PURE FOOD. 



" What a man eats he is. 



THE REASON FOR IT. 



Recreation has recently entered the field 

 of college athletics. This department will, 

 in time, be extended to include athletic 

 clubs and outdoor games, such as golf, ten- 

 nis, cricket, etc. 



Good, strong athletes cannot be made un- 

 less fed on good pure food: neither can 

 good, tough hunters or fishermen, for that 

 matter. It is therefore eminently proper 

 that Recreation should instruct and in- 

 form its readers as fully as possible as to 

 what foods are good and what are not 

 good, and I have decided to add still an- 

 other new department to this magazine, to 

 be known as " The Pure Food Depart- 

 ment." in which topics relating to this sub- 

 ject will be fully and frankly discussed. No 

 purring will be done in order to secure 

 advertising; and articles known to be im- 

 pure will be exposed, entirely regardless of 

 the question of advertising. 



EMBALMED FOOD. 

 E. D. M., M.D. 



One of the best results of the Spanish- 

 American war perhaps has been the un- 

 covering of injurious methods of food 

 preservation that seem to have become al- 

 most universal without attracting the atten- 

 tion of the people. State boards of health 

 are now awakened to the knowledge of a 

 danger of enormous proportions, and in- 

 vestigations will follow, which, in all prob- 

 ability, will astonish men who innocently 

 " doctored " food products that went often- 

 times to their own families. The difference 

 between a chemist's statement and a physi- 

 cian's statement about the harmlessness of 

 chemical food preservatives may be impor- 

 tant. Take, for instance, the matter of 

 boracic acid. The chemist will say that 

 boracic acid is quite harmless if used in 

 moderate quantities. He means by that 

 that his text books do not indicate that it 

 is a poison. The physician, on the other 

 hand, who has occasion to make prolonged 

 use of small quantities of boracic acid in 

 diseases like cystitis knows that the pa- 

 tient's appetite will be expected to fail be- 

 cause of the effect of boracic acid, and he 

 has to watch that effect carefully. In one 

 patient the appetite will fail on the first day 

 of treatment;. in another the treatment can 

 be carried on for a week; in another patient 

 the treatment can be continued for a fort- 

 night, but the physician knows that practi- 

 cally he maybe prevented from obtaining the 

 full beneficial effect of boracic acid in 

 cystitis because the general health of the 



patient fails too rapidly when the appetite 

 fails. There are occasional cases in which 

 boracic acid produces much more serious 

 disturbance than loss of appetite. This one 

 common feature is a particularly serious 

 one if the citizen does not know the cause 

 of his loss of appetite and continues the 

 use of " doctored " food in his daily diet. 

 All of the " harmless " chemicals which are 

 used for food preservatives have not only a 

 deleterious influence if used continuously 

 in small quantities in their simple form, but 

 they are likely to make chemical combina- 

 tions of greater potency through reaction 

 with other chemicals that are incidentally 

 taken into the stomach in the varied diet of 

 the civilized man of to-day. The army beef 

 scandals have given momentum to the idea 

 of investigating the extent to which our 

 every-day food is treated with antiseptics 

 by dealers, who may be quite innocent of 

 intentional wrongdoing. There is already 

 evidence that manufacturers of chemical 

 antiseptic food preservatives have been sup- 

 plying thousands of tons of their products 

 to dealers in food products annually, and 

 that the business has of late grown rapidly. 

 If the Spanish-American war had had no 

 other result than in making this disclosure 

 it is probable that we could well afford to 

 pay the expenses of the war. 



THE VALUE OF GOOD FLOUR. 



In the last few years great attention has 

 been paid by scientists, biologists and so- 

 cial economists to the question of foods as 

 affecting the happiness, healthfulness, 'lon- 

 gevity and general welfare of the human 

 family. The attentive study of these ques- 

 tions has brought to the notice of the gen- 

 eral public a great variety of appetizing, 

 nutritious cereals, as well as a mass of most 

 valuable information. It is a fact long 

 known, but too little recognized in actual 

 practice, that in the manufacture of super- 

 fine white flour, fully 18 per cent, of the 

 muscle making, nerve sustaining nutriments 

 are eliminated and excluded, thus reducing 

 the normal value and strength giving pow- 

 ers of the products to 82 per cent., while 

 were the flour made from the whole wheat 

 the standard would be 100, the unit of per- 

 fection. 



This waste of 18 per cent., which is en- 

 tailed in the process of manufacturing white 

 flour, seems insignificant, but the results 

 become startling when we realize that the 

 loss in the food giving power of 600,000,000 

 bushels of wheat, estimated to have been 

 grown last year, amounts to the positive 



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