There are very few foods which, if eaten singly, would be found to disagree. Most of the trouble arises when we combine the various foods which do not suit or harmonise; and the result is, distress and a complication of disorders, due to the bad combination of such foods. Such foods disagree with one another, so to speak, rather than with us. This question of food combinations is one which has been very largely overlooked, but it is a highly important one, nevertheless. Most people have never paid any attention to the relative proportion of their foods, or thought how each would combine with the other; and it is largely due to this lack of foresight that so much dyspepsia is present, and that so many digestive troubles are active throughout the world. The motto of the average individual would seem to be, “Out of sight, out of mind”; but it must be remembered that, while the stomach _receives_ the food, the body has to _retain_ it; and long digestive processes, involving an enormous outlay of energy, and many and complicated chemical changes, have to be gone through, before food is appropriable by the system. Of course, the tendency among civilised peoples is in the direction of increasing the number of articles of food at each meal, instead of decreasing it. They like to see the table spread with a litter of dishes, while a fifteen-course dinner is supposed to be the height of luxury! Were the processes of living considered a little more from the physiological, and a little less from the gormandising point of view, such would not be the case. The tendency would then be (at least among all intelligent people), to _reduce_ the number of dishes, as much as possible—limiting them at each meal to three or two, or even one.
Food should be solid. The digestive juices are fluids, and an excess of liquid, with the food, tends to dilute these gastric juices, and consequently to interfere with their converting action. If fluids be drunk with any meal they will dilute the power of concentrated action of the gastric juice, and other digestive juices; and will, further, have a tendency to wash the food through the stomach into the intestines before it has undergone proper stomach-digestion. Water, therefore, should not be drunk _at_ meals, but shortly before, or an hour or so afterwards. In this way the requisite amount of fluid is supplied to the system, without interfering with digestion in the manner indicated.