Counsels on Health - Ellen G. White

of food that are wholesome and palatable to one
person may be hurtful to another. Some cannot use
milk, while others can subsist upon it. For some,
dried beans and peas are wholesome, while others
cannot digest them. Some stomachs have become
so sensitive that they cannot make use of the
coarser kind of graham flour. So it is impossible to
make an unvarying rule by which to regulate
everyone’s dietetic habits.
Narrow ideas and overstraining of small points
have been a great injury to the cause of hygiene.
There may be such an effort at economy in the
preparation of food, that, instead of a healthful diet,
it becomes a poverty-stricken diet. What is the
result? Poverty of the blood. I have seen several
cases of disease most difficult to cure, which were
due to impoverished diet. The persons thus
afflicted were not compelled by poverty to adopt a
meager diet, but did so in order to follow out their
own erroneous ideas of what constitutes health
reform. Day after day, meal after meal, the same
articles of food were prepared without variation,
until dyspepsia and general debility resulted.
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