What Shall We Give Our Children to Eat? A Few Remarks on Diet.

Dr. Abram Livezey

Peterson's Magazine: March 1888 at 293.

      This is a query of the greatest importance to mothers who have a real concern for the welfare of their children. Anthropology teaches us that man's nature--mental and physical--is developed, maintained, altered or changed by the food which he partakes; while physiology informs us that our frail bodies, brain and nervous system are made up of the food we eat daily. But to the query. This we can best answer . . . by telling mothers what their children should not eat or what should not be given to them. The use of pork in any form is one of the most frequent sources of blood impurities, a rife promoter of cutaneous, cancerous and ulcerous affections--an article of diet which exerts a pernicious influence upon the blood by loading it with carbonic acid gas and impregnating it with the seeds of scrofula. Every mother in the country, at least, knows that the hog eats filth, wallows in filth, and is hence a living moving mass of filth itself, and hence the inveterate pork-eater according to sound physiology teaching becomes part hog.

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       Now dear Mothers, please remember that, as the minds of your children are cultivated, so will the formation of their characters in adult life, as a rule; and as children are fed in the early years of their existence, so will be their dispositions in after-life. Gross feeding makes them coarse. Parents who give their children under seven years of age or before they possess their second teeth, largely a meat-diet commit a grave error and send many innocents to the grave. It not only adds greatly to their mortality, but it unwisely hastens maturity, with lustful feelings, and makes them coarse, unamiable, animal-like, both in their propensities and dispositions. A free indulgence in hot rolls and fresh bread, preserved fruits, sweetmeats, etc. are prone to pass at once into a fermentative state and become a source of disquiet, producing flatulency, distress of the stomach, and other unpleasant symptoms of indigestion. Mothers should early teach their children to eat slowly, and that all hog-meat, salted meat, and much meat of any kind, rich pastry, cakes, cheese, nuts and unripe fruit are positively injurious, and these articles must be withheld from children, if we would have them maintain good digestion and good health . . . ."

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