ANTES Y ‘DESPUÉS DE IMPUESTOS

WATER FOOD SUNSHINE TEMPERATURE ACTIVITY (Work, Function, Exercise) REST (Relaxation) SLEEP (Repose) CLEANLINESS REPRODUCTION HAPPINESS ORGANIZATION CONDUCT FAITH NORMAL LIVING THE TOTAL APPROACH

We should fully understand that our lives arc but individualizations, partial and limited expressions of the integral life, just as our bodies are parcels or fragments of the body of the earth upon which we live. We maintain our lives from hour to hour, from instant to instant, only in virtue of our relation with the sun and air and earth— by food, air, water, heat, light—which supply the essential conditions of existence and the materials out of which our inner structures are formed and shaped.

There are certain fundamental conditions proper to the mental and physical wellbeing of man, and we must understand, as a matter of the strictest science as well as of individual experience, that health is maintained or lost in exact proportion as these fundamental conditions are supplied or denied. This is one of the first important truths in reference to our physical organization which we must learn, if we are to have health on anything more than the haphazard basis commonly accepted. For when the conditions of normal life are not fulfilled it is inevitable that sickness ensue; when they are adequately fulfilled, health is equally inevitable. How shall we determine our choice of materials and conditions for the production of tissue and the elimination of waste and toxins? We must let the living organism answer this question for us. The human constitution is the final umpire before which all such questions must be arbitrated. Can the body use the material in the production of tissue or in the elimination of waste? If not, it is valueless. That is hygienic, that is

beneficial if used habitually in a state of health, those things, in other words that are essential to a state of health and are indispensable to life. But let us not lose sight of the fact that health and the best means of promoting it cannot be studied in the sick room. The conditions and materials of health are best studied in the healthiest specimens. If the body rejects it in health it is not normal to man, is not a hygienic factor; if the body seeks it and appropriates it in a state of health, it is a hygienic factor. If the body cannot make use of it in health, it is equally valueless in a state of disease.

Physiology affords us no knowledge of any power in the living organism by which it can manufacture either tissue or energy out of drug-elements, or by which it can eliminate the causes of disease with such elements. On the contrary, the physiologist knows all too well that drugs are only means whereby the system may be exhausted in a very unnecessary and wasteful manner. Any interference with the processes of life, in either health or disease, except by supplying appropriate elements for its use and proper conditions for appropriating these, is always and under all circumstances, a serious mistake.

The chief materials and conditions concerned in vital processes are air, water, food, sunshine, temperature, rest and sleep, exercise or activity, cleanliness and wholesome mental states. The sum of the whole of these, if rightly used, is health. When any or all of them are abused, disease results. Preservative Hygiene, that is, the hygienic care of the well to the end that health may be maintained, is the correct employment of these factor-elements of normal living plus the persistent avoidance of abnormal elements or habits that we have foolishly, though, perhaps, ignorantly introduced into our living plans. Let us here briefly consider the essential factors of life.

AIR

Air, which we take into our lungs in breathing, is the chief source of oxygen, an element that is as essential to nutrition and the functions of life as nitrogen, carbon, calcium, etc. Without sufficient oxygen to keep the “flame of life” burning brightly death ensues. The elaborate provision that has been made to supply the body with oxygen reveals the great importance of air.

The red cells are oxygen carriers, their function depending upon the presence of hemoglobin. They also carry carbon dioxide, so that they are important factors in both the nutrition and the drainage of the body. It is estimated that normally about one-fourth of the blood of the body is in the lungs, which means that an average of

about one thousand square yards of blood cell surface is constantly exposed to the air. As our commonly recognized “normals” are far from valid, this figure may be short of the genuine norm of nature. This blood surface in the lungs flows past the air chambers of the lungs in a never-ending stream so that it is estimated that every second two trillion cells pass by the air chambers giving up their load of carbon dixoide and taking on a supply of oxygen.

Fresh air is essential at all times. When we consider how the air in our cities is contaminated with just about anything and everything that our bodies do not want, cannot use, and will probably work themselves to death trying to expel, we can appreciate the advantages the country dweller has over the city dweller in this respect. The lungs of the dweller in the industrial cities become filled with soot and are found, at death, to be black and infiltrated with dust and soot.

Medical men had taught the people for so many ages that cold air, damp air, night air and draughts cause disease, that they had them living and sleeping in unventilated homes, stores, offices, shops, etc. They closed the windows and doors of the sick- room and excluded all fresh air. Hospitals were ill-ventilated, foul-smelling dives in which breathing was difficult. When the Hygienists, led by Graham and Trall, attacked these superstitions, the profession was by no means the first to admit the correctness of the views of Hygienists. Indeed, they have never entirely admitted that they were wrong about cold air, damp air, night air and draughts. To this day they prefer the oxygen-tent to fresh air.

Full breathing is an indispensable requisite of good health. People who live and work and sleep in ill-ventilated houses, offices and workshops, who sit stooped over or in cramped positions at their work, or the desk in the school room, and those whose clothing so constricts the waist and chest that normal breathing is not possible, suffer from insufficient oxygenation and, consequently, function on a low physiological level. Shoemakers, tailors, seamstresses and others whose work keeps them in constrained and cramped postures cannot breathe well. A proper and efficient performance of the important function of respiration is impossible when the habitual position is such as to prevent the normal excursions of the chest and diaphram in breathing. Workers—such as stonecutters, welders, painters, bakers, printers, and others who work amid gases and dust—are also greatly handicapped by a lack of fresh air during their working hours.

Foul air and bad bodily use are not the only elements of impaired breathing. We frequently see inadequate thoracic equipment among the people all around us. These people lack the chest size and expansion needed for the size and weight of their bodies. Such a condition is not confined to the adult populations of our cities, but

inadequate respiratory equipment is sometimes seen in babies at birth. If the respiratory equipment of the individual is not proportioned to body size and weight, it will not be possible for him to function on any high physiological level. Even but a slight deficit in respiratory capacity will make a considerable difference in the course of a single day. Every parent should see to it that congenital or hereditary respiratory deficiency is overcome by means of proper chest gymnastics started early. Defective oxygenation is in itself a state of impaired health and the ultimate character and site of the so-called diseases that grow out of this are, as a rule, secondary and determined by factors which are additional to and often less important than the respiratory inadequacy.

Air is also the medium that carries heat away from the body. Even warm air carries away heat and cools the body covered with perspiration. An electric fan does not cool the air; it only circulates it. A current of warm air driven against the wet body feels cool. When the body has become thoroughly dried, the same air will feel hot. Air, is thus seen to be important, both internally and externally.

WATER

Considered in its physiological relations, water is one of the most important nutritive elements that is used by the living organism, whether plant or animal. It composes the chief bulk of all animal and vegetable bodies, provides the essential fluidity of the blood of the animal and the sap of the plant, without which neither could flow or be distributed to the many tissues and organs of the complex body. About four-fifths of the blood by weight is water, while the so-called solid portions of the body, the muscular portions, are chiefly water, containing scarcely one-fourth of solid matter, the remainder being water. Bone contains water as an essential constituent, while cartilage contains even more water than bone. All of the secretions of the body including the milk of mammals are largely water.

The body, composed as it is of multitudinous cellular aggregations, must of necessity be porous and tubular, or else it would be impossible for each part and each cell to receive nourishment and to have its waste carried away. When we reflect that water is the only liquid which is essential to the formation, development and support of the human frame, is the menstruum and conductor of all other nutritive elements to all parts of the body and the menstruum and conductor of waste and toxins from the cells and out of the body, we begin to perceive something of its importance in the economy of living organisms. The fact that water is absolutely necessary to depuration is often not sufficiently stressed; on the other hand, there are those who

think that excretion can be speeded up merely by over drinking of water. Water is essential for the removal and expulsion of waste materials from the cells and tissues of the body, so that water is as important for disassimilation and excretion as for supply and assimilation. As it is water that conveys the nutritional factors to all the cells and carries away the cellular waste, this is to say. as food materials can be carried throughout the body by water only, and as water is the only medium by which waste is carried away, it follows that the value of food, sunshine, exercise, air, etc., depends upon water. But water is not merely used by the body in carrying on its functions, much of the water taken in becomes actual cell constitutent, so that, as already pointed out, the body is largely water. Air that is deprived of all water is hardly fit for respiration. But water, diffused through the air as vapor, serves another important function; namely, it prevents a too rapid evaporation of water from the body. Air deprived of all humidity would cause a rapid and exhausting evaporation of water, both from the skin and lungs, thus rapidly dehydrating the body, reducing the individual to a state of exhaustion and, if water were not taken, death. Drink we define as pure water, all other fluid substances taken as “drink” being either foods or poisons. Hygienists can agree with the ancient Pliny who considered it a great absurdity for mankind to go to such great trouble and expense in making, artificially, such a great variety of liquors, when nature has prepared, ready-made and always at hand, a drink of so much superior quality as pure water. The only beneficial substance contained in these liquors is water; most of the rest of their contents being poison. Not all of the water taken into the body is taken as drink. Fruits and vegetables are abundant in this substance. Even the potato, solid as it may seem, is composed of from seventy to eighty per cent water. The more succulent vegetables and the juicy fruits are even more abundant in water. Thus, the juices of foods (unlike liquors), which contain wholesome nutritive substances, also supply the body with water. It is significant that water is the only drink for all animated beings except man, who goes out of his way to prepare poisonous liquids for “drink.” Although the “soft drinks” now imbibed in such great quantities by the people of this country, are largely water, they contain coal tar dyes, white sugar, artificial flavors, phosphoric acid and various habit-forming poisons such as caffeine and acetanelid.

Instinctively animals prefer soft waters to hard waters and horses may be observed slaking their thirst in a turbid stream of soft water rather than to drink hard, though limpid water. It is unfortunate for man that he has developed the idea, one

that has been fostered by the medical profession, that if the waters of a well or a stream are so foul that cattle will not drink them, they are possessed of medicinal properties.

The body is constantly losing water through the skin as sweat, through the lungs in the exhalations of these, through the kidneys as urine and through the colon mixed with the feces, as well as in saliva and mucous that may be expelled from the body; hence, it is necessary to frequently replenish the water supply, either by drinking water or by taking it in the food eaten. Many people derive all of their water from food and drink no water. This subject of water and water drinking will be discussed more fully in Volume II of this series.

FOOD

Food is any substance which the living organism can appropriate and make a part of itself. This is to say, it is usable material or material that can be made into living tissue. All else is poison. However innocuous a substance may appear, if it is not food it is poison in its relation to the living organism. Food is the material out of which the organism is constructed and by which it is repaired and maintained and by which reproduction is accomplished.

Perhaps in no field of human knowledge does there exist as great discrepancy between the vast amount of truth that is already ours, and its utilization in safeguarding the welfare and increasing the dignity of man, than in the field of

Hygiene and nutrition, which is but a part of Hygiene. Ignorance, poverty, prejudice

and intolerance are not the sole causes of our failure to benefit from the knowledge (to use but one factor) of diet and nutrition that is ours, in increasing human health, happiness and longevity. Commercial interests, including the disease-treaters, are even greater bulwarks against truth.

To state that food is an absolutely necessary pre-condition of life and health is but to state a fact of everyday observation. So basic is food it may properly be regarded as the controlling factor of life and health. We are often reminded that we can live for weeks without food, for days without water but only for minutes without air. This apparent fact is supposed to show the relative importance of these nutritional factors. There are two simple replies to this statement. These are: 1. air and water are also food; and, 2. the length of time one may go without taking these nutrients is determined by the amounts of them that are stored within the organism. A man can go for weeks without eating only because he possesses a large store of proteins, carbohydrates, fats, minerals, vitamins, etc., within his own body. The time he can go

without water is much shorter because he has a relatively smaller water supply stored within. He has almost no stored free oxygen that can be used in the absence of oxygen from without, hence lie must have oxygen quickly or he perishes. It is doubtful, in my mind, at least, that a man can live longer without sugar or protein, or phosphorus, or iron, than he can live without oxygen.

As food lies at the very foundation of human existence (constitutes its substratum), supplies the elements of our physical organization and the materials for the unfolding of all the mental powers of living structure’s, it is important that we know something about our food needs in the many and varying conditions and circumstances of existence.

Medical men were simple enough to believe that on the basis of chemical analysis, the whole mystery of nutrition could be solved, indeed, had been solved. They discovered that man needed proteins, carbohydrates and fats. Under their influence civilized man was led to attempt to live upon a diet such as no race in history had ever attempted to live upon. The results were disastrous, although, despite the findings of the past fifty years, most medical men are still loathe to admit that the profession had been wrong.

When medical men realized the inadequacy of their previous teachings about diet, their protein-fat-carbohydrate fuel and their calories, they gave but scant attention to minerals, but turned to a search for other factors. This led to the discovery of vitamins. Today it is well known that it is possible to die of starvation on a diet that supplies proteins, fats and carbohydrates in full measure. Hygienists and others decried cooking on the ground that it destroyed the “life” of the food, that it destroyed its electro-magnetic qualities, that it disorganized it, etc. These first faint efforts to discover something in foodstuffs besides fats, proteins and carbohydrates, may properly be recognized as “intuitive” recognition of vitamins and enzymes. Indeed, when the discovery of vitamins was first announced, Prof. Percy G. Styles, an American physiologist, described the theory as a re-statement of Graham’s views.

Realizing that the men outside the profession, whom they had denounced in no uncertain terms, had long since beaten them to important facts about food and nutrition, the medical profession is still loathe to admit the validity of the findings of