When we realize the extent to which bread is eaten, the blind dependence placed on this supposed staff of life by almost the entire world, it is not strange that there is so much fermentation and consequent acid formation in the average digestive tract.

Knowing the alkalin requirements in this class of foods we are each under a very personal responsibility to see to it that in our particular stomach no fermentation through arrest of this tricky food shall occur.

We can do this in two ways: we can either refrain wholly from the use of acid fruits or other acids when bread or potato or other starchy food is eaten, as also from concentrated proteins, as meat, eggs, fish; or we can erase these very risky foods entirely from the bill, which we can do without loss, if we are eating a sufficient variety of vegetables and fruits.

In this way we can escape perhaps the commonest of all sources of fermentation and acid formation, yet of all the restrictions to eating, that in relation to bread seems to be the hardest for most people.

The writer has seen children scolded, threatened, or even sent from the table because they were unwilling to eat more bread, or to eat it with every other article of food on the table, under the parental misunderstanding of the old idea that "bread is the staff of life."

Is is not the staff of life, and in its refined form it is verily the staff of death, for its use in this form, white, denatured, emasculated thoroughly, is one of the surest and the quickest roads to acidosis, the fatal alkalin deficiency that is the great cause of disease.

Whole grain bread can be used, even to some advantage, by the laborer, if taken in such combination as will allow it to digest without the usual fermentation, but it is never necessary even to the laborer, and to the desk worker it is a continual and immediate source of danger.

Catarrhs depend for their presence on this fermentation of starches and sugars almost wholly, as is easily proved by the sufferer from catarrh, if he will omit all forms of starch or sugar from his daily bill.

All disease is in a sense catarrh, or an evidence that the body is seeking through the mucous membranes to extrude toxins, and these toxins are from the carbon family, whose whole source is carbon foods.

Every inflammation of every organ of the body is a catarrh, so catarrh is the great evidence of disease.

Yet you will be told that catarrh is incurable except by high altitudes. But high altitudes do not cure, they merely suppress the evidences of catarrh, by drying up the discharge as fast as it appears; covering up the thing, but never eradicating it. Any sufferer from catarrh knows that when he ascended to high altitudes his discharge disappeared, but when he returned to a low altitude this was already present, just as before he went up, showing it to have been present all the time, but dried by the dry and rarefied air of the higher altitude.

The asthmatic knows the same thing, for if he gets relief on the top of Pike's peak his asthma returns as soon as he again reaches the plain, not the next day, but at once.

A great sufferer from asthma told the writer many years ago that on his way to Denver, where he was forced to live, apart from his family in the East, he always dropped all asthmatic symptoms at Chicago, and on his returns to visit his family he always picked the symptoms up in Chicago, just where he had left them, and in the night he knew when he reached Chicago for this reason.

The rarefied air of Denver gave him great relief, and continued to do so for ten years or more, but asthma finally got him even there, for his causes were building up all the time, and no rarefication of the air would, after a time, suffice to dry up the catarrh of his bronchial tubes.

The writer has many times since regretted that he did not then know what the cause of asthma was or he could have soon eradicated it, so that this sufferer could have lived East with his family and enjoyed life, for they would not live in Denver with him; and it was pathetic to see him return every year and suffer agonies just to be near his family for even the few weeks that his strength held out.

Any case of asthma that cannot breathe comfortably in his uncongenial surroundings is not cured; likewise any case of hay fever that cannot bury his face in his particular bete noir without sneezing is not cured; and the fact that such people can do this very thing after discontinuing acid-forming habits of diet is the best proof in the world that their disease came from these internal toxins of acid character, and never from the protein pollens to which the disease is attributed.

These are but the excitants, the real cause being always the internal condition of the patient himself.

Some pollens are specifically irritating to certain individuals, but if these are determined for this year, and if vaccination with these is practiced, and if some relief occurs, there is no feeling of certainty that next year the particular proteins chiefly causative will not be found among an entirely different group, as I am sure everyone who has submitted to the multitudinous sensitization tests can testify.

This is not the way to treat asthma, for it does not touch or contemplate the cause. Rather it is more to the point to remove from the system those irritating acids that cause the sensitization of the bronchial or nasal mucous membrane, then the thing will die of its own weight with nothing to support it.

This would be a big thing for the writer to say were he not in possession of such irrefutable evidence of cure through the many recoveries in which no effort was made to do anything but stop this adventitious acid formation.

But twenty-four years and many hundreds of cases of both asthma and hay-fever can testify to full and complete recovery that shows in ability to live in their former impossible surroundings without the least evidence of their old troubles.

Cases of a deep type and of twenty-years history have submitted themselves to this form of treatment, and in very many of the cases of spasmodic asthma there has been complete relief in a few days with no sign of return after many years, though the deeply catarrhal cases require a longer time.

If hay-fever sufferers will start in early in the spring they can almost positively avoid the August attack, and surely by the next year even the worst of these will be free from all symptoms of the trouble.

This is sufficient reward, surely, for the slight care necessary in diet, and if you do not believe it to be, just ask some former sufferer who has recovered what he thinks of it.

It is a great pity to see a spasmodic asthmatic wheezing his life away, when all the time, if he but knew it, but a few days or weeks separate him from a most heavenly relief.

All disease is from acid formation and retention, else all are wrong who are attributing to acid the role in disease formation that ranks so far first that men like Dr. George W. Crile can say that there is no natural death, that all deaths from natural causes, so-called, are merely the end-point of a progressive acid saturation.

Seneca was wrong when he said: "Men do not die--they kill themselves."

Sir William Arbuthnot Lane was wrong when he said: "After all there is but one disease--deficient drainage."

The very same thought differently expressed--but are all of these really great men wrong?

From the writer's standpoint these men are great prophets; those who have seen a great light and are not afraid to tell the world of it. His experience fully confirms the statements of all three men: we do kill ourselves through this continual manufacture and retention of toxins; there is but this one disease, when we consider the thing broadly; and there is no natural death, surely, if these things are true.

In order that every man be his own physician it is necessary that he know why he gets sick and just what to do about it.

When he knows this he will know far more than the entire medical profession, for they are still saying that the causes of disease are a great mystery, and if they are so, then how is it possible to know what to do effectively for such a mysterious condition?

The causes are so plain that he who runs, and runs fast, may read with one eye shut, for they are written all over the body of the sufferer, as well as all over the entire face of Nature.

Believing a thing a mystery will never solve its causes nor will it help one iota in its management.

The causes of disease are the causes of acid accumulation, from the four sources outlined previously, all of which are intrinsic sources, therefore, subject to intrinsic control; self-caused, therefore self-controllable, always.

This is the lesson that each must learn if he aspires to be his own physician, and once he has learned this lesson well, he then lacks only the will and initiative to put the whole program to the test, which will thoroughly convince him of the truth of the entire proposition.

Let no man who is wounded try to do without the surgeon, for this is his legitimate field, nor should one who is deformed try to do the same thing, for this also is surgery's legitimate field, in both of which surgery has shown its worth; but if one has a pain anywhere in his insides let him stay away from the surgeon, if he wishes to die whole, for he may die otherwise in various sections serially.

Until the writer sees at least one case of appendicitis die "naturally," whether this be a simple catarrhal and uncomplicated case or a perforated case with abdominal abscess, he is sure to be excused for not taking this condition as seriously as it is painted by the surgeon, who knows nothing but the operative treatment of this really simple condition.

Until he finds a case of asthma that cannot be reached through diet alone, here again he should be excused for not taking seriously the statement that the cause of asthma is unknown, and its management fruitless of results, beyond change of altitude. Until he finds one case of either gastric or duodenal ulcer, below the stage of actual cancer, that fails to respond to a short fast and corrected diet, he is still further to be excused for not boosting the surgical treatment of this condition.

And so he can go through the list of unmanageable conditions, disbelieving in the accepted view of either causation or treatment, till he is surely somewhat excusable for believing that if each man were actually his own physician he could hardly make a worse job of it than is already the case.