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Salads

CHAPTER XXIX

   Horses cannot exist on a diet of grains alone. They need an abundance of green food (grass) along with their grains. Grass is their salad. Worn-out horses placed on salad (the grass in the pasture) and permitted to roam at pleasure soon get to racing, rearing and kicking just from exuberance of spirits.

   Bamboo shoots, young, tender and easily digested, form a large part of the diet of the gorilla and other anthropoid apes. These form for the apes, a wonderfully appropriate vegetable salad. Such shoots, or the ordinary, softer green vegetables and roots, taken as salads, are essential to good nutrition, the finest development and the highest degree of health in man.

   Gramnivora in nature do not live exclusively on grains, but have great liking for young and tender green stuff, being especially fond of the fresh shoots of newly germinated plants. Many worms, insects, snails, etc., do the same. Go where we will, the need for the young green plant is evident.

   Until the chemists discovered vitamins no one, except the students of nature and natural feeding practices, knew just why the gentle old family cow would occasionally smash fences to get into the growing corn or across on the other side where the grass was green or the alfalfa was deep. Give the old cow access to plenty of green vegetation and an abundance of grains and she will eat heaviest of the green vegetation. It was not known until recently why children would snitch apples or other fruit while the owner's back was turned. The instincts that drives all animal life to seek elemental needs were not understood and could not be understood under the older dietary theories.

   Man requires his daily supply of green grass as much as does the horse, cow, ape, bird, etc. Not the small salad (two leaves of wilted lettuce, a thin slice of a half-ripened tomato, a radish and a spoonful of foul-tasting dressing) served in the restaurants, but a large bowl of salad each day is required by every one. Since the days of Graham the people of this country have learned to eat a lot of fruits and vegetables, but we could well afford to eat more.

   Vitamins are just now the only food elements that occupy the mono-idead minds of the gum-willies, just as the calorie was once the god of their worship, just as dextrinized bread was once the one great idea in their feeble heads. If the medical man condescends to notice minerals at all he is likely to prescribe calcium lactate, citrate of iron, and other inorganic salt preparations and ignore the organic salts of fruits and vegetables.

   Under the tutelage of the Hygienists the people learned to eat raw foods in spite of the dire warnings of the profession. Soon raw lettuce and celery were served in the hotels and restaurants and in the dining cars on the trains. In the homes of the country raw foods were growing more popular. Everywhere more and more of such foods were raised and marketed. Today thousands of train loads a year of lettuce are shipped all over the country. The same is true of celery and other foods. Raw foods are eaten today, of all places, in the homes of the physicians, themselves. What's more, instead of the people dying from typhoid and other "germ disease" as a consequence of eating these "indigestible," "foodless" and germ-laden foods, they actually recovered from diseases that the medical profession had pronounced incurable. Something had to be done. They sent their researchers to the laboratories to find out why the "quacks" were successful where they failed miserably. These gentlemen soon came up with the discovery that these raw fruits and vegetables are richly supplied with vitamins and that these vitamins are responsible for the recoveries. Wonder of wonders! These vitamins enabled physicians to so far forget their bacteriophobia that they actually ventured to eat a leaf of raw lettuce! Some of them actually ate apples that had not been baked.

   Fruits and vegetable salads provide in delicious form the mineral and vitamin-bearing foods so essential to good nourishment. Instead of emphasizing fresh fruits and raw vegetables, the medical man and his satellites in the various schools of so-called healing, together with the professional dietitians and the bio-chemists, are likely to emphasize liver, liver extract, cod-liver oil, halibut liver oil, kidney, milk, eggs and yeast. He will also prescribe synthetic "vitamins."

   So far as the medical profession as a whole is concerned and so far as the general public is concerned, there is an inexcusable lag between accumulated and proven facts and principles of nutrition and the actual use of this knowledge. The newer knowledge of nutrition is not much used by the people and their physicians. In the hospitals physicians are still feeding their patients as they did fifty years ago. The printed diets they give to their patients are not based on proven dietary principles and are in almost every instance inadequate.

   Up until very recently the medical profession advised the people never to eat raw vegetables or raw fruit, because of the germs on these. But a few years ago a real "scientific" physician would scarcely have dared hold a head of lettuce in his hands without rubber gloves, if, indeed, he could have been induced to touch it, or even go into the same room with it. All of a sudden they made the discovery that raw vegetables and fruits carry vitamins and that it is the vitamins in these foods that restore health and prevent sickness.

   The medical profession had urged--even coerced--the people to "eat plenty of good, nourishing food," not germ-infested vegetables, and had overworked the underweight bogey so long that the frenzy caused by food debauchery had to be counteracted. At medical meetings a few physicians began to speak out against the "meat, bread, potato diet" with its accessories, such as "sweet desserts, butter, cream, sugar and mayonnaise, which conduces to degenerative diseases."

   Will physicians urge people to eat raw vegetables and fruits, will they urge a large daily salad of raw vegetables? They will not. There are too many people who could trace this advice to its origin and this would embarrass the "scientific" crowd. They will have the chemists analyze the quintessence of life out of all foods and label it vitamin and urge the people to have their vitamin pills each day. They will classify their extracted and synthetic vitamins along with pepsin, inglucin, insulin, calories, gland extracts, etc. They will continue to advise food-drunken humanity to: "Eat as you please; food, tobacco and other habits have nothing to do with health."

   The profession has learned how to talk loud and long about many things. Their loquacity is an acquired habit. Their effort is to see how much they can say about something of which they know nothing. Their long-winded talk about vitamins, food blends, diet, etc., may lead the layman to believe they know something about nutritional science. It is a mistake. Food knowledge has not penetrated beneath the epidermis of the profession and everyday physicians may be heard to advise patients to eat whatever they please; that food has nothing to do with health.

   The thousands of acres of vegetables in cultivation in this country, the mile upon mile of fruit orchards that exist to supply an ever growing demand for fruits--these things did not result from the work of the regular physicians, but from the efforts of the "irregulars," the fanatics, faddists, quacks. These men educated the people into a knowledge of the value of these foods at a time when the regular profession was declaring that such foods were without food value and were dangerous in their raw states because of the germs they carry. The medical profession gave no attention to diet until popular sentiment compelled them to stop fumigating long enough to at least give lip service to the subject.

   The ignorant person may continue to neglect these foods, referring to them as "rabbit foods," but intelligent people are no longer misled by such disparaging expressions. Their value and the necessity for consuming them daily are no longer doubted.

   The old style of eating caused dullness and drowsiness in people. It caused them to develop diabetes, Bright's disease, tuberculosis, gastric ulcer, hardening of the arteries, apoplexy, gall-stones, etc. For the distress caused by such eating, our fathers took bitters, pepsin, and baking soda. The newer style of eating results in diabetes, tuberculosis, heart disease, hardening of the arteries, gastric ulcer, nervous diseases, etc. For the distress caused by present-day eating, people consume tons and tons of alkaseltzer, Bell-ans, Tums, baking soda.

WHAT IS A SALAD?

   Salad is from the Latin meaning salt and true salads are abundant in organic salts. They are also abundant in vitamins. They are of prime importance and should not be neglected. Such salads as potato salad, shrimp salad, etc., are not to be classed with green vegetable salads and are not substitutes therefor. Fruit salads are usually made of canned fruits, hence are not true salads. Cooked salads do not serve the true function of a salad. A macaroni salad is a travesty on the fair name of salads.

   Dr. Maurice Shefferman very appropriately calls potato salad, tuna fish salad, salmon salad, chicken salad and like concoctions, "unreal salads." He says they are "concoctions" devised by "old-time tea-room operators" that have been appropriated by the restaurant and drug-store counters. He says a restaurant owner once told him: "You can make a much better chicken salad out of pork than you can from veal."

   The restaurant and drug store salads commonly consist of a small quantity of tuna or salmon or some similar substance, with chopped celery, cole slaw, and mayonnaise, a couple of leaves of wilted lettuce, vinegar, salt, with, often, the addition of various spices. French dressing may be used instead of mayonnaise.

   The usual vegetable salad served in hotels, restaurants and drug stores consists of two leaves of wilted lettuce, one or two thin slices of a half-ripe tomato, a spoonful of greasy dressing and a radish or a pickled olive. Such a salad is not worthy the name and, even if it were good, would not meet the salad needs of a canary. The Hygienic rule for eating salads is to eat a tubful of it.

   A few simple rules for salad making will be observed by the Hygienist.

   1. Salads should be made of fresh vegetables. If these can be had direct from the garden, this is better. In purchasing vegetables in the market for salads, choose the freshest and crispest vegetables obtainable. Wilted and shrunken vegetables have lost both palatableness and food value.

   The green, outer leaves of plants--those parts that are exposed to the sunlight in growing--make the finest salads. Leaf lettuce is superior to head lettuce. Green celery is superior to white. Lettuce, celery, cucumbers, tomatoes, green peppers, etc. make excellent salad vegetables. Raw turnips make a splendid addition to a salad. Fresh radish leaves also make a tasty and valuable addition to salads, as do spinach leaves.

   2. Vegetables and fruits used in salads should be well cleaned. Products, such as apples, that have been sprayed with arsenic, should be carefully washed and dried. Delicate green leaves, after washing, should be permitted to dry slightly before using. Carrots, beets, etc., should not be scraped, or peeled before using, but should be carefully scrubbed with a brush. Cucumbers should never be peeled. The peelings of the cucumber should be eaten with the rest of the fruit.

   3. Salad vegetables should not be broken, diced, hashed, cut, sliced, etc. This causes vital losses by oxidation.

   While we have long observed that foods lose their palatableness and undergo obvious changes upon being cut, sliced, shredded, etc., as a result of oxidation, only recently has it been shown that these measures, so popular with those who like their salads shredded and their peaches sliced, cause a loss and destruction of vitamins.

   The results of some of these latest tests will help us to appreciate the value of natural foods in their natural state.

   Analyses for vitamin C showed that approximately 10% of this is lost during the six minutes required to shred the cabbage and an additional loss of 4% occurs in the 10 minutes required to mix a dressing for the salad. The additional loss when the cabbage was chopped rather than shredded was 4%,. The finer the cabbage is shredded or chopped and the longer it stands before being eaten, the greater is the loss of this vitamin.

   Dr. Fredrick F. Tisdall of Toronto, Canada reported astonishing losses of vitamin C from foods as a result of processing. His report was made before the American Institute of Nutrition. He says the mere act of grating either raw apples or raw potatoes causes a complete disappearance of vitamin C. The mere act of chewing these foods causes the destruction of half their vitamin C. "Thank God for the tomato and the orange!" he exclaimed. "They don't act in the same way."

   Other investigators reported comparable losses from other foods. For example, when Savoy cabbage is chopped it loses much of its ascorbic acid. Even the type of chopper makes a difference. One chopper destroyed thirty per cent of this vitamin in a few minutes, while a different type of machine destroyed sixty-five per cent.

   Recent reports state that two British scientific workers, Doctors Frank Wokes and J. G. Organ, of Kings Langely, England, have discovered that vitamin C is destroyed by ascorbic oxidase--ascorbic acid oxidase. Ascorbic oxidase is produced in large amounts when fresh fruits and vegetables are cut. The report tells us that "being set free, through cutting, the oxidase attacks vitamin C contained in these chopped up vegetables and fruits." Then it also reports that "In tomatoes, for example, the oxidase is present in the skin. If a tomato is sliced into large pieces much less oxidase is freed than if the pieces are small."

   The "report," as it comes to us through the newspaper, is a bit confused or garbled. We interpret it to mean that oxidase is present in certain parts of the fruits and vegetables and is released in the shredding and cutting processes and mixed with the general substance of the food. Coming in contact with vitamin C the oxidase causes it to unite with oxygen--the familiar process of oxidation--and, thus, destroys the vitamin C.

   The British investigators found that when lettuce is shredded it loses 80 per cent of its vitamin C in one minute. Using oranges, cabbages and other fruits and vegetables in these experiments they found the same thing. They found that ripe tomatoes lost much less vitamin C than did the green ones on being chopped into small pieces. In all green leafy vegetables destruction of vitamin C was very marked. It was found that mincing of fruits and vegetables is harmful in that it deprives the body of vitamin C.

   From these findings it is evident that foods lose more than color and flavor when they are chopped, grated, ground or mashed in the preparation of salads and juices, or in being cut up for cooking purposes.

   These facts are expected to result in a complete re-examination of all of our vitamin-food standards. Heretofore these standards have been concerned only with the amount of vitamin in the food. They have taken no account of the actual amount of vitamin that reaches the body. The destruction of vitamins by processing and cooking, and by chewing, has been more or less ignored, especially in practice.

   There is nothing new in the discovery that cutting fruits and vegetables into small pieces and permitting the air to reach them, results in oxidation. That the foods undergo changes in color, flavor and odor is apparent to all. These changes are results of chemical changes in the foods and these changes result largely from oxidation.

   In 1928 when, Dr. Shelton's Health School was founded, the rule was instituted that fruits and vegetables are not to be shredded, diced or cut into small pieces and this rule is rarely varied from. Fruits are served whole, even tomatoes are served whole, or in large pieces. We have avoided oxidation of foods as much as possible. Our refusal to grate salads, slice peaches and to follow the fad of extracting juices from vegetables here at the Health School has been fully justified by the results of these experiments.

   Much of the damages of foods that result from cooking are due to oxidation--heat instead of oxidase being the catalytic agent--and we have at all times served most foods in their natural or uncooked state. Every real advance in knowledge of foods confirms the wisdom of our "return to nature" in diet.

   To compensate for the lack of vitamins in our conventional cooked and over cooked diet we are offered vitamin concentrates and synthetic vitamins. These things are of little to no value, are expensive and fail to compensate for all of the food losses caused by cooking.

   How much better and simpler would be the use of raw foods! Better nourishment for less money and costing less time and effort in preparation may be had from raw foods. If you do not want to completely abandon cooked foods, if you still desire a baked potato or steamed spinach, make up your diet of at least three-fourths uncooked foods. Have a large raw vegetable salad with each protein and each starch meal. Do not skimp on the salad. Eat a tub of it.

   4. In making fruit salads, the fruits should be used whole or cut into large slices. No sweetening substances should be added. Apples, peaches, etc., when sliced soon become brown and undergo a change of taste from oxidation. They also lose vitamins.

   5. Vegetables to be used in salad making should not be soaked in water. They should be carefully picked and thoroughly cleaned, care being taken not to bruise them in these processes. Soaking them in water leeches minerals and vitamins from them and reduces their value as foods.

   6. Make salads simple and do not try to put the whole garden into a salad. The object in making a salad is not to try to see how many ingredients can be jumbled together. Salads should be simple and composed of but few ingredients. Three ingredients should be the limit. The practice of cutting up, shredding and otherwise wrecking a dozen or more articles of food and mixing them all together in a salad is pernicious. The loss of vitamins from such a salad, by oxidation, makes such a salad incompetent to serve the purposes for which salads are eaten. Salads may be simply prepared and yet served in ways to tempt the most fastidious tastes. They require a minimum of activity in the kitchen.

   7. Salads should be made pleasing to the eye, but at no time should nutritive value and wholesomeness be sacrificied to artistic appearance. Salads should be daintily prepared, beautiful and appetizing when seen, and fresh and crisp to eat. But the value of the foods making up the salad should not be sacrificed to eye-appeal as is so often done. Important as is eye-appeal, it is not as important as wholesomeness and nutritive value. If the eater is truly hungry he will scarcely notice the occasional lack of eye-appeal.

   If garnishing is required a small amount of cress, parsley or cabbage may be used for this purpose. The addition of a radish or two or of a few sprigs of mint to a salad is not objectionable from the Hygienic standpoint. Adding pickled olives is objectionable.

   8. Do not violate the rules of food combining within the salad or with the salad and the rest of the meal. A tomato salad with a starch meal violates the rule not to take acids with starches. Lemon juice on a salad taken with a protein meal violates the injunction against taking acids and proteins together.

   The addition of cheese or nuts to salads is permissible only if these foods are to form the protein part of the meal. If eggs are to be added to a salad this should be done only when eggs are to be used as the protein at a protein meal.

   Most published salad recipes, even those carried in the health journals and in books on nutrition, are unhygienic concoctions. Here is a sample taken from the pages of a magazine devoted to diet:

 VEGETABLE SALAD

3 medium sized carrots.
1 cup tiny--cooked peas.
1 cup shredded cabbage.
1 cup grated hard boiled eggs.
2 teaspoonfuls vegetable salt.
1 cup lemon vegetable jelly.

   With what kind of a meal can such a concoction be beaten? Why the salt? Why the cooked peas? Why spoil the cabbage by shredding it? Why the hard boiled egg? The true Hygienist will steer clear of such unwholesome concoctions. This salad is a whole series of bad combinations within itself and will not combine with either a protein or a starch meal.

   9. Do not use salt, vinegar, lemon juice or dressing of any kind on a salad. Salad dressings are comparatively very new things in the arts of the cook and are for the most part abominations. No intelligent person acquainted with the first principles of nutrition will ever be guilty of using them. They almost invariably form incompatible combinations with other parts of the meal.

   Salad dressings, made of olive oil, or soy oil, and lemon juice (with sometimes the addition of egg-yolk; at times, honey is also added), are not wholesome additions to a salad. Both the fat and the acid inhibit protein digestion, while the acid inhibits starch digestion. The natural flavors of foods are much more delicious than the taste of the dressing. No one who desires the best of digestion will violate the laws of correct food combining by using so-called "health-dressings."

HOW TO EAT SALADS

   When Dr. Tilden initiated the daily salad habit (this was back in the 1890's) the practice was vigorously condemned by the medical profession. Today many physicians and most nutritionists are advising the daily salad without giving credit where it is due. My own view is that two salads a day should be eaten--one with the starch meal the other with the protein meal.

   The bio-chemist, Carlton Fredericks, advises taking vitamin capsules with starch. For more than forty years it has been the practice in Hygienic circles to take a large raw vegetable salad (leaving out tomatoes or other acid foods) with the starch meal. The salad has been a very large one, measured by ordinary standards, and made up of fresh uncooked vegetables. This salad carries an abundance of vitamins and minerals. The vitamins in these vegetables are the real genuine articles and no chemist's imitations of the real thing. No just-as-good substitutes for vitamins have ever satisfied the Hygienists. We take the real article or nothing. His capsule-eating is a commercial program and belongs to the drug fetish.

   Mr. Fredericks, himself, points out the complementary action of the vitamins. We need, not just the vitamin B complex, but all vitamins. A large raw vegetable salad supplies several known vitamins and those that may exist but have not yet been detected. Vitamins not only cooperate with each other in the nutritive processes, but they also cooperate with the minerals in the body. These are supplied by the vegetable salad. To take vitamin preparations that are combined with calcium or iron or other minerals will not answer the purpose. These minerals are in non-usable forms. There is no better source of food substances than the plant kingdom — the laboratory and the chemist have not yet been able to concoct acceptable foods.

SAMPLE SALADS

   "Recipes," says Leslie Powel, a British Natural Therapist, "are ten a penny, and most of those met with through the ordinary channels give the food-conscious person a sense of dismay. They are so often an offense against Nature, things of elaborate artifice, inviting acts of culinary sabotage, and leading in all probability to digestive derangement." He adds, "usually it will be found that the healthfullest recipes are also the simplest; we make food an unnecessarily complicated business for much of the time, without gaining much, if anything, in epicurean pleasure."

   The following recipes for salads are not intended to exhaust the list of delightful salads that may be made. They are intended, rather, to serve as models or guides by which the intelligent student of nutrition may make his own salads. Many combinations of vegetables are possible in salads. These recipes for salads are simple, conforming to the principles of correct combining which should be observed in making all salads.

½ head of lettuce
1 whole tomato
1 sweet pepper
1 bunch of parsley

½ head of lettuce
1 whole tomato
3 stalks of celery

½ head of lettuce
1 whole ripe tomato
1 stalk of French endive

1 large dish of leaf lettuce
3 stalks of green celery
1 medium sized cucumber, whole

1 head of endive (chicory)
1 green pepper
1 small onion

¼ head of cabbage
1 whole ripe tomato
3 stalks of green celery

¼ head of cabbage
3 stalks of green celery
3 whole carrots

1 large dish fresh raw spinach
2 small onions
3 stalks of green celery
1 small bunch of water cress
1 large red pepper

1/4 head of lettuce
1 ripe tomato
1 whole cucumber

½ head of lettuce
2 fennel roots
2 radishes

¼ lb. dandelion leaves
2 small carrots
1 small onion

1 small bunch water cress
1 whole cucumber
1 stalk French endive

¼ head of cabbage
1 bunch of water cress
1 stalk endive

1 large bunch fresh tender radish leaves
1 large ripe tomato
3 stalks celery

Lettuce
Cabbage
Endive

Lettuce
Fresh Corn
Raw Spinach

Lettuce
Cabbage
Radishes or green sweet peppers

Lettuce
Chinese cabbage
Onions (or scallions)

FRUIT SALADS

   As before stated, fruit salads are best made of whole fruit. The following salads are excellent:

Plums
Cherries
Apricots

Peaches
Plums
Cherries

Plums
Peaches
Apricots

1 large pear
1 apple
Grapes

   If a fruit is cut for a salad, it should be cut into large pieces to avoid oxidation as much as possible and eaten immediately. It should not be cut and permitted to stand for long periods before eating. The following salads of cut fruits may be used. They may be eaten with four ounces of nuts, or, if you are not a strict vegetarian, four ounces of cottage cheese. A large fruit salad and the four ounces of nuts or cheese should make a meal. Do not eat the sweet fruit salads with nuts or cheese. Either make a fruit meal of these salads, or take a glass of sour milk or buttermilk with them.

Sliced oranges
Cut apples
Lettuce leaves

Sliced apples
Cut Pears
Celery Lettuce leaves

Sliced pineapple
Sectioned grapefruit
Lettuce leaves

Sliced bananas
Sundried (or fresh) figs
Pear or apple

Sliced oranges
Sectioned grapefruit
Sliced apples
Lettuce leaves

Sliced bananas
Cherries
Sweet grapes
Lettuce leaves

Diced Avocados
Chopped onions
Lettuce leaves

Sliced peaches
Whole apricots
Plums
Lettuce leaves


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