at meal times are those, usually, who are permitted to munch crackers, cakes, candies, and other such dietetic abominations between meals. They are not hungry when meal time arrives. But there is a more profound reason why this type of diet "spoils the appetite." It loads the body with an excess of denatured carbohydrate and. in self-defense, nature cuts off the demand for food.

There is no indispensable food. If a child does not like spinach and many of them do not, there are other foods just as good, or better, that he will like. I have seen a baby's nose held to force it to swallow a poisonous drug prescribed by a doctor, and I don't believe in this method of forcing a distasteful food down a child's throat any more than I believe in its use to compel the child to swallow the doctor's dope.