Page:Linda Hazzard - Fasting for the cure of disease.djvu/196

 case, the basis of diet is starch, which carries its nutritive principle in a bulky vehicle, demanding extra labor from the digestive tract in order to separate waste from nutriment and to eliminate the former.

To reduce the supply of food to the reciprocal basis of demand, the plan that suggests the omission of the early morning breakfast is perhaps the easiest method to follow, and, once the habit is acquired, this meal is scarcely missed. Common sense indicates that food ingested soon after rising is really detrimental to the body and the mind, for the brain and the nervous system are recuperated by the night's rest, and tissue cells have been replaced while the body slept. In fact, the reasoning power is retarded and hampered in its action by the presence of food in the stomach, since the latter calls energy elsewhere and deprives the brain of just so much of its motive power. The whole mental and nervous systems are at their maximum of energy in the early morning; the blood, in its double function, has replaced the waste it has carried away, and the entire human fabric stands at the threshold of the day ready for anything but the process of digesting food. There is no true hunger at