Digestion & the Fiery Energy

Digestion as a Fire in a Boiler

This is a simple and practical illustration that can do much to carry home just one point. Food must be digested just as fuel must be burnt, or clinkers remain. If the good reader ever fired a furnace or a boiler in a power plant, he learned a few very valuable lessons, namely:

1st - Not too much shoveled in at once.
2nd - Spread the coal thinly over the hot embers.
3rd - Regulate the draft.
4th - Select the fuel which will burn best - leaving the least amount of clinkers - with the least fumes and smoke.

If persons are sincere in their effort to gain or regain health, these four points are invaluable as guides to the principles of combustion, inside or outside the body. No one wants to be preached to all the time about diet, etc. We ourselves must do a little observing and selecting as to quantity, combinations and quality of foods taken at each meal. It becomes an interesting study when we have a purpose in mind, like firing a locomotive to run better and pull more freight. We all want service from our bodies and from our automobiles. Do we care as much for our own body, which does the actual important work, as we do for the car which merely takes us there?

Our actual needs for food and fuel are so simple and so few, but they must be in keeping with our mind and our desires, or else we feel frustrated. If we continue to observe the reactions from our own eating habits, we will soon learn, like the little boy who ate green apples. Nature teaches and we can easily learn by being apt pupils; but if indulgence is our aim, then suffering is the result - sooner or later. Why should we pay such a high price for that little pleasure of eating? Simple foods serve best, and they should be neither too rich, nor fried, nor too sweet. Simplicity in diet helps much in the process of digestion. Less combinations at any one meal makes