Only life can possibly beget life, all through Nature's great realm, and food is no exception to this universal rule.

Analysis of the food which adorns every table reveals the fact that more than ninety per cent, of this is dead food.

If you plant it in the ground it will not grow, so it has no life.

When the tomb of the ancient Tut-Ankh-Amen was opened it was known that he had been dead a very long time; he could never again produce life or beget life, but when the kernels of grain, that are always found in the tombs of the ancient Egyptian mummies, were planted in the ground they grew, showing that during all these thousands of years they had retained this vital spark that can beget life.

Consider again the Lord's directions to Adam in the Garden: "Every herb that is upon the face of the whole earth, and every herb bearing seed; and the fruit of every tree, in which there is the seed of a tree bearing fruit, shall be to you for meat."

All life, all vital, all reproductive foods, hence fit for indefinitely sustaining man, the supreme summit of creation.

Adam may have been satisfied with this arrangement, but Eve was not, but must experiment further with foods, even that forbidden, and her descendents to this very day have followed the custom of monkeying with food directions that are so plain and so complete and comprehensive that they are like a fingerboard at a cross roads.

Through Adam came death, on account of disobedience, and all down the ages since that time disobedience has carried its own punishment. And it is verily thus that we are punished BY our sins, not for them.

Life cannot be supported on dead foods, as laboratory experiments amply prove, and only by means of the small amount of really live food ordinarily eaten daily is life supported at all.

In perhaps every meal is to be found some live food, but the preponderance of dead foods is so great that the race is supported by an infinitesimally insignificant part of what it eats daily, the rest being filler, fuel, but not life-sustaining.

Would we advise one reared very largely on cooked or otherwise devitalized foods to go at once to a raw vital standard? Absolutely not, for the same reason it would not be wise to go from a long residence in a dark cell to the bright sunlight, the difference would be too great to permit of this, and the body unaccustomed to the vital foods would be thrown into the greatest confusion by so radical a change.

We have done very well on foods largely non-vital, but there is no way to tell how much better we would have been on a vital standard of feeding.

Those whose vitality is fast ebbing away, as at the end of a serious illness, or the last stage of a chronic disease, we do not feed even largely of the raw foods in vital form, but use vegetable broths with also some raw fresh fruit juices and the expressed juices of raw succulent vegetables till the system becomes accustomed to this change; then by degrees the cooked are omitted and the raw increased till the system comes to accept the change without marked protest.

In this way cases of far-gone organic disease come back by slow degrees till they are again functioning almost normally, even after death had set his unmistakable seal on the case, and many of these continue a high degree of health afterward, albeit with some crippling of an important organ that limits the life in some ways permanently.

The reason for the difference between raw foods and cooked is plain, for every chemist knows that heat without any other aid will change chemistry, and whether it is wholly in this fact of chemical rearrangement through heat, or whether the so-called vitamines furnish the explanation, we do not know, nor is it important to know this so long as we have the evidence of a change due to heat.

Tomatoes cooked are not tomatoes raw at all, and yet they are of extreme usefulness cooked if we did not try to live on these.

As a partial food they furnish many elements that may be missing in other foods, so are useful as restorative foods, and science has discovered that they contain the vitamines almost unimpaired, as evidenced by their ability to restore deficiencies in vitamine feeding experiments.

Raw tomatoes contain very little oxalic acid, cooked tomatoes are very high in this, and while oxalic acid is harmless in the body, yet it still does tie up much alkali and should not be used largely, while the fresh tomatoes can be used in vast quantities without lessening alkalin conditions of the body, in fact they do rather reinforce the body reserves in this respect.

Cooked fruits of any kind are dead foods, not that they do harm in this form, but that they do not give us the things for which we eat fruits, or for which we should eat fruits.

The human digestion has become so accustomed to the cooked foods that many have great difficulty with the raw, especially the raw vegetables eaten in the form of the most useful vegetable salads.

For these, it is well to grind the vegetables and at first merely express the juices and feed these in orange juice or other fresh fruit juices till the body has acquired more vitality and more tolerance for the raw things.

By degrees the body can again be trained to depend very largely on the raw vital foods, and when this point is reached it is surprising how small an amount of food is required to sustain full health and vigor.

Several years ago certain French scientists undertook an experiment to show the effect of pasteurization and concentration on milk, that was most conclusive.

A large orphanage was set aside for their use, and the children there of varying age and condition were divided into three average groups, one fed on whole raw, unchanged milk; the second on pasteurized milk, and the third on condensed or dried milk, and their condition compared for some weeks or months.

You know the result, at least if you believe that vital foods will impart vitality and dead ones will not.