TWELVE DAYS’ FAST.

Manawatu Herald, Volume XXXIII, Issue 964, 9 March 1911, Page 4

TWELVE DAYS’ FAST.

NOVELIST'S REMEDY FOR ILL-HEALTH.

Never surely was a more startling remedy put forward tor illhealth than that earnestly advocated by Mr Upton Sinclair, the author of The Jungle, in the February issue of the London Magazine.

“For ten years,” says Mr Sinclair, “I have been studying the ill-health of myself and the men and women around me. And I have found the cause and the remedy. I have found not only good health but perfect health ; I have found a new state of being, a new potentiality of life, and a sense of lightness and cleanness and joyfulness such as I did not know could exist in the human body.” Mr Sinclair had been a martyr to ill-health for years, and had tried remedy after remedy in vain. Then he heard of the starvation cure, and determined to give it a trial. The word “fast” has a somewhat elastic meaning. It may merely mean abstention from certain kinds of food ; in Mr Sinclair’s case it meant absolute abstention from all food for a period of twelve days, at the end of which he broke the fast with some orange juice. A course of milk food completed the process, and the result was magical. Mr Sinclair experienced the keenest activity of mind and a perfectly ravenous desire for physical work. “I now became,” he says, “as round as a butter ball, and so brown and rosy in the face that I was a joke to all who saw me.” “Those who have made a study of the fast,” continues Mr Sinclair, “explain its miracles in the following way : Superfluous nutriment is taken into the system, and ferments, and the body is filled with a greater quantity of poisonous matter than the organs of elimination can handle. The result is the clogging of these organs and of the blood-vessels. Such is the meaning of headaches and rheumatism, arteriosclerosis, paralysis, apoplexy, Bright’s disease, cirrhosis, etc., and by impairing the blood and lowering the vitality this same condition prepares the system for infection —for colds or pneumonia, or tuberculosis, or any of the fevers.

“As soon as the fast begins, and the first hunger has been withstood, the secretions cease, and the whole assimilative system, which takes so much of the energies of the body, goes out of business. The body then begins a sort of house-cleaning, which must be helped by a bath daily, and, above all, by copious water drinking. The tongue becomes coated and the breath and the perspiration offensive, and this continues until the diseased matter has been entirely cast out, when the tongue clears and hunger reasserts itself in unmistakable form.”