FASTING AND ETERNAL YOUTH.

Wairarapa Age, Volume XXXII, Issue 10041, 11 May 1910, Page 4

FASTING AND ETERNAL YOUTH.

No one need be surprised to find fasting recommended as a maker of "health. "Man never is, but always to be blessed," or fretfully thinks so, and peers everywhere and experiments anyhow in the hope of precipitating the millennium—much in the same spirit, and with as much success as the old Spanish explorer ransacked Florida for the spring whose waters were to make him eter- j nally young. Still, fasting—not taking a day off food for hygienic or religious reasons, but desisting from it for days and even weeks—is such a revolutionary departure from universal practice and, seemingly, human necessity, that a world ever anxious to catch at straws of success will doubtless learn with interest from Mr Upton Sinclair, author of "The Jungle," that through faßting "I have not only found good health, but perfect health; I have found a new state of being, a new potentiality of life; a sense of lightness (one wculd txpcct that), and cleanne

and joyfulness such as I did not knowtcould exist in the human body I" Mr Sinclair's is doubly an exceptional case. As he explains in the April "Contemporary Review," he was constitutionally peculiar, and the victim of "headaches and an unruly stomach," a condition which is not remarkable in view of his statement that in his boyhood children ate hot bread three times a day, and revelled in "fried chicken and rich gravies and pastries, fruit cake and candy and ice-cream." Later his preference was for "apple pie and toast soaked in butter aud stewed fruit with quantities of cream and sugar.'' The system thus imposed upon him might be considered fit, if any could, for revolution in the shape of a long, long rest. Then Mr Sinclair may be characteristically an experimenter, destined by Nature to "try things;" and if he bad only seen in the meatcanning works one-tenth of what he describes in '"The Jungle" it is not to be marvelled at that he became a vegetarian and by a gradual process 1 came to return a negative answer to the question, Why eat? Adding to this, that he appears to have been a natural dyspeptic, a certain adaptability to his theory suggests itself. All the same, it is a very remarkable story that he tells. He was always ailing one way or another, the cause of which would probably be that "perversion of nutrition" as a famous American physiologist calls it, which arises from food over feeding certain tissues but not nourishing them. He tried "Fletcherism," excluding the "unchewable" and masticating the rest of the food with great energy, but loat weight and grew steadily worse—which instructively suggests that m such things one man's meat may be another's poison. At last, when concluding that his internal combustion was hopelessly burning his health away, he met a lady who fasted and prospered, and then himself tasted ior twelve days, afterwards breaking his digestion in again with gradual and increasing draughts- of warm ' milk until he consumed eight quarts a day. The milk, it is explained, flushed the system out, in addition to giving it nutriment. The effect of this milk was to develop in him "an extraordinary sense of peace and'calm, as if every weary nerve in the body were purring like a cat under a stove." His mind became very active, his muscles leaped, and from being lean and tnngry-looking like Casaius he showed "round as a but-ter-ball and so brown and rosy in the face that I was a joke to all who saw- me." He fasted again and : again for days at a stretch, and made these and other good results permanent. His headache? vanished, he caught no culd from sitting in , draughts or standing bareheaded in the rain, and wad so bursting with energy that whenever he had a spare minute or two his animal_exuberance expressed itself in tic feats. He now claims to be proof against "all common infections" and the "chronic troubles."