Now if a non-acid-forming habit of eating will restore the seriously ill to health, will it not more surely prevent the advent of disease?

It is not a great tax on credulity to arrive at such a conclusion.

The whole plan is on a par with the bank account, for it is easier to conserve this by careful management than to recoup it after it has been depleted.

When we write checks against an account that is not active enough, that is not replenished frequently or sufficiently, we soon run into the red, and the bank notifies us that our account is over' drawn, and we have to get busy and make good our shortage or lose our credit, a fearful thing.

If we see to it that the amounts withdrawn are daily made good then we know that we are in balance, and have nothing to fear for our credit.

The body is continually throwing off chemicals in the form of waste matter, many of these such as have to be used in considerable quantities in the body to complete the chemical changes that go on in preparing waste for exit from the body, and if these losses are not daily made good we run short of some of the most vital chemicals of which we stand in daily need.

We cannot get something out of nothing, neither can we get lime or other of the essential body chemicals out of foods from which they have been refined or cooked away, so we must be sure that our losses are made good in kind by using those foods that we know represent these very things continually.

When we eat white breads or white flour preparations we are woefully deceiving ourselves, for these things do not contain the most vital of the chemical salts we require.

Nature placed them there for our use in the whole grain, but man has refined them away under the impression that he can improve on Nature, or to make them more beautiful or more easily baked or more easily handled or stored, or even digested.

When man starts in to improve on Nature he is following a wrong track, and especially when he seeks to improve on the natural foods, for these contain just the things that Nature designed for her children, and no art can improve on them.

So if we would avoid or prevent disease, we should make sure first of all that what we select as food is really such, not a manufactured taste, beautified, refined, or changed in any way from its original state--vital foods, those still containing the life implanted there by Nature, or Nature's God.

These are safe, and nothing else is, even though we may acquire a tolerance for other foods that are deficient and for a long time seem to do well on them.

You will note that little is said about other devitalising habits, but there is no doubt that the causes of enervation, or decline in vitality, are many things, such as habits that rob us of sleep or rest, tobacco, whiskey, drugs, sexual abuses.

These things are all wasteful of vitality, and no one who can think would for a moment seek to lessen their importance as causes of physical decline, but as compared with the usual, the well-nigh universal, mistakes of the table, all these other causes combined must take an inferior place, and the more especially so as when one is correctly nourished there is a tendency to normality in all other respects, and habits are seldom formed in other harmful things.

A man normally fed from childhood is nearly protected against excesses, for the normal body needs no stimulation or no sedation, so does not crave these things.

The normal body is very much alive in every particular, so is not in the market for the cheap pleasures that thrill without satisfying.

To live without the sense of fatigue in a constant state of rehabilitation is to live without fear. Stop for a moment to consider what this would mean in the lives of every one!

A world without fear would be a Heaven, and it has been truly said that all there really is to fear in this world is fear.

Fear paralyses everything, stops digestion, assimilation, excretion, so that through fear we are poisoned daily with our own body wastes.

Dr. W. B. Cannon, of Harvard, while detailing his experiments on the motility of digestion through his then almost new x-ray studies before a meeting of the New York Academy of Medicine, at which the writer was present, told of the studies on the motility of the cat's intestine, and how as they were watching the rhythmic movements of the peristaltic waves of the small intestine a dog in the next room suddenly barked, and the cat went into a state of fear.

At once all peristaltic movements stopped entirely, the intestine lying absolutely without apparent motion, and it was two hours after before the movements resumed with anything like the rhythm or depth shown before the fear arrested them.

If this is true of the cat, it is no doubt just as true of the human digestive motility, and where the fear is not excessive it is possible that these movements are not wholly arrested, but that they are in some degree interfered with by fears of lesser degree, or by depressing thoughts, there is little doubt.

As one of the necessary prerequisites to comfortable and normal digestion, then, an equable frame of mind is not the least in importance, and can be cultivated by any one, if the health is so good as to remove from the body this innate fear of disease, and all other sorts of fears, for after all, fears are inborn.

In an old hotel in Pennsylvania is an inscription burned into the face of the old walnut mantel: "I have been young and now am old and have seen much trouble, most of which never happened."

It is a fact that most of what we fear never happens, and our carefully groomed fears went as lost effort, and with them went some of our vitality.

Worry is but a phase of fear, and worry is the middle name of a host of good and otherwise very sensible people.

Worry interferes with every function of the body, and interference is in direct ratio to the size and depth and height of the worry, and worry never yet accomplished anything.

Worry, as all fear, is the most insane waste of precious vitality that could be imagined, for it is wholly bad and without giving to the system anything at all to compensate even in small degree for what it takes out of the body.

It is a luxury to some, but withal the most expensive of all luxuries, the most destructive, the least constructive.

So why worry, when worry will never improve conditions in the slightest degree, and will, if indulged, ruin the finest body and mind in the universe?

Worry, like all fears, has a physical background, even as has insanity, and while we may not be able to control fully the mind, we can at least control the physical background.

Instead of telling people to stop worrying, we will do them more good if we try to find out what they are eating, and how they eat these things, and by correcting their evident mistakes we can so regenerate the physical body that worry is no longer in evidence.

Several years ago a young man of property came to the writer reporting that he had not slept a single wink in an entire week, and he looked it.

His face was purple, his brain in a whirl, he was erratic in speech, taciturn, unresponsive to simple questions, in fact, in the early stages of dementia.

He said he had invested heavily in real estate just before the war, and now the factories had nearly all shut down, the young men had either gone to war or were working in munition factories at higher wages, leaving his town almost without man power sufficient for the ordinary work, and the factories were unable to secure help from outside, for other towns were in similar plight.

His family was communicated with and furnished the information that with a little careful handling he could husband his property till after the war, when real estate would again begin to come to its value and he could dispose of some to let him out of his difficulties.

The banks had never pressed him for his liabilities nor were they apt to do so, but his plight had so gotten on his nerves that he imagined that every bank was about to foreclose on him.

Examination showed him to be very toxic, and he admitted being a rather heavy eater of much concentrated food with very imperfect bowel action.

No effort was made to convince him that his financial condition was other than what he feared, but he was cleaned out and sleep forced for three nights, after which the blood left his head and his face turned a normal color; he said nothing more about worries, stayed two weeks, ate only alkalin foods, reduced his toxic state, and returned to his business apparently without the least fear.

After two weeks he asked what he had been worrying about, and said that he did not see why he worried, that the bankers all knew him and would carry him along any decent length of time, and he was pulled to know why he had ever thought otherwise. No change had occurred in his financial state, and it was not till after the war that he finally emerged without loss, but he never worried again.

The cause of his worries was physical, in himself, due to the fact that he carried a toxic load that changed the complexion of the entire world for him.

His would have been another case of dementia from business difficulties, but, like Senator Tillman, the cause was never in overwork or the state of the real estate market, but in his table habits alone.

To prevent disease is to cease the daily cause of disease, and the cause of disease, as before remarked, is in the gradually increasing amounts of acid end-products of digestion and metabolism, a controllable condition.

So again let us inquire, if seated disease will recover by a reversal of the wrong feeding habits, why will not these same habits prevent disease in the first place?

Prevention costs nothing, but it does save a lot, and if one is of sound mind it must seem that the only sane thing to do is to avoid habitually the well outlined causes of disease, without waiting for its development.