This is an age of seeking after health, and many and various are the means proffered to that end.  Drugs, serums, medical and surgical appliances, baths, waters, fearfully and wonderfully conceived methods of exercise, rigid and drastic schemes of dieting, &c., &c., crowd upon each other’s heels until the prevailing idea in the mind of any one seeking to solve the health problem is one of hopeless mystification.  Life would be too short to give them all a fair trial, even if any one could be found either foolish or courageous enough to attempt the task (I believe some do try everything by turns but nothing long), so one is driven perforce to make a selection; and while dismissing nine-tenths of the nostrums urged upon us as unworthy of any sane and rational consideration, we know the truth lies somewhere, and will be found by those who seek it on simple, common-sense lines.  Doctors differ like the rest of us, but there is a broad general ground of agreement upon which we can all go, namely, that cleanliness, in its widest sense, including pure air, food, and water; plain, easily-digested, nourishing food; with rest and exercise in proper proportion, are the main essentials for right living, and so furnish the key to the problem.  No one of these is of itself sufficient.  All are necessary and inter-dependent, and it is the want of recognising this principle which so often leads to failure and consequent abandonment, or even wholesale denunciation, of the regimen followed.  Thus a person may be advised to adopt certain foods, the rules and regulations regarding which he follows to the letter, but acts unhygienically in other ways, as by shutting out the fresh air, inattention to cleanliness, over-exertion or want of sufficient exercise, eating when exhausted, and so on.  The food, at least if it has gone in any way against the inclination or prejudice, will of course be blamed, while really it may be quite innocent.

One might multiply instances to show how so many not only fail to find health by their unreasonable methods, but bring ridicule and disrepute on certain of the measures followed.  There is no need to waste further time, however, in demonstrating the obvious.  One would hope that all readers are genuinely interested in health principles, and sufficiently in earnest to promote these intelligently.

Our business in these pages lies with the food question, and in this chapter I purpose to deal specially with

Health Foods,

of which there are a large and ever-increasing number now upon the market.  How people can complain of want of variety with such a seemingly endless category to choose from passes my comprehension, for the difficulty I find is to do justice to even a small proportion of them.  If one were to sample a different dish every day it would take months to get over them, and great as is the outcry in these days for variety, I do not think this constant chopping and changing