Fruits also exert a very cleansing and purifying effect upon the system. Their medicinal value is therefore not to be omitted from our consideration; and further, were the fruitarian diet followed, humanity would escape nine-tenths of the ills from which it now suffers, because of its over-eating, and its living upon gross and highly stimulating articles of food, and bad food-combinations. The choking and blocking effects of the more solid and earthy food would be avoided—while indigestion, fermentation, constipation and all the ills which accompany them would also be entirely done away with.
This question of the prevention of disease by diet is a very important one, both from the economic and from the physiological point of view, and if any diet can be found which will prevent a large percentage of the diseases from which mankind suffers, that diet should surely be adopted. Inasmuch as fruits and nuts are man’s natural diet, it should be obvious that they are the ones best suited to his organism, and consequently those which will maintain it in the highest state of health. Let us consider this question a little more fully.
In my previous work, I argued that every article of diet must be more or less healthful or more or less injurious, and this being so, only those foods should be eaten which had been proved by philosophy and experience to be the most wholesome. The fact that the system _can live_ upon other foods, and maintain a certain degree of health, argues merely that it can _withstand_ the bad effects of these other foods, and by no means shows us that they are the best! I further contended that the same foods are alike detrimental or beneficial to all, and that the old doctrine which Dr Page called “the most foolish of all aphorisms”—namely, “one man’s meat, another’s poison”—is totally false. I contended that, while there might be certain deviations and variations in the details of the diet, still all men are _rudimentally_ alike, and that the body of each human being is made after a certain pattern, which pattern is in accordance with the general principles which apply to all individuals. Man, that is, belongs to a certain _genus_, and consequently his food must be, within certain limits, the same as that of the rest of the family to which he belongs. That is, as we have seen, the frugivora, and his diet must accordingly consist of fruits and nuts in their uncooked, primitive form. There may be certain individual differences, and there doubtless are. Thus, some individuals are unable to eat strawberries, others bananas, others onions, others mushrooms, but this would show, merely, that these particular individuals, _while in the peculiar state of body in which they then are_, are unable to appropriate and utilise, with benefit, these particular food-stuffs. The chemical composition of their bodies has become altered in some way unknown to us, and, as the result of this altered chemical composition, they are unable to appropriate, with profit, food containing certain elements with which they may already be overstocked. In other words, this would prove, merely, that, in their present physical condition, they are unable properly to assimilate and digest those particular food-stuffs. It does not show that, if they were normal, these foods could not be appropriated and used with benefit. In other words, the fault is rather with the individual than with the food. Still, I admit that these differences have to be taken into account; and that no two individuals can be treated exactly alike—especially at first. To use a simile, no two spokes of a wheel are identical—that is, each spoke is individual, and different from all other spokes—but they all lead, nevertheless, to the hub, the central point which unifies and combines them all. In a similar manner, I can see that there is an ideal diet for the human race, which should be followed by all who are in health, and could be eaten by all with equal profit and benefit, if the chemical composition of their bodies were altered. But, as each spoke must be treated individually at first, so must each individual be treated individually, and, by gradual changes in the diet, be brought more nearly to a normal standard, when it will be far easier for it to adopt a simple fruitarian diet, without any of the disturbance or unpleasantness that might otherwise follow. As Dr Jackson expressed it:
