Salad is from the Latin meaning salt and true salads are abundant in organic salts. They are also abundant in vitamins. They are of prime importance and should not be neglected. Such salads as potato salad, shrimp salad, etc., are not to be classed with green vegetable salads and are not substitutes therefor. Fruit salads are usually made of canned fruits, hence are not true salads. Cooked salads do not serve the true function of a salad. A macaroni salad is a travesty on the fair name of salads.

Dr. Maurice Shefferman very appropriately calls potato salad, tuna fish salad, salmon salad, chicken salad and like concoctions, "unreal salads." He says they are "concoctions" devised by "old-time tea-room operators" that have been appropriated by the restaurant and drug-store counters. He says a restaurant owner once told him: "You can make a much better chicken salad out of pork than you can from veal."

The restaurant and drug store salads commonly consist of a small quantity of tuna or salmon or some similar substance, with chopped celery, cole slaw, and mayonnaise, a couple of leaves of wilted lettuce, vinegar, salt, with, often, the addition of various spices. French dressing may be used instead of mayonnaise.

The usual vegetable salad served in hotels, restaurants and drug stores consists of two leaves of wilted lettuce, one or two thin slices of a half-ripe tomato, a spoonful of greasy dressing and a radish or a pickled olive. Such a salad is not worthy the name and, even if it were good, would not meet the salad needs of a canary. The Hygienic rule for eating salads is to eat a tubful of it.

A few simple rules for salad making will be observed by the Hygienist.

1. Salads should be made of fresh vegetables. If these can be had direct from the garden, this is better. In purchasing vegetables in the market for salads, choose the freshest and crispest vegetables obtainable. Wilted and shrunken vegetables have lost both palatableness and food value.

The green, outer leaves of plants--those parts that are exposed to the sunlight in growing--make the finest salads. Leaf lettuce is superior to head lettuce. Green celery is superior to white. Lettuce, celery, cucumbers, tomatoes, green peppers, etc. make excellent salad vegetables. Raw turnips make a splendid addition to a salad. Fresh radish leaves also make a tasty and valuable addition to salads, as do spinach leaves.

2. Vegetables and fruits used in salads should be well cleaned. Products, such as apples, that have been sprayed with arsenic, should be carefully washed and dried. Delicate green leaves, after washing, should be permitted to dry slightly before using. Carrots, beets, etc., should not be scraped, or peeled before using, but should be carefully scrubbed with a brush. Cucumbers should never be peeled. The peelings of the cucumber should be eaten with the rest of the fruit.

3. Salad vegetables should not be broken, diced, hashed, cut, sliced, etc. This causes vital losses by oxidation.

While we have long observed that foods lose their palatableness and undergo obvious changes upon being cut, sliced, shredded, etc., as a result of oxidation, only recently has it been shown that these measures, so popular with those who like their salads shredded and their peaches sliced, cause a loss and destruction of vitamins.

The results of some of these latest tests will help us to appreciate the value of natural foods in their natural state.

Analyses for vitamin C showed that approximately 10% of this is lost during the six minutes required to shred the cabbage and an additional loss of 4% occurs in the 10 minutes required to mix a dressing for the salad. The additional loss when the cabbage was chopped rather than shredded was 4%,. The finer the cabbage is shredded or chopped and the longer it stands before being eaten, the greater is the loss of this vitamin.

Dr. Fredrick F. Tisdall of Toronto, Canada reported astonishing losses of vitamin C from foods as a result of processing. His report was made before the American Institute of Nutrition. He says the mere act of grating either raw apples or raw potatoes causes a complete disappearance of vitamin C. The mere act of chewing these foods causes the destruction of half their vitamin C. "Thank God for the tomato and the orange!" he exclaimed. "They don't act in the same way."

Other investigators reported comparable losses from other foods. For example, when Savoy cabbage is chopped it loses much of its ascorbic acid. Even the type of chopper makes a difference. One chopper destroyed thirty per cent of this vitamin in a few minutes, while a different type of machine destroyed sixty-five per cent.

Recent reports state that two British scientific workers, Doctors Frank Wokes and J. G. Organ, of Kings Langely, England, have discovered that vitamin C is destroyed by ascorbic oxidase--ascorbic acid oxidase. Ascorbic oxidase is produced in large amounts when fresh fruits and vegetables are cut. The report tells us that "being set free, through cutting, the oxidase attacks vitamin C contained in these chopped up vegetables and fruits." Then it also reports that "In tomatoes, for example, the oxidase is present in the skin. If a tomato is sliced into large pieces much less oxidase is freed than if the pieces are small."

The "report," as it comes to us through the newspaper, is a bit confused or garbled. We interpret it to mean that oxidase is present in certain parts of the fruits and vegetables and is released in the shredding and cutting processes and mixed with the general substance of the food. Coming in contact with vitamin C the oxidase causes it to unite with oxygen--the familiar process of oxidation--and, thus, destroys the vitamin C.

The British investigators found that when lettuce is shredded it loses 80 per cent of its vitamin C in one minute. Using oranges, cabbages and other fruits and vegetables in these experiments they found the same thing. They found that ripe tomatoes lost much less vitamin C than did the green ones on being chopped into small pieces. In all green leafy vegetables destruction of vitamin C was very marked. It was found that mincing of fruits and vegetables is harmful in that it deprives the body of vitamin C.

From these findings it is evident that foods lose more than color and flavor when they are chopped, grated, ground or mashed in the preparation of salads and juices, or in being cut up for cooking purposes.

These facts are expected to result in a complete re-examination of all of our vitamin-food standards. Heretofore these standards have been concerned only with the amount of vitamin in the food. They have taken no account of the actual amount of vitamin that reaches the body. The destruction of vitamins by processing and cooking, and by chewing, has been more or less ignored, especially in practice.

There is nothing new in the discovery that cutting fruits and vegetables into small pieces and permitting the air to reach them, results in oxidation. That the foods undergo changes in color, flavor and odor is apparent to all. These changes are results of chemical changes in the foods and these changes result largely from oxidation.

In 1928 when, Dr. Shelton's Health School was founded, the rule was instituted that fruits and vegetables are not to be shredded, diced or cut into small pieces and this rule is rarely varied from. Fruits are served whole, even tomatoes are served whole, or in large pieces. We have avoided oxidation of foods as much as possible. Our refusal to grate salads, slice peaches and to follow the fad of extracting juices from vegetables here at the Health School has been fully justified by the results of these experiments.

Much of the damages of foods that result from cooking are due to oxidation--heat instead of oxidase being the catalytic agent--and we have at all times served most foods in their natural or uncooked state. Every real advance in knowledge of foods confirms the wisdom of our "return to nature" in diet.

To compensate for the lack of vitamins in our conventional cooked and over cooked diet we are offered vitamin concentrates and synthetic vitamins. These things are of little to no value, are expensive and fail to compensate for all of the food losses caused by cooking.

How much better and simpler would be the use of raw foods! Better nourishment for less money and costing less time and effort in preparation may be had from raw foods. If you do not want to completely abandon cooked foods, if you still desire a baked potato or steamed spinach, make up your diet of at least three-fourths uncooked foods. Have a large raw vegetable salad with each protein and each starch meal. Do not skimp on the salad. Eat a tub of it.

4. In making fruit salads, the fruits should be used whole or cut into large slices. No sweetening substances should be added. Apples, peaches, etc., when sliced soon become brown and undergo a change of taste from oxidation. They also lose vitamins.

5. Vegetables to be used in salad making should not be soaked in water. They should be carefully picked and thoroughly cleaned, care being taken not to bruise them in these processes. Soaking them in water leeches minerals and vitamins from them and reduces their value as foods.

6. Make salads simple and do not try to put the whole garden into a salad. The object in making a salad is not to try to see how many ingredients can be jumbled together. Salads should be simple and composed of but few ingredients. Three ingredients should be the limit. The practice of cutting up, shredding and otherwise wrecking a dozen or more articles of food and mixing them all together in a salad is pernicious. The loss of vitamins from such a salad, by oxidation, makes such a salad incompetent to serve the purposes for which salads are eaten. Salads may be simply prepared and yet served in ways to tempt the most fastidious tastes. They require a minimum of activity in the kitchen.

7. Salads should be made pleasing to the eye, but at no time should nutritive value and wholesomeness be sacrificied to artistic appearance. Salads should be daintily prepared, beautiful and appetizing when seen, and fresh and crisp to eat. But the value of the foods making up the salad should not be sacrificed to eye-appeal as is so often done. Important as is eye-appeal, it is not as important as wholesomeness and nutritive value. If the eater is truly hungry he will scarcely notice the occasional lack of eye-appeal.

If garnishing is required a small amount of cress, parsley or cabbage may be used for this purpose. The addition of a radish or two or of a few sprigs of mint to a salad is not objectionable from the Hygienic standpoint. Adding pickled olives is objectionable.

8. Do not violate the rules of food combining within the salad or with the salad and the rest of the meal. A tomato salad with a starch meal violates the rule not to take acids with starches. Lemon juice on a salad taken with a protein meal violates the injunction against taking acids and proteins together.

The addition of cheese or nuts to salads is permissible only if these foods are to form the protein part of the meal. If eggs are to be added to a salad this should be done only when eggs are to be used as the protein at a protein meal.

Most published salad recipes, even those carried in the health journals and in books on nutrition, are unhygienic concoctions. Here is a sample taken from the pages of a magazine devoted to diet:

VEGETABLE SALAD 3 medium sized carrots. 1 cup tiny--cooked peas. 1 cup shredded cabbage. 1 cup grated hard boiled eggs. 2 teaspoonfuls vegetable salt. 1 cup lemon vegetable jelly.

With what kind of a meal can such a concoction be beaten? Why the salt? Why the cooked peas? Why spoil the cabbage by shredding it? Why the hard boiled egg? The true Hygienist will steer clear of such unwholesome concoctions. This salad is a whole series of bad combinations within itself and will not combine with either a protein or a starch meal.

9. Do not use salt, vinegar, lemon juice or dressing of any kind on a salad. Salad dressings are comparatively very new things in the arts of the cook and are for the most part abominations. No intelligent person acquainted with the first principles of nutrition will ever be guilty of using them. They almost invariably form incompatible combinations with other parts of the meal.

Salad dressings, made of olive oil, or soy oil, and lemon juice (with sometimes the addition of egg-yolk; at times, honey is also added), are not wholesome additions to a salad. Both the fat and the acid inhibit protein digestion, while the acid inhibits starch digestion. The natural flavors of foods are much more delicious than the taste of the dressing. No one who desires the best of digestion will violate the laws of correct food combining by using so-called "health-dressings."