THE popularity of sugar has been quite strengthened by its recommendation by the food administration for the soldier in the last war. Yet this recommendation has its basis in the expediency of the abnormal situation, not in the sugar itself, as a wholesome article of diet, and is no more advisable for ordinary situations than the trench equipment of the soldier to citizens in ordinary times of peace. Sugar for the soldier, whose life was keyed to a strain of mind and body, out of all relation to ordinary existence, is entirely different to sugar as an agency introduced into normal physiological chemistry.

Extracted from the beet, cane or corn, sugar in its very nature is a broken out fragment, distorted and unbalanced, and enters the system with no other virtue than that of a physiological irritant, whipping, by its morbid affinities, the system into unwonted vital strains, while having no power in itself to replenish the losses suffered by the overtaxed organism.

Being an extract of high chemical concentration, sugar is practically a form of physiological gunpowder and explodes in the digestive tract very much like ordinary gunpowder would do if put in a burning furnace. And just as the explosion of gunpowder, if not severe enough to shatter the furnace itself, would certainly reduce the fire of its fuel into smoke and half-burnt cinders, so the explosion of sugar in the stomach breaks up the physiological combustion in the digestive field where living food holds the place of fuel, and the resulting fermentation, with its gas and bacterial acids - uric, carbonic, oxalic acids and alcohol - bring out in a striking way the same processes of smouldering fuel that take place in our house furnace.

Now, however, it is the presence of these very acids, and especially alcohol, that compels the system, by way of self-defense, to bring out a "hormone," equipped with the power to lift the physiological "brakes" that regulate the normal supply of vital energy in the system. The "brakes" being removed, the organism, both physically and mentally, becomes temporarily flushed with a current of great vital power by which the menacing poisons are neutralized and eliminated from the circulation. It is the physiological mobilization of these constitutional reserves of nerve power, sweeping through the organism in its pursuit of the circulating poisons, that give rise to the sensation of vigor and high spirits which follow any artificial stimulation, whether directly by indulgence in alcoholic beverages, or indirectly in the form of fermentative foodstuff, such as candies, pastry and jams, with its output of acidity and alcoholization.

It may thus be readily seen why there should be such a strong demand for free sugar, white bread and sugar-coated dough-nuts in the bill of fare of trench-life. The extraordinary strain upon vitality and nervous energy, due to the high-tensioned strain on every function responsive to thought and action, requires food whose stimulating power should be equal to sustain the draft. Here, if anywhere, the end justified the means, as the gravity of the situation demanded the sacrifice of vital reserve forces, even with risk of subsequent nervous debility and premature constitutional breakdown.

But such powerful reasons cannot be claimed by the candy and pastry eaters who are engaged in the peaceful walks of normal life, and whose indoor sedentary occupations, with scant office supply of oxygen-bearing air, cause indulgences in extracted and concentrated foodstuffs to be doubly dangerous. It is amongst these injudicious feeders that we find the traditional "walking pictures of health," with their faces ruddy and round, bloated from the fermentation of retained physiological sewerage, with livers clogged from an excess of sugar and starch, while their kidneys are slowly torn to pieces by the crystals of half burned clinkers of uric and oxalic acids - pictures, indeed, but clinical pictures - not of health but of premature decay, forming the rank and file of those victims of high living, that are mowed down at the rate of half a million per annum by recognized preventable diseases. For what are those deadly foes to human life, masquerading as typhoid, Bright's disease, pneumonia, tuberculosis and cancer, but fundamentally food diseases, due to wrong eating or overeating. And as alcohol, the great destroyer of nervous life, springs from fermentation due to sugar-charged food, it follows that sugar and its mixtures hold the position of major cause to the constantly increasing number and deathliness of modern diseases.

In an article: "Is sugar consumption increasing?" recently published in a current medical journal, the inference is made, that in view of the increasing consumption of sweets in states "gone dry," sugar is claimed to be a positive substitute for alcohol. This would explain the fact of women being held accountable for more than three-fourths of the world's sugar consumption.

This accelerated craving for sweets in the absence of alcohol shows unmistakably the true interrelation between the two. Introduced into the stomach, sugar starts the processes of fermentation that lead up to the formation of alcohol, which again has the same stimulating influence on the central nervous system as the direct consumption of liquor has upon the cerebro-spinal nervous system.

In fact, from one point of view, the substitute is even more disastrous than the real thing, in so far that while respectability sanctions the intoxication arising from candy indulgence, the inebriety due to liquor is yet, in the better class of society, regarded as a vice. And yet when considered in the light of the medical statistics, recently obtained in one of the largest communities of the Pacific Coast, in which it was found that over 80 per cent of school children where threatened by degeneracy of the optic nerve, and the remaining percentage suffering from incipient cardiac insufficiency - it is readily seen that from a standpoint of health and efficiency the present reckless indulgence of candy, especially among our school children, is almost more fatal to the organism than alcohol itself!