It was his accentuation of the pleasures of taste that led his misunderstanding followers later to ascribe to his teachings meanings that were never intended, and epicureanism today means devotion to the fine art of eating for enjoyment.

So firm a hold has the idea of pleasure in eating taken on our national consciousness and customs that eating accompanies practically every public function, in fact, holds a rather major position in the most of these.

It is so hard to get a church crowd out to any mid-week function that eating is advertised widely as the inducement to the membership to attend.

If only the raw and wholly vital foods were served on such occasions the custom would not be wholly without good, but the usual church supper represents the usual idea of food, the meats, white bread, potato in some form, a sweet dessert and coffee, perhaps varied by meat or potato salads, while if a leafy or green salad is served it generally consists of one or two leaves of lettuce with mayonnaise dressing, perhaps a slice of banana added as a decoration, the whole usually neglected in consuming the meal, or eaten as a compliance with the bill as served.

In the larger cities one can now find restaurants in which are served nothing but vital foods, or those approaching the vital standard so closely that one can secure a really regenerative meal, and at a lower expense than the usual dead meal. It is encouraging to find these restaurants becoming more popular, as a larger number of people are making it possible for such enterprising proprietor to make a very decent profit in maintaining a place where real food may be secured.

Other restaurants, while serving conventional food, are providing larger variety and better quality of salads and fresh fruits, and stressing better combinations of foods than called for usually by the customary diner.

All these are bringing a new era in food selection and combination that will go far toward improving the national customs in diet, but that it will be long before such customs are the rule is putting the matter both mildly and optimistically.

The average man thinks that because he is still alive and enjoying average health that, therefore, nothing is to be done about his dietary habits, at least surely not before he loses his ability to eat three square meals a day and enjoy them.

This attitude is not surprising when one thinks that dietary direction of ninety-nine out of a hundred physicians is to "eat plenty of food, nourishing food--keep well nourished," or, in other words, keep right on with your usual habits, for this--as the average man sees it--is what everyone has been doing.

The medical training of the usual young man is wholly deficient in food lore, even though there is much reference to diet in connection with disease, but the average training in diet takes in the caloric needs chiefly, with the chemistry wholly misunderstood or totally ignored.

If chronic disease is caused by an increasing acidosis, if acute disease is merely a reaction against increasing amounts of this same acid accumulation, and if this state results only from foods, then what more important phase of study as a preparation for the physician could there be than foods?

This is what Dr. Leonard Williams of London meant when he said that for these omissions in medical training some one should be hanged.

In the south Pacific Islands are cocoanut palms everywhere, and on one of these there is a group of people calling themselves Cocoavores, who live wholly on the cocoanut.

They represent almost every civilized country, and are made up of human physical derelicts who were given up to die in their former civilized surroundings, but who have come here to live out in the great amphitheatre in the sun and to eat of Nature's food wholly unchanged.

When a new arrival comes in he or she is given fifteen trees which are to be tended, the nuts harvested and stored, and these are to furnish the entire diet for the year.

These people do not furnish clinical material for any hospital or surgeon, for they have no disease; those who were suffering from tuberculosis when they arrived, as most of them were, soon recovering and enjoying as good health as the rest, yet the entire food for the year is cocoanuts and what vegetables and fruits can be secured through the warm weather season.

The cocoanut is not by any means a well-balanced food, but it is rich in the things the body most requires, so life can be supported very easily on such provender.

Fats are too high in the cocoanut, and the condition of one living on this type of food must show a great excess of fatty material in the excretions, but being vegetable fats there would not be on this account any tendency to stone formation, as gall stones or kidney gravel, for the vegetable fats do not contain the crystals of cholesterin that are found in all animal fats, even in cream and butter, the crystals that form the nucleus for such concretions as we describe under the name of gall stones or kidney stones.

The hair would be greasy, the skin exuding oil at every pore, yet this would not mean disease of any kind.

Now, if people can live and function normally (as these must be doing if they can recover from such diseases as tuberculosis) when subsisting on such natural foods as cocoanuts, how much easier it must be to live on a wide variety of such foods.

To the unadulterated taste of one eating only natural foods there is a variety and excellence of flavors to be enjoyed in the normal foods that any chef would covet the ability to produce in his artificial methods of tickling the human palate.

The exquisite flavors of a luscious apple, orange, pomegranate, grape, pineapple cannot be approached by art, and the poor endeavors made through the use of artificial coal-tar flavors are easily recognized as but a poor imitation of the real thing, and even then have to be covered up largely by much sugar in order to get by even the jaded palate of the tired variety seeker in new food flavors.

Such imitations would never get by one used to the unadulterated flavors of the natural foods, and would never be swallowed by such; but the usual tired palate is accustomed to being imposed on to the extent of absolute deceit, and readily lets anything by that even remotely resembles the article whose name it is stealing.

In sweets we have honey and the simple concentrations of the cane and maple juice, all of which are vital, except for the fact that the latter two have been concentrated by superheat, so are not in reality live foods, but still representing the concentrated salts of the original fluid.

When the cane syrup is not only concentrated to the granulation point by heat, but further treated by refinement till nothing remains of its original salts, it represents then nothing but clear carbon compound, nothing but sweetness, with everything taken out that Nature put there, and it is nothing but low-grade fuel, giving the body nothing but stimulation for a time, and the acids resulting from its oxidation in the body neutralized always by filching our own stored alkalin reserve.

In this way it is in exactly the same situation as white flour from which have been refined away all the alkalin salts of the bran and pericarp, leaving nothing but the starchy compounds and protein, the lime and other of the most necessary of our alkalin supplies being taken out with the bran by a fine silk bolting cloth that allows nothing to pass but the impalpable powder that represents these two things.

So these are not only dead foods, both of them, but also robbed of the pennies that closed the dead man's eyes.

Nothing is left that is of value, and experiments carried out many times on laboratory animals in various of the chief laboratories of nutrition all over the scientific world have shown that either or both of these foods will not support life. In the Rockefeller experiments some of the animals fasting, living wholly without nourishment of any kind, actually outlive those fed freely on the white sugar and white flour preparations.

Yet we permit the fine milling of flours, their bolting and complete denaturing, robbing the poor man of his staff of life, the least expensive of his necessary foods, and we still allow the refinement of sugars to remove everything that relates them in any way to food, knowing that we as a people are depending on these as food to nearly twice the extent of any other nation.

When will we wake up to the dangers that lurk in just these two things alone?

Of the dead foods, those that have been changed or processed in any way, there are two classes: those that have been changed only by heat, and those that have lost through refinement everything that related them to food.

Of the two, a considerable proportion of the former can be used without harm, such as cooked greens and roots, if so cooked as to retain their soluble salts, but the latter class should be barred forever from the table of every one who desires to be anything but a physical bankrupt in time.

Our candy bill is enormous, and accounts for diseased tonsils and adenoids in the school children of today to an almost 100% degree.

The writer has seen many times both diseased tonsils and adenoids completely clear up in one month from inhibition of candy intake alone, without further dietary change, and in twenty-four years he has yet to meet the case of either that will not clear up promptly in either children or adults if all denatured food is passed up and the diet limited to those foods that contain only the vital factors that make of any article the only legitimate food for man.

The insane rage of the nose and throat surgeon for tonsil removal is leaving a crop of subjects everywhere whose bars are down for every transient infection, for the tonsils represent the keystone of the arch of lymphatic protection of the throat, the entrance by which so much infection finds its way into the system, and whose guardian is chiefly the tonsil.

Not only so, but seven of the vocal muscles originate in the sheath of the tonsil, and when this is removed the slacking of these muscles shortens the vocal register at both ends, interfering greatly with vocal resonance and control.

Man is created just right; he needs all the organs with which Nature endowed him, and no nose and throat specialist can improve in any manner on Nature's arrangements.