(From Light on Health).
ADDRESSING a meeting at the Hotel Russell, London, in connection with the Lady Margaret Hospital, on May 9th, Dr. Josiah Oldfield stated that all fruits containing sugar, and all green salads and root vegetables, and nuts containing starches and fats and oils, were really treasures of stored sunshine in these various forms.
When these fruits were being digested, this stored-up sunshine was set free and was utilized by the cells of the body.
No man who was happy ever wanted to go to war, as it is only the discontented who are always wanting to fight, or to quarrel; the question of happiness is linked up with the possession of sunshine in the body.
The test of sufficiency of sunshine in the body is whether you can wake up in the morning with song and gladness.
If a man begins his day by growling at his breakfast, his wife should cut off his sausage and bacon, and give him fruits and salad, porridge and honey.
If a woman meets her troubles halfway, or wears a worried look, or develops a nagging habit, she is in need of internal sun- foods, and she should drop her many cups of tea, and replace them by apple juice, or carrot soup, or even by her grandmothers tisane of fresh chamomile tea.
More homes are ruined by bad tempers than by all other causes put together.
Bad temper is the result of a nervous irritation similar to the friction in the internal machinery of a car.
You prevent the latter by pouring in oil; the former can be cured by applying sunshine to all the internal organs of the body.
Lipstick and powder make a charming veneer, but for home-making a man does not want a veneer wife; he needs a woman with sound heart of oak, and a temper of all-day sunshine.
If he has any care for the future, he must avoid the cocktail and cigarette tribe, and seek a mate among the true daughters of Eve, whose daily food is drawn from the sun-kissed gardens of Eden.
Liver troubles and kidney troubles are the common ailments of civilized races, and they are diseases of stagnation.
The more civilized the community, the more artificial does its food become.
The finer and more valuable elements get extracted to be sold at a profit, and the more worthless refuse is chemicalized and coloured and passed off as good for the poor.
These chemicalized and denaturized foods have lost their sunshine.
What wonder, then, that the slums breed reptiles instead of humans?.
In earlier days sunshine foods were scarce in England, and by the end of the winter diseases began to decimate the population.
Epidemic diseases swept like flames through the land and killed their thousands, while blood diseases like scurvy were endemic and crippled their tens of thousands.
No wonder that May Day was a festival of unrestrained merriment and joy, for it told of the sun turning in the heavens, the coming again of his treasures of healing, the springing up in every hedgerow of nettles and dandelions, and in every birch tree the rising of the sap-the earliest foods that were filled with the treasures of sunshine.
To-day, owing to wise legislation, market gardeners are being encouraged to build acres and acres of glass, and so to use the first warm rays of the sun in producing lettuces, and cress, and tomatoes, and cucumbers, and asparagus, and watercress-foods full of sun-built salts and vitamins.
To-day, our cousins beyond the seas, to whom the sun goes in all his glory when he leaves our shores, are sending tokens of goodwill in their fruits, and bidding us eat their sunshine foods and keep well.
Bare February is hardly over before Australias and New Zealands harvest of apples and pears, pines and grapes, comes pouring into our homes – with butter made from the rich herbage of their meadows.
In bygone centuries we used Australia as the cesspit for our criminals and our wastrels.
To-day they repay us through the miraculous potency of sunshine by the finest foods for creating the highest types of manhood and integrity grown by men and women who are themselves representatives of the worlds best brains and character.
In the days of Englands spiritual degradation we made the West Indies a land of groaning and wailing and unutterable misery. Slavery lay like a blight on the land, and Jamaica, one of the fairest islands of the earth, was a land of cursing, of moral iniquity, and of hopeless degradation.
To-day the descendants of those tortured negroes are returning good for evil, and are pouring out-not coals of fire, indeed, upon our heads, but golden shafts of sunshine into our stomachs.
All the winter through come ships laden with bananas and grapefruits, sugar cane juice and honey, coconuts and oranges.
I have just returned from Jamaica, and I would advise all who suffer in our long winter from loss of sunshine in their food, to go out from Christmas to Easter to a land where there is wealth of ripe fruits, and a still more valuable variety of vegetables filled with curative salts and vitamins.
A woman is not to be valued by the number of jewels she can wear, but the amount of sunshine she can radiate.
Any weakling can go on burning tobacco and puffing out smoke, but if a man wants to possess strength and health and vitality, he must eat foods that will give out their sunshine and heat inside him as they are digested.
Flesh foods are shoddy, decadent articles of dietary, but all the products of the gardens, and of the orchard, and of the harvest field, are treasured stores of sunshine, on which man can live and become vital and full of happy contentment.
