Good health is not an accident. While most people are born normal, that is, in fair health, quite a few are not. Anyone can readily understand that men, and especially women, who are heavy smokers or drinkers, also those suffering from the consequences of venereal diseases, as well as other chronic afflictions, can offer a poor heredity to their offspring. Good health begins before one is born. If you want to have healthy children you must be healthy yourself, and live a wholesome life.
Good health is acquired and maintained only through correct living. You could not imagine yourself living in dissipation, subsisting on a diet of candy, pastry, and soda pop, working long hours indoors, getting very little rest and sleep, and still looking the picture of health and feeling fine. This is simply impossible. We are created by nature according to certain definite and infallible laws, and when we break these laws we must suffer the consequences-disease and premature death.

When we look closely at our present-day living we will admit that we have strayed rather far from living according to nature's laws. The primitive man lived a simple life: he ate foods in their original form just as nature grew them; he lived outdoors where he had plenty of sunshine, pure air to breathe, bodily exercise to keep his outer, as well as inner, muscles in good shape; and he had hardly any worries or dissipations. In contrast to that, we now live in an age of great comforts and little physical exertion; we breathe in the polluted air of our cities; we hide from sunshine and the outdoors; and, worst of all, we gorge ourselves with devitalized, manufactured-for-profit foods; we indulge in stimulating drinks, and waste our nervous energy on modern pleasures. Is there any wonder that we have to pay a heavy price for this wholesale breaking of nature's laws? Take a look at our overcrowded hospitals, insane asylums, and jails, and you will understand what havoc our modern living wreaks on us.

True, lately we have learned quite a bit about hygiene and nutrition; we have succeeded in increasing the span of human life somewhat over man's span of a few hundred years ago — but this is nothing in comparison with primitive man's longevity (remember the multicentenarians of the Bible?). With all these modern discoveries we are still in a sorry state. It is an accepted fact and no surprise to anyone that no single person in our modern countries is in perfect health. This, in itself, is a tacit admission that something is wrong with us, because normally a person should be well — not sick. Diseases pile up upon humanity so fast nowadays that the medical science cannot keep up with them. Our hospitals refuse admittance for lack of bed space and our cemeteries are expanding fast. No wonder it costs so much to be sick and buried!

What is then the main cause of our present-day deterioration in health? The worst offense against our body is our mode of eating. When we stop to analyze the basic causes of all the sickness in and around us we cannot help noticing that, as bad as they are, all other causes lead to less destruction than our eating habits. We will also notice that any bodily function performed by us involuntarily will do us less harm than our voluntary actions will.

To explain the latter we must take an example of an involuntary action like breathing. In that we can never run out of air in our lungs completely, because we breathe automatically and not through the conscious effort of our will, so we are never in danger of suffocation. Take as another example our eyes. They are protected by eyelids, eyebrows, eyelashes, tear glands, et cetera and cannot be harmed unless we begin straining or abusing them in some conscious way. All of our inner functions are performed involuntarily and would be much worse off if we had anything to say on the matter. Our body adjusts itself in many ways to various conditions and changes in occupation, climate, temperature, altitude, et cetera, without our even noticing it. In this manner, nature takes care of all our involuntary functions without much of our own conscious participation.

However, when it comes to food consumption, we are more on our own since we are free to eat whatever and whenever we feel like eating. While in some regions of the earth, or among certain groups of populations, people live correctly and enjoy a good measure of health, others are either periodically deprived of food altogether, or else are confined to a very limited variety of it. As a result of these conditions they develop various deficiency diseases. Again,, some people confine themselves to certain traditional foods and also prepare the latter according to some established custom. For instance, Hungarians are known to use an abundance of greasy fried foods; Italians, too many starchy foods (spaghetti, etc.); Spanish people use highly spiced foods, and so on. All this leads, accordingly to either positive or negative conditions of health — specific ones for each group or region. Some regions are known for the exceptionally robust health and longevity of their inhabitants, whereas in others certain diseases prevail which are common to the whole population. English people as a rule suffer with gout and rheumatism; Jewish people with diabetes; Hungarians, with kidney and bladder troubles; the Spanish, with ulcers of the stomach arid tuberculosis; mountain people everywhere, with goiter,, and so on down the line.

In this country we are fortunate, or perhaps rather unfortunate,, to have all the foods we want, so we all habitually overeat; we also-eat the wrong types and combinations of foods, not knowing or caring which of them are best suited to our body requirements; we eat too often, thus not giving our digestive system a chance to-assimilate the food properly; we often eat at the wrong time, and in unfavorable circumstances, as, for instance, when not hungry,, when excited, or when in a hurry.
However, the most destructive thing in our dietary customs, is our consumption of foods devitalized, highly concentrated, overcooked and denatured through the processes of food manufacturing whose object is to render these foods more appealing to the eye, nose, and palate, so as to make them more salable, also to. make them easier to handle and store. On top of that, many injurious chemicals are added to manufactured foods in order to* keep them from spoiling for long periods of time, add color,, texture, softness, et cetera. There are no less than four hundred* twenty different chemicals which are being added to various manufactured food products in this country today. We are told that, used in small quantities, these chemicals are harmless, but our body is not made by nature to handle these foreign, often caustic, substances, and as a result it is unable to either assimilate or eliminate them. They gradually accumulate in our body, interfere with all its normal functions, cause derangements of various kinds and bring on sickness and premature death. Thus, through foods, just as the saying goes, we actually dig our own graves with our teeth.

We can see for ourselves that trying to cure disease is not the answer to the present plight of humanity. The wiser thing to do is to prevent sickness by living properly so that one will be immune to disease rather than fall prey to it. In spite of the fact that we all know quite well, and wholeheartedly agree with, the old saying — "An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure" — very few of us are concerned with doing anything about it.

The average person's reasoning is as follows: As long as I am not sick, why bother? But what does the word "sick" mean? Must one be laid up with fever or contagious disease to be classified as sick? Ordinarily, when you tell someone who is up and about that he is sick he will become offended. Perhaps, if we used the term "deficient," it would make a much stronger appeal to the afflicted person. In fact, most of us are deficient in one thing or another; quite a few — in a number of badly needed body elements. We are not sick in bed, yet our digestion may be poor; we are constipated; we suffer from gases, belching, bad mouth odors; for seemingly no reason we get blotches, pimples, boils, infections, headaches; we feel tired, sleepy, dizzy, our hair keeps falling out, our eyes weaken, our teeth develop cavities, we experience scores of other unfavorable reactions, yet we go around maintaining that we are not sick. True, we are not sick in bed, but we have deficiencies which slowly but surely lead to more serious complications. Are we able to enjoy living in such conditions of health? Definitely not! Enjoying life in the conventional sense of the word means possessing much worldly wealth, going places, eating and drinking, gambling and dissipating freely. This is called having a good time, and is the ultimate goal of most people. But how long can this last, and what does it leave for us or our posterity? This kind of living destroys the person and breeds a sick progeny. The real enjoyment of life is found in the constant feeling of supreme vitality, the exhilarating consciousness of youth no matter at what age, the lightness of step, the feeling of strength and adequacy to any task, the feeling of cleanliness of body and mind, the desire to do things, to accomplish something big and worth while. Only perfect health produces such emotions, and how worthy are they of a little effort and attention to be paid to this-matter!

To be in good health we must learn for ourselves the principles of healthful living and abide by them as closely and as religiously as possible when we are still in good health, instead of waiting until we get sick, old, and decrepit when it is too late to do much about it.

The first basic principle of regaining and maintaining good health is living as close to a natural life as possible. This does not mean that we have to go back to living in caves, fight wild beasts, eat raw meat and the roots of plants. By all means, take advantage of the wonderful technical and cultural improvements civilization has brought us but, at the same time, remember not to break nature's laws. In all your ways of living try to follow natural instincts.
You must spend a good part of your time outdoors to get good pure air and plenty of sunshine. Substitute the primitive man's physical exertion with active sports, brisk walking, gardening, outdoor breathing, get plenty of rest and sleep, and, above all, eat simple wholesome foods as much in their natural state as possible. After all, we are made of the food we eat, and it is what we put into our bodies that can make us ill or well.

Nature did not intend us to eat fired foods — else it would grow cooked foods on bushes. Any food that can possibly be eaten raw should be consumed that way, because cooking robs the food of its vitality — you eat dead food; food that cannot grow again when planted; food which has lost most, or all, of its precious vitamins and minerals. Whatever has to be cooked should not be fried or overcooked. Quick cooking or steaming in sub-boiling temperatures are the ideal methods of preparing fired foods. Abstinence from tobacco, alcohol, sweets, medicines, and, for that matter, from any kind of man-made preparations will go a long way towards building and maintaining good health. We have to learn also the proper ways of eating and correct combinations of foods, eating to reduce or to gain weight, eating to look and feel young. We have to know the food values and therapeutic properties of foods.
We shall take up all these matters in detail in the succeeding chapters, but here let us leave you, dear reader, with this all important thought — keep as close as possible to nature if you desire to be well, to stay young, and to live long.