Hygiene Collection of Herbert M. Shelton

UNNATURAL food is the principal cause of human degeneration. It is the oldest vice. If we reflect upon the number of ruinous dietetic abuses, and their immemorial tyranny over the larger part of the human race, we are tempted to eschew all symbolic interpretations of the paradise legend and ascribe the fall of man literally and exclusively to the eating of forbidden food. From century to century this same cause has multiplied the sum of our earthly ills.

Several generations of study of cell development and heredity have ignored almost completely the more important study of nutritional habits as these determine and predetermine cell developments and affect reproduction and survival. The role of nutrition in integration, reintegration, and disintegration has been shamefully neglected.

For the most part, it has been taken for granted that it matters not what kind of food an organism consumes, so long as it consumes "enough" and more than "enough." Plenty of food and lack of food are chiefly considered as of importance. This places most importance upon quantity rather than quality and kind.

Only recently have we begun to seriously investigate the physiological basis of life and the incidences of nutrition as they affect growth and reproduction, both in a physiological and pathological sense. It is true that hints of the role of nutrition in health and disease have come to thinking members of our race during the past several thousand years; but scientists have considered such things unworthy of their notice.

WANT OF APPETITE is not always a morbid symptom, nor even a sign of imperfect digestion. Nature may have found it necessary to muster all the energies of our system for some special purpose, momentarily of paramount importance. Organic changes and repairs, teething, pleuritic eruptions, and the external elimination of bad humors (boils, etc.), are often attended with a temporary suspension of the alimentary process. As a rule, it is always the safest plan to give Nature her own way.

TO A NEW ERA, which has just begun to glow in the gold-red light of Eos, the goddess of dawn, while the deluge of medieval superstitions is fast assuaging, and many a submerged truth has reappeared like a bequest of a former and better world, to stand as way-marks on the road to a true Science of Life--its name a prophecy that links its destiny with invisible but strong ties, to the fate of the dainty butterfly: a groveling grub entombs itself as a chrysalis in a cocoon whence it comes forth a being of celestial beauty, a winged flower of rainbow colors and pure silk, a fitting emblem of the fruition of life's renewed effort to assert its original purity and healthfulness--that no longer considers depravity and wretchedness as the normal condition of man, and happiness as the reward of a self-abhorring suppression of all natural desires; that rejects the blind confidence in the efficacy of an abnormal and mysterious remedy, and realizes that the physical laws of creation find an echo in our innate monitor.