The use of the oven, pan and kettle is not essential to a healthy diet, but few people in this changeable, and often cold, depressing climate are willing to forgo their occasional use.  One cannot get hot water for a drink without a kettle or a small saucepan and a gas ring, and hot water is often a very comforting and useful drink, especially where an effort is being made to break off the tea and coffee habit.

A diet of bread and butter, biscuits, cheese, fresh and dried fruits is excellent, provided our correspondent also includes grated raw roots and salads as the medicinal part of the regimen, and keeps the fresh fruit to itself as one meal of the day.  Cold water or cold milk could also be taken in the place of hot water or hot milk, although I deprecate the use of milk as a beverage unless a person is willing to live entirely on milk like a baby does.  The hot vegetables are uncalled for, provided the raw vegetables are substituted for them.  The puddings can well be discarded.  Cocoashell beverages are useful in very many cases.

Beans or lentils can be eaten sparingly in a raw state if first soaked, then flaked in a Dana machine, and afterwards flavoured with herbs or parsley.  I certainly think that, if they are to be cooked, the taste is better if eaten hot; but there is no reason why cold cooked lentils should not be eaten any more than is the case with an other form of cooked food.  Uncooked vegetables will not take the place of lentils, because they are of a different order of food-stuff.  The uncooked vegetable would go well with the lentils as neutralising agents of the acids into which all nitrogenous foods break down in the body.  Most people will find that nuts, cheese and eggs are better sources of proteid than lentils or other “pulse foods.”

H. VALENTINE KNAGGS.

THE

HEALTHY

LIFE

The Independent
Health Magazine.

3 AMEN CORNER LONDON E.C.

VOL.  V                             OCTOBER
No. 27.                              1913

There will come a day when physiologists, poets, and
philosophers will all speak the same language and understand one
another.—­CLAUDE BERNARD.

 AN INDICATION.

Just as there is a pride that apes humility, so there is an egotism that apes selfishness, a cowardice that apes stoicism and an indolence that apes effort.  This is especially apparent in matters pertaining to health.

How often, on the plea of not causing worry or expense to others, does a man or woman not put off taking necessary rest, or consulting a doctor, until a slight ailment that once would have yielded to treatment becomes an irreparable injury.

Such conduct is often admired as unselfish, but for unselfishness and stoicism a psychologist would read fear, indolence and egotism.  Fear