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Counsels on Diet and Foods
sanitariums be taught to cooperate with God in seeking health. “Ye
are God’s husbandry, ye are God’s building.” God made nerve and
muscle in order that they might be used. It is the inaction of the human
machinery that brings suffering and disease.—
Letter 5, 1904
456. Those who treat the sick should move forward in their im-
portant work with strong reliance upon God for His blessing to attend
the means which He has graciously provided, and to which He has
in mercy called our attention as a people, such as pure air, cleanli-
ness, healthful diet, proper periods of labor and repose, and the use of
water.—
Testimonies for the Church 1:561, 1867
Rational Remedies in Sanitariums
457. The light given me was that a sanitarium should be estab-
lished, and that in it drug medication should be discarded, and simple,
rational methods of treatment employed for the healing of disease. In
this institution people were to be taught how to dress, breathe, and eat
properly—how to prevent sickness by proper habits of living.—
Letter
79, 1905
458. In our sanitariums, we advocate the use of simple remedies.
We discourage the use of drugs, for they poison the current of the
blood. In these institutions sensible instruction should be given how
to eat, how to drink, how to dress, and how to live so that the health
may be preserved.—
Manuscript 49, 1908
[304]
459. The question of health reform is not agitated as it must and
will be. A simple diet, and the entire absence of drugs, leaving nature
free to recuperate the wasted energies of the body, would make our
sanitariums far more effectual in restoring the sick to health.—
Letter
73a, 1896
A Remedial Diet
460. Indulging in eating too frequently and in too large quantities,
overtaxes the digestive organs and produces a feverish state of the
system. The blood becomes impure, and then diseases of various kinds
occur. A physician is sent for, who prescribes some drug which gives
present relief, but which does not cure the disease. It may change
the form of disease, but the real evil is increased tenfold. Nature was
doing her best to rid the system of an accumulation of impurities, and