tites]

To the door of the hurry habit may also be laid the excessive use of
flesh foods. Carnivorous animals bolt their food. Frugivorous animals,
to which class the human race properly belongs, eat slowly. But when,
through the perversions of civilized life, frugivorous man is forced to
eat as fast as the carnivores, he instinctively adopts a similar diet.
As someone has expressed it "when we eat as fast as a dog, we naturally
crave the food of a dog." Our apelike progenitors had few, if any, flesh
foods and only those which they could catch with the hand and eat raw.
Our eliminating organs, the liver and the kidneys, have been framed to
meet the demands of man's natural diet, but not adapted to handle the
diet of civilized men in the excessive use of flesh foods and the use of
alcohol. These organs are, fortunately or unfortunately, provided with a
large factor of safety and can stand a great deal of abuse, but the
cumulative effect of this abuse, especially when combined with an
unhygienic life in general, sooner or later leads to disaster. Our
tastes have also been perverted. The appetite is very likely to be
innocently misled by the delicacies which civilization has invented, as
well as by the tricks of cooking, seasoning, and preparing. For this
reason, we can not trust, as thoroughly as we would like, the ordinary
leadings of taste. The solution of this problem of nutrition, like the
solution of the housing problem, must be sought by retaining the
advantageous food customs which we now find about us and substituting
scientific customs for the disadvantageous ones.

[Sidenote: Other Evils of Civilization]

It would be impossible to enumerate all the inventions of civilization
which have brought us difficult problems of individual hygiene. We shall
name only a few more. The invention of chairs, though adding to human
convenience, has tended to produce wrong posture, from which spinal,
nervous and digestive disturbances follow. The invention of the alphabet
and of printing has made possible the accumulation of knowledge, but has
promoted eye-strain with a great train of attendant evils. The device of
division of labor has created much wealth, but destroyed the normal
balance of mental and physical work, recreation and rest. From this
follow occupational diseases of overstrain, bad posture, industrial
poisons, and a craving for narcotics. A combination of conditions has
lessened the opportunities for prompt discha