Food combinations

—some persons, especially those of weak digestive powers, often experience inconvenience in the use of certain foods, owing to their improper combinations with other articles. Many foods which are digested easily when partaken of alone or in harmonious combinations, create much disturbance when eaten at the same meal with several different articles of food, or with some particular article with which they are especially incompatible. The following food combinations are among the best, the relative excellence of each being indicated by the order in which they are named: milk and grains; grains and eggs; grains and vegetables or meats; grains and fruits. Persons with sound stomachs and vigorous digestion will seldom experience inconvenience in making use of other and more varied combinations, but dyspeptics and persons troubled with slow digestion will find it to their advantage to select from the bill of fare such articles as best accord with each other, and to avoid such combinations as fruits and vegetables, milk and vegetables, milk and meats, sugar and milk, meat or vegetables, fats with fruits, meats, or vegetables, or cooked with grains.

table topics Now good digestion waits on appetite, and health on both—shakespeare

We live not upon what we eat, but upon what we digest.—abernethy

If we consider the amount of ill temper, despondency, and general unhappiness which arises from want of proper digestion and assimilation of our food, it seems obviously well worth while to put forth every effort, and undergo any sacrifice, for the purpose of avoiding indigestion, with its resulting bodily ills; and yet year after year, from the cradle to the grave, we go on violating the plainest and simplest laws of health at the temptation of cooks, caterers, and confectioners, whose share in shortening the average term of human life is probably nearly equal to that of the combined armies and navies of the world.—richardson

Almost every human malady is connected, either by highway or byway, with the stomach.—sir francis head

It is a well-established fact that a leg of mutton caused a revolution in the affairs of europe. Just before the battle of leipsic, napoleon the great insisted on dining on boiled mutton, although his physicians warned him that it would disagree with him. The emperor's brain resented the liberty taken with its colleague, the stomach; the monarch's equilibrium was overturned, the battle lost, and a new page opened in history.—sel

 

 

Galloping consumption at the dinner table is one of the national disorders.—sel

 

 

The kitchen (that is, your stomach) being out of order, the garret (the head) cannot be right, and every room in the house becomes affected. Remedy the evil in the kitchen, and all will be right in parlor and chamber. If you put improper food into the stomach, you play the mischief with it, and with the whole machine besides.—abernethy

 

 

Cattle know when to go home from grazing, but a foolish man never knows his stomachs measures.—scandinavian proverb

 

 

Enough is as good as a feast.

 

 

Simplicity of diet is the characteristic of the dwellers in the orient. According to niebuhr, the sheik of the desert wants only a dish of pillau, or boiled rice, which he eats without fork or spoon. Notwithstanding their frugal fare, these sons of the desert are among the most hearty and enduring of all members of the human family. A traveler tells of seeing one of them run up to the top of the tallest pyramid and back in six minutes.

 

 

One fourth of what we eat keeps us, and the other three fourths we keep at the peril of our lives.—abernethy

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