Licence: Public Domain Mark
Credit: The Health Food Company. Source: Wellcome Collection.
Provider: This material has been provided by the National Library of Medicine (U.S.), through the Medical Heritage Library. The original may be consulted at the National Library of Medicine (U.S.)
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![THE HEALTH FOOD COMPAM. [A medical jrentleman, who has made the subject of food a careful study for many years, was invited to acquaint himself with Ihe plans and operations of the Health Food Company of New Yoik, and to report his conclusions for publication. Ho accepted the invitation, and his very readable and instructive account of his inter- view is herewith presented in his own language, as originally published.] Your invitation to investigate and describe the doings of the Health Pood Company, of No. 74 Fourth Avenue, New York City, is cheerfully responded to in the interest of that humanity, in behalf of which you are laboring so efficiently, and for the advancement of which they are far from being idle. While I cannot do justice to the subject in one article, I can at least explain their leading thought. They believe as everybody does who reasons—that the principal article of human food in America is a robbed, depreciated substance, incapable of sustaining human life. They believe that the human animal in America is drenched with starch, and destroyed by it. They believe that the ten thousand mills in America which are to-day engaged in pulverizing wheat and sifting from it its gray matter, are only to be classed as shorteners of human longevity, as destroyers of human life, with the distilleries of the land, and that the extermination of one is not more to be desired than the annihilation of the other. Thus far you will admit that they are not heretics ; with the next stacje of their belief you will, I hope, as fully agree. They assert that upon the exterior surface of each and every grain of wheat there is a fibrous, siliceous skin which is worthless as food, and injurious as an ingredient of food. They invite you to look through a powerful microscope at a grain of wheat of your own selection, and the object presented to your vision is not more attractive than the following drawing, ie, in fact, rather more repulsive in appearance. A Magnified Ghain of Wheat. As vou look through the magnifier you discover a rough and bristling structure, shaggy as the bark of some gnarled old oak, with much dust and many insects' eggs stored away in the crevices, and you feel certain that the substance under examination could not have been designed for human food. You want to seize upon that monstrous, unclean cocoanut, and scrape, and brush, and scrub it, until you get through the unwhole- some rind, ami expose the cleanly food to view. You are next invited to select from another parcel a second grain of wheat, which is then placed beneath the glass, and exposed to view. Here is what the eye rests upon, as nearly as a simple drawing can reproduce it. A Magnified Grain of Wuhat with Coat of Silex and Woodt Fibeb Rhmoved. It is a clean, smooth, highly-polished affair with a surface no longer dense but semi-transparent, and in color a trifle lighter than the other.](https://iiif.wellcomecollection.org/image/b21158745_0001.jp2/full/800%2C/0/default.jpg)
