"To be happy, we must be true to nature and carry our age along with us." You'll notice that the author of this apt quotation did not say "drag," he said carry. The years are a "drag" on you only if you are ill, whether ailing with some particular malady or maladies, or only half-sick—not well enough to feel good, yet not quite sick enough to go to bed.

Nutritional scientists, along with the biochemists, are proving more conclusively every day that most of your ills have their beginnings in poor eating habits.

If you want to carry your years lightly toward a longer, happier life, rather than allow the years to drag you along through a miserable, ailing, premature old age, you must take time to analyze your current eating habits. Compare them, one by one, with the stay-young dietary habits that make for a stronger, younger-looking, more vigorous you.

MAKE PLANNED DIET A HABIT

The kind and quantity of food you eat are largely a matter of habits formed in early childhood. This often explains why obesity runs in certain families, although the fatties may try to explain away their overweight by blaming it on an "inherited family trait." Usually the tendency toward obesity lies, instead, in a common family habit of indulging in large meals of rich, starchy foods. Similarly, the persons who "don't like" this, that or the other food are merely following some childhood eating habit.

From the age of thirty onward, if you value your health, good looks and ability to live a long and vigorous life, you must change your eating habits.

The high-energy carbohydrate foods that were tolerated during your earlier years now slow you down and build up deposits of fat in dangerous places. After the super-active childhood years, the exhausting teens and the procreative twenties, few of us are called upon to expend the same amount of energy for daily survival as did our more primi­tive ancestors. Yet many people go on eating a lumberjack's diet while doing work no more strenuous than sitting at a desk for a few hours a day, or performing a few modernized and mechanized household duties.

After the age of thirty, preferably, and most certainly after forty, you must begin taking stock of your eating habits.

This means more protein and vitamin-rich fruits and vegetables. And less—perhaps none at all—high-starch foods such as rich desserts, all-starch items like white rice and macaroni, fattening bonbons, highly sugared and carbonated soft drinks, or overindulgence in alcoholic beverages.

This menu-in-a-nutshell is your first and most important step toward the goal of a longer life and a younger-looking body. From now on you must accustom yourself to topping off a meal with fruits (or the permissible desserts given in Part II) rather than with the rich pastries, cakes, candies and jellies you have formed a habit of expecting at the end of every meal. One of the best means of keeping your sweet tooth under control is by looking to honey (see Chapter 12), nature's own confection, and the only sweet food, besides fruits, that contains valuable food elements.

Bad food habits at any time, and especially during the years that subject men and women to the ordeal of their climacteric (change of life), may be the underlying cause of a physical and mental breakup that can devastate any remnants of youthfulness left to them.

A pitiful case came to my attention several years ago o£ a forty-nine-year-old woman whose husband had died two years previously, leaving her a childless widow. Since his death, partly because o£ her grief, but mostly because of the physical inertia resulting from an abnormal meno­pause, she had not taken the trouble to prepare well-balanced meals for herself. Whenever she felt hungry, she existed mainly on easy-to-fix sandwiches, cakes and pies from the bakery, and endless boxes of candy. At the time I first heard of her case, she had sunk into a wretched state o£ melancholia, sleeplessness, heart palpitation, breathlessness and aching fatigue that had driven her to the border line o£ insanity.

Under the watchful eye of her sister who lived in the same city, this middle-aged widow was put on an emergency vitamin treatment to counteract the serious dietary deficien­cies resulting from two years of these ruinous eating habits. And she was made to eat meals that began at breakfast with high-protein foods such as meat, eggs, cheese, fish, or seed cereals; continuing with more protein foods for lunch; and ending up the day with yet another protein meal, light but nourishing, of millet or sunflower seed served with fortified milk, a cube of cheese and a dish of fruit.

For a mid-morning energizer, she was taught to drink a large cup of warmed milk (made extra protein-rich by mixing one tablespoon of powdered skim milk with one cup of water) flavored with a teaspoon of honey. Her afternoon snack was usually a cup of tea (sometimes the aromatic herb tea brewed from fenugreek seeds and flavored with honey), served with a few seed-cakes, or several pieces of fruit dainties (see Part II).

Within three months' time, this woman had made so dramatic a recovery from her mental and physical breakdown that she was able to obtain, and hold, a responsible position with a large welfare organization. Because of her reformed eating habits, she was also able to pass through the remainder of her menopause with no undue discomfort—and today she looks younger than she did at the time her husband died.

Nor are middle-aged women the only violators of good eating habits. Many men are such prejudiced eaters (usually it's the wife or mother who "spoils" them by catering to their prejudices) that they deliberately slight the foods most needed by their older bodies at a time when mind, muscles, nerves and sex glands are undergoing a period of readjustment similar to the menopause experienced by a woman.

You can be unwise at the table during your teens and your earlier years, and still get by, but your eating sins will come home to roost if you persist in following youth-destroy­ing food habits past the age of forty.

Let me repeat: The matter of food likes—and dislikes—is largely a matter of habit. Therefore, train yourself to like the foods that do the most toward preserving your youth and fortifying you against an early and a senile old age. For example, instead of "thinking, "But I don't like cheese,'* start thinking for a change, "I want to feel and look younger, and cheese is a protein food that can help my body accomplish this goal."

With this kind of positive thought, it won't be long before your taste buds will develop a real appreciation for the subtle flavors to be found in the different kinds of cheeses—in other protein and natural foods, too. Make these your first foods in every meal, because they are the foods that can help you look and feel much younger than you do at present.

If you want your "body's worth" from the meals you eat, that is, if you are eager to regain the appearances and sensa­tions of a youthful body, then you must acquire the habit of a high-protein, planned diet. Oh, I'm not saying that an occasional variation will do you too much harm. But don't count on these periodic diet dissipations to supply you with that day's needed quota of protein, minerals and vitamins.

DIGESTIVE AIDS NOT FOUND IN DRUGSTORES

Another habit that will contribute to your health and long "youth" is that of aiding your middle-aged stomach to do a thorough job of digesting the proteins you eat.

As explained in the preceding chapter, digesting protein food is the main job of your stomach (carbohydrates and fats, except milk fat, are processed in the upper intestinal tract). And to break down the proteins you eat into the amino acids which are the only forms of protein that can be carried by your bloodstream, nature has provided your stomach with digestive juices that normally are strong acids. These acid stomach juices, when strong enough, reduce all protein foods to a pulpy mass. The fibers of that steak you eat, when properly digested, should become as liquefied as though the meat had been pulverized in a powerful grinder and mixed with water.

Not only is the hydrochloric acid in your stomach juices an effective pulverizer, it is also a powerful germ-killer. As an experiment, you might place a little chopped meat in a glass of water and let it stand in a warm place. Before long, the contents will start to putrefy rapidly.

But now place a little hydrochloric acid in another glass of water, add some more chopped meat, and repeat the experiment. This time you'll notice that no putrefaction sets in, because the acid destroys the germs and fungi which cling to all food, regardless of the care with which it is handled. Likewise, when your stomach is healthy—that is, when its juices are strongly acid—your food digests instead of putrefying. Ordinarily, the billions of bacteria and fungi that get into your stomach each day fall into a strong acid bath and are destroyed. But if your stomach acids are not potent enough to kill these invaders, or to do a thorough job of pulverizing your protein foods, you may be headed for trouble—the kind of trouble that makes you feel ill, dispirited and too 'old" to get the most out of life.

As though all this weren't enough, I should warn you also that no matter how conscientiously you attempt to follow the high-protein diet regimen outlined in this book, it will do little good toward making you look and feel younger if your stomach acids are too weak to properly digest the protein foods you eat. For this reason, it behooves you to make certain that strong digestive juices await the food you send into your stomach.

There are several ways to stimulate your stomach cells into secreting digestive juices that are strongly acid. Pleasant ways, I might add—ways that have been largely overlooked in our American eat-on-the-run meals.

Start your meals with fruit, a cup of vegetable soup, a bouillon or a meat broth. Why? Because fresh fruits and their juices (dry wines, also) and the extracted juices of vegetables, together with meat extract or the bouillon made by simmering meats and vegetables together, are rich in certain extractive substances. When these foods reach the stomach before a meal, their extractive substances cause certain groups of cells in your lower stomach to produce a hormone known as secretin that passes directly into the bloodstream and is carried to all the organs, including the glands in the upper section of the stomach. Here the secretin hormone excites the gastric glands into producing and pour­ing forth into the stomach large amounts of the very powerful hydrochloric acid which is absolutely essential for thorough digestion of a protein meal.

European and Oriental eating habits have made use of this important digestive secret for centuries. Broths and dry wines are everyday mealtime accessories. Rarely do you find a European home where the family sits down and immediately dives into the entree or main course. Step by step, the stomach is encouraged to prepare for its main digestive task through the sipping of dry wines, and the spooning of light broths.

If you have no prejudice against it, a very small glass of a low-alcohol dry wine sipped before or during the meal can be a valuable aid to digestion in persons past forty. However, please don't get the idea that I am advocating the use o£ liquor, for I am violently opposed to alcoholism and all that it represents. But the light i 2-per-cent—or less—wines to be found on European and South American tables are far from being intoxicating. In fact, after a vintage year (a year when the grape develops a great deal of sugar and the alco­holic content of the wine runs high), the wine makers dilute their dry wines with water to make them appropriate for table use.

Remember, though, that cocktails and highballs are not digestive aids, to be used the same as a very low-alcohol dry wine, because they do not contain the extractive substances from fruit, and because their alcoholic content runs too high. About the best these dubious beverages can do for you is to give you a dizzy head, and add calories to your daily quota. I have even hesitated to mention dry wines as a di­gestive aid for fear of providing a ready-made excuse for some intemperate person to indulge his or her weakness. So let me repeat: The dry table wine, to be taken solely as a digestive aid, must be used in very small quantities and must be a low-alcohol wine, that is, 12-per-cent or less. If you cannot find one with that little alcohol, buy a good dry wine, and dilute it yourself with about two parts wine to one part water. Actually, some of our medicinal preparations contain more alcohol than a European table wine.

In recent years, we have learned that the vitamins of the B-complex group, particularly thiamin, are needed by the stomach for producing its digestive acids. From this you can quickly grasp why the average devitalized, high-starch, low-vitamin diet is the prime cause of our national maladies— indigestion and constipation.

There is yet another "homemade" remedy for good di­gestion. Do you try to keep happy at mealtime? If not, you are placing a burden on your stomach glands so onerous that poor digestion is the inevitable result.

The glands in your stomach (as well as the salivary glands in your mouth) are stimulated into action by your desire for food; by the sight, smell and taste of appetizing food; and by the calmness of your emotional state. Very often the thoughts in your mind, and the emotions produced by those thoughts, have a greater influence on the acidity and quantity of your digestive juices than does the food you eat. One disturbing or irritating thought is all it takes to put the brakes on your digestive machinery. Distressing news, angry words, nauseating subjects or the sight of unappetizing food prevent you from digesting your meal, whether or not you think you are "sensitive" to such mealtime unpleasantness.

A meal that is going to be thoroughly digested and assimi­lated into the bloodstream (the first and only place where your food can begin its work of nourishing the body cells) is the meal that is eaten without any emotional disturbance. Good spirits are essential for proper digestion.

After you master the art of eating, along with the art of planning your meals, you will have taken another long stride toward your goal of a longer life, and a healthier one. And for the sake of your confused stomach and your vanishing youth, throw away those "alkalizer" tablets and powders that do nothing except make you burp a little, all the while they are decreasing the acidity of a stomach which already con­tains too little acid for good digestion. Such "remedies" profit no one except their manufacturers.

This is a timely spot to bring up the subject of chewing. A lot of false information and erroneous advice has been handed out to the public for years on the subject of "proper mastication of food." Once and for all, I would like to clear up these mistaken ideas, and present the true facts. In brief, here is your "chewing chart":

i. All vegetables, fruits and sugar-starch foods should be chewed thoroughly. Carbohydrates are digested in an alkaline base, as I've explained before. The saliva in your mouth is an alkali, and is secreted by the salivary glands as the first step in the long and complicated digestion of carbohydrates. Therefore, if you bolt your carbohydrate foods, you cause them to miss this preliminary digestive processing, with the result that they reach the upper intestinal tract (where the processing is completed) in­adequately prepared for the final steps. All herbivorous animals, such as the cow, rabbit and horse are noted for their long and patient chewing. In so doing, they are following the rules of nature—thorough mastication for carbohydrates in order to mix them well with the alka­line saliva of the mouth.

2. All protein foods such as meat, fish, poultry, eggs and cheese require little chewing for good digestion. No doubt this comes as a surprise to you—a complete re­versal of everything you've ever been taught about mastication. Meat has been conscientiously and labori­ously ground for the person with poor, or no, teeth; while eggs have been boiled only enough to set the white for the person with a "weak digestion." All of which has been a serious digestive and nutritional mistake! From recent experiments, some of them conducted at the Mayo Clinic, we now have learned that protein foods which reach the stomach in solid, larger bites will be digested—and assimilated—far better than the ground, soft-cooked or thoroughly masticated proteins.

During the experiment at the Mayo Clinic, it was discovered that meat fed in good-sized bites was digested far better than ground meat. You have only to consider the dog or the lion, both carnivorous, to realize that you've never seen either of these animals patiently masticating their meat as a cow does her cud. For one thing, nature has not given the carnivorous animals teeth for long chewing. Rather, they have been provided teeth for tearing off chunks of a size for convenient swallowing. The dog—and you—can safely swallow protein foods with little chewing because the real work of digesting these proteins is done by the stomach acids. And let me assure you that the hydrochloric acid in your stomach can do a far more thorough job of pulverizing meat fibers than your teeth could ever accomplish.

The fact of the matter is that you actually waste protein food by sending it to the stomach in a finely ground, or semi-liquid condition. Why? Because the little valve (pylorus) at the bottom of the stomach is hair-triggered to open and empty the stomach contents into the upper intestine whenever the mass reaches a certain pulpy state. Therefore, a soft-boiled egg will leave the stomach before it is completely broken down by the digestive acids into the amino acids which are used to rebuild body protein. In like manner, ground meats are too quickly liquefied to be completely broken up into their amino acids. So, instead of being assimilated into the bloodstream, much of this partially digested protein is excreted from the body.

This is a good place to pass on to you a bit of wisdom regarding whole fruit versus fruit juices.

I deplore the custom of serving squeezed citrus juices instead of the whole fruit. All fruits (vegetables, too) are carbohydrates. That means their digestion begins in the mouth. With that fact in mind, will someone please tell me how you can chew a glass of orange juice? The answer, of course, is that you can't. The juice, with its naturally high sugar content, passes immediately through the mouth and stomach, reaching the upper intestine without any predi-gestion whatsoever.

That is why many of you may have noticed your morning glass of orange juice has a tendency to make you belch, or to cause those ' 'rolling gas pains" in the abdomen. Like all other half-digested carbohydrates, your orange juice be­gins to ferment in your intestinal tract, sending off gases that cause discomfort. However, had you eaten your break­fast orange, pulp and all, you would have been forced to chew the tough fibers o£ the whole fruit long enough so that the saliva—a digestive juice—would have been well mixed through it. And by the time the fruit pulp reached the upper intestine, the final digestive processing could have gotten under way with no trouble at all. Furthermore, the vitamins and minerals of this valuable citrus fruit would have been more completely assimilated into your bloodstream along with the correctly digested mass, instead of being partly lost from the body in the incompletely digested juice.

With fruit juice, there is also the tendency to overindulge. Rarely can you relish more than one whole orange at a time, whereas a thirsty person can easily gulp down a pint, or more, of orange juice. This is too much fruit sugar to reach the upper intestinal tract at one time, without any pre-digesting by the saliva.

Colitis patients have been advised for years to "eat only whole fruits and vegetables." The fermentation gases from incompletely digested fruit and vegetable juices are simply that much added torture to the already irritated intestinal tract of a colitis patient. Yet these same persons can enjoy whole fruits and vegetables without doubling up from the pain that is sure to attack them after taking juices.

What is good advice for the colitis patient is good advice for everybody—stick to whole fruits and vegetables, rather than merely the juice. Canned, frozen or home-squeezed orange juice may be a very "convenient" way of introducing fruit into the breakfast menu, but it's most assuredly not a nutritionally correct way of introducing an orange into your digestive tract.

A final word on "home" digestive aids: The kindest thing you can do for your stomach is not to overload it.

Five or six smaller meals throughout the waking hours are far more sensible—and valuable to the preservation of your youthfulness—than three routine stuffings a day. I don't know who ever decreed that three times a day we must eat enough to assuage all hunger pangs throughout our sixteen, or more, waking hours. But whoever it was certainly had little practical knowledge of human physiology. The stomach that is overloaded once every five to six hours during the day is the stomach that gets "old" long before the rest of its body. But the stomach that is given a smaller quantity of food (and I emphatically do not mean the junky between-meal piecing that is the rule rather than the exception in this country) every three to four hours is the stomach that will show its appreciation for this wise treatment by remaining healthy—and allowing its nearest neighbor, the hearty to avoid a lot of strain.

I was interested in reading an interview with the incom­parable Mary Garden whose seventy-and-more years are utterly belied by the youthfulness of her keen mind and lovely body.

'In all the years of my career/' she told the reporter in­terviewing her, "I never ate those eight-and-ten-course dinners. I have never in my life overeaten! I like everything inside the animal. Liver, tongue, sweetbreads, I adore. And vegetables out of the garden, but out of the can, no. Bread I never touched—I was 'way ahead of my time."

In a few terse sentences, Mary Garden has summed up the essence of good nutrition—the essence of eating to remain young.

ONE PROTEIN FOOD TO AVOID

It's too bad that more people don't hold with the old Arabian superstition that "to eat pork is to invite leprosy." Not that there is the slightest iota of truth in this old belief. Yet pork eaters risk other dangers to their health. Instinctively the Arabian and other Semitic peoples realize these dangers and consider the flesh of the pig revolting as a food.

Regardless of your nationality or religious beliefs, the simple truth is that pork flesh is one meat you should avoid. You'll notice that in all my books I stress "lean beef, lamb or mutton." Nowhere will you find one good word for pork. Nor is this simply a prejudice on my part. Persons who have consulted gastrointestinal specialists for disorders ranging all the way from simple heartburn to ulcerative colitis are immediately warned "not to eat pork."

No food that travels down the esophagus places as heavy a burden on the digestion as pork. And no food carries with it so probable a risk of serious infection.

Pork simply is not a "clean" meat. It is all too likely to be infected with the tiny worm that causes in humans the sometimes fatal disease called trichinosis. That's the reason why you are constantly admonished not to eat "pink pork." Only by long and thorough cooking is the danger of trichi­nosis removed—maybe.

I was talking not so long ago to a butcher who stated emphatically that he never ate pork. Because of my own theories about pork, I pressed him for the reason why he felt that hog flesh was not fit for human consumption.

"You wouldn't ask," he replied, "if you had seen as many freshly butchered hogs as I have. Most hogs are sick animals when they are killed. You have only to see the big ulcers on their livers to believe this. Why, when you stick a knife into those hog livers, you should see the pus that squirts out! And yet people keep on eating pork."

Yet the poor hog that is raised for butchering today is not to blame for the depraved condition into which his species has been forced. His ancestors, the wild pig and the razor-back hog of our own southern states, roamed the woods, living on a natural diet of fish, snakes, fruits, barks, roots, grubs and acorns. But what is the provender of your closely penned farm hog today? About 50 per cent highly concentrated foods aimed at putting those profitable pounds of overweight on the poor animal (an overfed hog can become as diseased as an obese human), and about 50 per cent slop. In some states, this slop is nothing more than the waste matter from the whiskey distilleries. This artificial diet plays havoc with the entrails of the hog, notably the liver, the same as a high-starch, low-protein diet impairs the vital organs in a human body. So is it any wonder that the hog raised on such an artificial diet reaches the butcher with a liver that is bursting with infection—to say nothing of flesh that fre­quently is alive with trichinae worms which burrow down into human muscles and intestines when the diseased pork flesh is not thoroughly cooked?

For your health's sake, I hope that you, too, see the reason of these objections to pork as a food. If pork is a habit with you, you would be well advised to change this eating habit, if for no other reason than that pork flesh and pork fat im­pose too great a burden on past-forty digestions. Although pork is meat, it's not for the person who wants to Eat-and-Grow-Younger!

FOOD HABITS THAT PREVENT INSOMNIA

Insomnia has been treated at length in my earlier book, Health through Nutrition. If you are a chronic victim of sleeplessness, then I recommend that you also read this more detailed treatment of the subject.

But for the purposes of your Eat-and-Grow-Younger pro­gram, I shall present here the nutritional side of preventing, or combating, insomnia—one of the most relentless foes of your efforts to stay young. And then, fortified with the food facts about sleep, you should make it a habit to eat for a good night's rest.

Before I tell you the foods that induce sleep, let me name two offenders that can bring on insomnia—too much starch, and too much common table salt. (I pass quickly over alcohol, coffee and tobacco as stimulants that can keep your nerves keyed up beyond the relaxing point. Enough has already been written about overindulgence in these powerful stimu­lants as a cause for insomnia.)

A highly revealing experiment on insomnia was conducted by Dr. Michael M. Miller, Associate Physician of St. Eliza­beth's Hospital in Washington, D.C. His simple, drugless treatment consisted wholly o£ reducing the amount of table salt in the diet to the correct proportion. I have long been a crusader against the American habit of pouring excessive table salt into food, and it is encouraging to see that medi­cal research, too, is beginning to recognize the insidious harm done to the human mechanism in a dozen different ways by too much of this far-from-harmless chemical.

Every food we eat already contains an adequate portion of natural salts from the earth. Under normal conditions, our bodies use less than 5 grams of salt a day. (Bear in mind that "salt" does not necessarily mean sodium chloride which is the chemical term for common table salt.) Yet most Ameri­cans consume between 10 and 30 grams of sodium chloride a day, in addition to the natural salts already present in the foods they eat.

The patients studied in Dr. Miller's experiment were allowed only 0.5 to 2 grams of table salt daily. All of the twenty patients were suffering from insomnia and nervous tension. One man was so tense he could not concentrate sufficiently to read, while three others suffered from severe headaches that contributed to their physical misery.

After no longer than a week on this low-salt diet, the patients began showing signs of the desirable physical tiredness which must take place at the end of the waking hours to balance mental tension before sleep can quiet the body. Within this comparatively short time of only seven days, these confirmed insomniacs were able to fall asleep within fifteen minutes or so after getting into bed. Better yet, most of them slept the night through without waking up. Those who did happen to wake up were able to go right back to sleep again within a few minutes, something any insomniac will recognize as a rare accomplishment. Some of the patients were even able to start taking regular afternoon naps—a wonderful youth-preservative for the past-forty body. After only a few more weeks on this low-salt diet, the patients reported either a marked decline in, or total absence of, the disturbing dreams that had plagued them previous to the experiment.

In order to make certain that the effect o£ the treatment was more physical than psychological, after several weeks more salt was added to the diet of thirteen of the former insomniacs without their knowledge. Sure enough, it took only a week to ten days before they grew tense again, and began having difficulty sleeping.

Three of the twenty insomniacs did not respond satis­factorily to the low-salt diet, receiving no appreciable relief from their nervousness and inability to sleep. I would have liked to have tried an experiment of my own with those three persons. In addition to restricting the amount of table salt in their diets, I would have added liberal amounts of calcium, lactic acid, vitamin C and vitamin-B-complex, particularly thiamin.

So convinced am I that this combination of a low-salt diet with a diet rich in calcium, lactic acid, vitamin C and thiamin will restore the proper balance to the chemistry of sleep that I urge anyone troubled with stubborn insomnia, and the nerve tenseness that contributes to sleeplessness, to try for himself this safe dietary experiment.

We are not born into this world with the need to learn how to sleep as we must learn how to walk, talk or write. Sleep is as natural to the body as breathing, and a newborn baby does not have to be trained to sleep. It is only in later years as an adult, after he has allowed the habits of unnatural living to make deep inroads in his physical and mental health, that he must resort to artificial means for inducing the sleep that should be as instinctive with him as it is with the animal.

In your bloodstream should flow the only sleep-inducers needed by a healthy body to make possible the enjoyment of a good night's rest. The chemistry of the bloodstream has been so expertly worked out by nature that the blood flow­ing through your body is intended to be equipped for taking care of any bodily function, including that of sleep. It is only when this intricately balanced blood chemistry is upset that the body mechanism gets out o£ order, causing— among other things—insomnia.

The sleeping and waking of your body is controlled by a complex mechanism in the very depths of your brain, known as the sleep center. And this sleep center deep within your brain can be regulated in only one way—by your blood­stream. By a simple, ingenious method, nature has set up a sleep cycle between the brain, the nerves, the muscles, the bloodstream, then back to the brain again. This sleep cycle, when operating efficiently because the body chemistry is in balance, makes it utterly impossible for the conscious mind not to sleep at regular intervals whenever the body needs re-energizing.

This is the way the chemically controlled sleep cycle operates: Every time your brain sends out an action message to a muscle via a nerve of the central nervous system, cer­tain chemical substances are secreted at the point of contact between the nerve and the muscles that are to go into action. One of the substances liberated at the nerve ends is calcium. During your waking hours, various muscles are continually being stimulated. This means that a lot of calcium is being liberated from the contact points between nerves and muscles. And all this calcium passes into the bloodstream, finally reaching the sleep center of your brain.

When enough calcium has been carried to the sleep center, automatically your conscious brain ceases to send out nerve impulses to your muscles. In other words, you have fallen asleep. And you fell asleep for the simple reason that the sleep center in your brain had become saturated with calcium.

In other words, the sleep center in your brain must be "sensitized" by special fatigue substances, such as lactic acid, before it can react to the influence of the calcium accumula­tions.

Therefore, your bloodstream must contain enough calcium plus enough lactic acid before the sleep center of your brain can produce the drowsiness and inactivity of your conscious mind that makes you "go to sleep."

If you are performing strenuous labor, or indulging in active outdoor exercise, the chances of your becoming an insomniac are slim. I've never met a laborer, a farmer, a lumberjack or a football player who suffered from insomnia. What's more, after a day spent in the outdoors, at the beach, or in the country, confirmed insomniacs of years' standing have been known to fall asleep as soon as their heads touched the pillow. Why? Partly because the sunshine and fresh air induced mental and physical relaxation, but principally because the greater amount of physical activity released more calcium and lactic acid into their bloodstream, thereby fur­nishing enough of these two body chemicals to "feed" the sleep center of the brain.

All the victims of sleeplessness whom I have observed are persons whose mental activity far overbalances their muscu­lar activity. This means that not enough calcium and lactic acid are released into the bloodstream by hard-working muscles. The result is a sleep center that lacks sufficient of these two natural sleep-inducing chemicals to "knock out" the conscious brain long enough for the body to enjoy a period of complete relaxation. And when to this systemic lack of calcium and lactic acid is added the further sin of meals also seriously deficient in mineral calcium and the lactic acid provided by soured milk, and sour-milk products, how can the average sedentary person living on an unbalanced diet expect to sleep as nature intended he should!

Balance the sleep chemistry of your blood, and I'll guaran­tee you can forget about counting sheep, and you can toss your sleeping pills into the garbage can where they belonged in the first place.

Because buttermilk, yogurt and cottage cheese made from soured milk are rich in both calcium and lactic acid, they are wonderful foods for persons who cannot produce enough of these two sleep-inducing chemicals through their own physical activity to feed the sleep center in the brain. That is why you will find many dishes using cottage cheese, soured powdered skim milk and buttermilk (yogurt, too) in the menus and recipes given in Part II.

And, to round out your diet-for-a-good-night's-rest, you must not overlook the B-vitamins, especially thiamin. Medi­cal studies have disclosed that when you don't get enough thiamin (vitamin B-i) in your diet, you may become overly conscious of every twist and turn that it's normal for your sleeping body to make during the night to relieve the strain placed on certain muscles when your body lies prone. The slightest noise may wake you up, or the room may seem "too light." When these things happen to interrupt your sleep, your tense, unable-to-relax nerves are crying out for thiamin.

These are some of the foods rich in thiamin: Seed cereals, particularly sunflower seeds and millet, whole grains, eggs, chicken, fish roe, sardines, codfish, lean beef and mutton, liver, kidney, heart and brains. Try increasing the amount of these foods in your daily meals and decreasing the num­ber of sweets and starches which overenergize your body to the point where it is "jumpy" during the day, and restless at night.

Indigestion (that includes constipation) is another well-known cause of broken sleep—another reason why high-starch meals for the person past-forty are likely to interrupt the natural sleep cycle. It's also true, as a rule, that if you indulge in rich, starchy meals you grossly neglect the natural foods that are good sources of the B-vitamins. So what these high-starch meals do is to clog up your digestive tract and starve your nerves at the same time—a perfect setup for insomnia.

A generous intake of vitamin C, another food element vital to your ability to get a good night's rest, helps prevent your blood vessels from losing tone, thereby impairing the circula­tion to the sleep center of your brain.

So let's have more emphasis on the body's chemical ele­ments of sleep—calcium, lactic acid, thiamin and vitamin C —and less promoting of the extremely dangerous pheno-barbital and bromide sleeping tablets by the drug industry. Sleep should be natural, not drugged.

These, then, are the principal bad habits that can help put the skids under your dream of enjoying a long "youth":

1. Too much starch, too little protein and a mineral-and-vitamin shortage

2. Stuffing yourself with large meals

3. Poor digestion

4. Restless, wakeful nights

Like a clever detective who ticks off, one by one, each clue that helps him solve a baffling crime, you should tick off each of these bad-habit menaces to your hopes of achieving a prolonged youthfulness.

When you have replaced these bad eating habits with the Six Commandments for a Long Youth (see Chapter 9), you will have started solving the crime that's being committed by none other than yourself against your chances for a long life, and a vigorous one, enjoyed in a body that stays young-looking.

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