Diet in Childhood
179
luxuries and mixed preparations .... Meat given to children is not the
best thing to ensure success.... To educate your children to subsist
on a meat diet would be harmful to them. It is much easier to create
an unnatural appetite than to correct and reform the taste after it has
become second nature.—
Letter 72, 1896
Fostering Intemperance
351. Many mothers who deplore the intemperance which exists
everywhere, do not look deep enough to see the cause. They are daily
preparing a variety of dishes and highly seasoned food, which tempt
the appetite and encourage overeating. The tables of our American
people are generally prepared in a manner to make drunkards. Appetite
is the ruling principle with a large class. Whoever will indulge appetite
in eating too often, and food not of a healthful quality, is weakening his
power to resist the clamors of appetite and passion in other respects in
proportion as he has strengthened the propensity to incorrect habits of
eating. Mothers need to be impressed with their obligation to God and
to the world to furnish society with children having well-developed
characters. Men and women who come upon the stage of action
with firm principles will be fitted to stand unsullied amid the moral
pollutions of this corrupt age....
The tables of many professed Christian women are daily set with
a variety of dishes which irritate the stomach and produce a feverish
condition of the system. Flesh meats constitute the principal article
of food upon the tables of some families, until their blood is filled
with cancerous and scrofulous humors. Their bodies are composed of
what they eat. But when suffering and disease come upon them, it is
considered an affliction of Providence.
We repeat, intemperance commences at our tables. The appetite is
indulged until its indulgence becomes second nature. By the use of
tea and coffee, an appetite is formed for tobacco, and this encourages
the appetite for liquors.—
Testimonies for the Church 3:563, 1875
[234]
352. Let parents begin a crusade against intemperance at their
own fireside, in the principles they teach their children to follow from
infancy, and they may hope for success.—
The Ministry of Healing,
334, 1905