264 MEALS MEDICINAL. 
out-door exercise. Furthermore there is much truth in the 
maxim, “ to eat little and often will make a man fat.” 
For contributing fat to lean persons the Banana cure is now 
popular in America. This consists of eating scarcely anything 
besides baked Bananas, which not only add weight, but at the 
same time recruit the nervous energies of body and mind. But 
those who advocate cooked Bananas are emphatic in condemning 
them raw as dangerous and unwholesome. Banana flour is 
found valuable in cases of stomach inflammation, and in typhoid 
fever, as it can be retained, if suitably prepared, when other 
forms of the appropriate foods are rejected. Sir Henry Stanley, 
the famous explorer, wrote concerning this Banana flour, ‘if 
only its virtues were publicly known, I cannot doubt that it 
would be largely consumed in Europe. For infants, persons of 
feeble digestion, and dyspeptics, the flour, properly prepared, 
would be in universal demand. During my two attacks of 
gastritis, a light gruel of such flour mixed with milk, was the 
only matter that could be digested.”—It contains twenty per 
cent of proteids, and sixty-eight per cent of sede te Agi 
The Banana is always pure, and never tainted by grubs : 
outer skin protects the fruit entirely from pum ente 
Experts say that the Banana, like the Medlar, can scarcely be in 
too ripe a stage for eating. The British Medical Journal (1904), 
teaches that Bananas should not come to table before their skin 
has turned black in places, whilst their pulp is at the same 
time slightly discoloured. 
Fish-oils, notably that from the cod’s liver, are more easily 
digested than ordinary fats, but are not so highly organized. 
The next most readily borne, and assimilated is bacon fat, 
either hot, as rashers, or of cold boiled bacon, which serves 
a much better purpose for building up the bodily tissues. 
Then comes cream, a natural emulsion; likewise butter. For 
children another capital combination of fat may be supplied 
by toffee, this being made of sugar, butter, and sometimes a 
portion of treacle. Butter in such a shape is especially agreeable 
to the young stomach; and most of the toffee-sugar occurs 
as ‘invert,’ which is particularly easy of digestion. 
For lean, or wasted patients one of the simplest means of 
enriching the diet is by adding to it a certain quantity of rich 
new milk, two, or three pints a day, besides the ordinary nourish- 
ments ; also “croutes au coulis,’ or gravy fingers, afford fat in 
