"Of the making of many books there is no end."

Surely Solomon was right, and for making another book at the present time, especially a book that is an addition to the increasing flood of health literature, there should be both reason and excuse that will satisfy the reader that the occasion is opportune for just one more book.

There is so much apparent disagreement among writers on the subject of health, particularly as this relates to foods, that the writer deems it timely to point the only seeming character of these discrepancies, and to draw particular attention to the fact that through all proposed systems that embrace the idea of foods as cause of disease and its cure, there is an unmistakable cable of truth that is nearly identical in all.

Certain fundamental hypotheses are recognizable in all, even though this author stresses this phase, that author that phase, for truth is unchangeable through all time and in every circumstance, and only confusion of terms or lack of perception on the part of the writer or reader will keep the great truths of food as a primary factor in disease and health from being easily discernible.

The writer himself was a physical bankrupt twenty-four years ago, suffering the very familiar trinity of troubles that now stands first in our mortality statistics as cause of death after forty years of age, the so-called cardio-vascular-renal condition, consisting of high blood pressure, kidney disease and dilated heart.

He had for years weighed 225 pounds in street clothing, and was unable to lower this figure through exercise and what he supposed was a proper modification of diet.

He was in a busy practice, chiefly surgical, and like most other physicians, he thought only of his work and not enough of his own physical equipment.

While at Arts and Science College he had gloried in his strength, and even years after his medical degree was attained he still considered himself a strong man, never dreaming that his very ordinary habits of life were laying the foundation for an early breakdown.

It was not till a hurried sprint for an incoming train dilated his heart that he really began to think that perhaps he was not the man he had believed himself to be.

At this point, where circulatory compensation was broken, his legs swelled to the capacity of the skin, he was unable to lie down and sleep for fear of drowning in his own fluids, yet he continued to work at the same rate, catching what sleep he could in a chair at night, or sitting upright in bed.

The same condition was very familiar to him in his daily practice, and he had always told those in a similar state to prepare for the final hop-off, which was never far in the future.

Remembering his own consistent failures in treatment of this condition, the future did not look over-long or very bright, and realizing the utter failure of medical treatment in this class of cases he did not take any medicine whatever,--for what was the use?

It was at this point that during many a long night, he made a careful analysis of his own previous habits--habits that might have led a strong man of splendid heredity to such a woeful pass--and finally developed the fact that since his graduation in medicine, sixteen years previous, he had eaten at hotels, boarding-houses, restaurants, and only the past five years had he lived as a married man in his own home, with controllable conditions at table.

This meant eleven years of public eating; surely a long enough period to form permanent habits that undoubtedly ruled the selection and combination of foods at his own table afterward, for each man's wife seeks to cook and serve the things that please her mate.

Analysis of the food situation at this time showed that he had been eating meat or other concentrated protein food at each meal, usually combined with white bread and generally potato in some form; the "plain food" of the American table.

He had been eating pastries freely as a top dressing for this incongruous mixture of incompatible foods, the whole washed down with two or three cups of coffee, sweetened thoroughly with white sugar and well aulaited with rich cream.

He had been smoking like a veritable chimney, and drinking stimulants freely--the usual man's idea of how a man should live-- when he can afford it.

No effort was made to change the habits in regard to either stimulants or tobacco, but the table was changed all around, two meals a day being totally deleted and the third consisting of vegetarian food, wholly.

The coffee also was discontinued, and in a few weeks the stimulants cured themselves through loss of desire for them.

In a few months the tobacco was given up, and for four years there was no desire to smoke, even after many years of heavy smoking.

Then followed a period of rejuvenation that was truly remarkable, especially to a physician who had always looked on disease from the conventional professional standpoint as a great mystery, as the eminent ones have always described it.

In two weeks there was not a sign of dropsy anywhere in the body. In three months the weight had gone down to normal, 175 pounds in street clothing. At about the same time he discovered that he could again run as fast and as far as he desired without disturbing the rhythm of his heart, and there was surprising endurance and long-windedness.

This meant a complete come-back for a dilated heart, a thing not in the books, scarcely to be believed, and a test of the blood pressure showed 120 mm. systolic, the low, normal figure.

Then followed four years of study, questioning, and experimenting, ending in a period in a New York post-graduate medical course, to correlate these surprising facts, and it was not till after four full years that he was forced to the conclusion that man is an exact composite of what he eats daily, yearly, and as a life habit.

During these four years he read everything he could find on the subject of foods, health, exercise, natural cure of disease and everything formerly regarded as taboo reading, from the orthodox standpoint, and it was then that he discovered this great cable of truth running through many apparently contradictory treatises on health, from the angle of correct diet, and was able to pick out this cable (not a thread) of truth from all systems, and to disregard the trivial differences in opinion, theory or viewpoint of the mass of writers, each of whom was seeking to put over his own peculiar view.

This experience so changed the character of the writer's practice that he dropped surgery entirely, and as completely also the administration of drugs, for if man is a composite of what goes into him daily in the form of nourishment, then what is the use of drugging him or cutting him for the results of wrong feeding habits? It is much more to the point to change the wrong habits and let Nature perform the cure, as Nature alone is able to do.

It is now twenty-four years since this breakdown and upbuilding occurred. After this long period, when the writer has already passed the average life-limit by many years, he has had the great pleasure of watching similar come-backs in many thousands of cases of apparently incurable conditions in every sort of individual and every sort of case, and now feels that the occasion is not strained when he presents a little book setting forth the theory of man's dependence on foods, their relation to the body in health and disease, and the discernible fact that in all the present successful systems of applying food to health there is always this great similarity that should far outweigh all seeming differences. This is the occasion and excuse.