Many years later I was living among the carefree inhabitants of a small South Sea island. I was curious about the cause of their happiness and found that they subscribed to gratitude without thinking. They never forgot to express gratitude for all the many little and greater joys the Creator gave them day by day. Without tiring they felt grateful for the sunshine, the warmth, the blue sea with its abundance of food, the coconut trees, various other fruit trees and many other things. Gratitude not only transmits warmth, it also produces contentment, which in turn awakens happiness. It stimulates the endocrine glands, promotes good circulation, and thus influences the metabolism for better health, with all the important body functions being activated. The German poet Schiller once described joy as an animating spark, believing that joy in fact makes the world tick. With two world wars behind us, and all the subsequent wars, we realise that the spring in the world clock can be equally well wound by destructive powers. However, since these powers are never able to rob us entirely of the divine gifts of light, sunshine, air and others, we have reason enough to express our joy about them daily.

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When a young person first starts smoking, how unpleasant he or she usually finds it. To be honest, it is far from enjoyable. On the contrary, the young person must fight all the way through nausea, disgust, nervous shock, dizziness and a general feeling of natural aversion in order to overcome the ill effects the learner smoker is subject to.

As with all harmful practices, the person trying to enjoy smoking insists that the pleasure outweighs the risks involved and that it can’t be all that bad anyway. He may even point to his grandfather who, although an inveterate smoker, lived to be eighty years or more. It is true that a person with a strong constitution may be able to stand poisons without any apparent damage to his health. However, if there are people who can take drugs and grow old in spite of doing so, that does not mean that everyone has the same strong powers of resistance. On the contrary, millions of people have died prematurely because of tobacco or nicotine, narcotics, alcohol and other drugs.

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Another product for daily use is the seasoning sauce Swiss Alpa-mare, also called Kelpamare. This product is made from the juices of fresh vegetables and herbs and is also manufactured by means of a special fermentation process. For this purpose suitable herbs are fermented in accordance with old Chinese and Japanese methods, using edible fungi (mushrooms), which develop in an absolutely natural organic way. When fermentation comes to an end we have a seasoning sauce similar to the soy sauce found in Japan and China.

Instead of having to extract the salt using hydrochloric acid, which destroys a number of vital elements, the natural method makes for quite a different product that is far superior in taste and content to the products made according to our old-fashioned methods. Furthermore, Swiss Alpamare (Kelpamare) also contains seaweed, which is added during the manufacturing process and therefore integrally mixed and blended with the herb extracts.

*1093/28/1*

It has always pleased me when, here and there on my travels, I have been served with bread as it was once made in my own country – from the whole grain. I found that the North American Indian women prepared their bread from grain that they had ground themselves with a stone mill. Arabs, Bedouins and other African people still keep up the custom of making their bread from wholegrain cereals. Some use wheat, some rye, others barley and each of these breads tastes good and provides the body with all the goodness of the whole grain, because whole cereals contain most of the elements needed to build up the organism and maintain it in a healthy condition. They abound in minerals, enzymes, vitamins and other essential factors.

*1023/28/1*

I have often been asked how much an adult should eat. Should we adopt the system of calories as a measure of our need or is there another way of knowing how much food will prevent us from becoming undernourished?

Like most systems, reckoning in terms of calories is not the perfect system, and should therefore be considered as a purely theoretical guide. An exact method of calculation is not possible because an individual’s need for food depends upon so many different and constantly varying circumstances, so that the adoption of a strict and definitive system can do more harm than good. True, a person’s body weight or build plays an important part in determining how much food one should eat. Theoretically speaking, a stout and tall person should require more food than a slim one. It is possible, however, that the slim person has a more vigorous nature and burns up more energy than the fat, placid, calm person and in this case our theory already ceases to be valid. A happy, jolly type needs less food than a discontented, unhappy person, because cheerfulness promotes better glandular function and consequently better digestion and improved assimilation. The happy person gets more out of his food. There is much truth in the old saying that one does not live on what one eats but on what one digests.

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