It is the duty of all papas and mammas to forbid their children to drink coffee, unless they wish to have little dried-up machines, stunted and old at the age of twenty... once saw a man in London, in Leicester Square, who had been crippled by immoderate indulgence in coffee; he was no longer in any pain, having grown accustomed to his condition, and had cut himself down to five or six cups a day.
Interpretation
The quote warns against the harmful effects of excessive coffee consumption, particularly for children.
In this quote, Jean Anthelme Brillat-Savarin emphasizes the responsibility of parents to protect their children from the adverse effects of drinking coffee, which he believes can lead to stunted growth and a premature aging process. He shares a vivid anecdote about a man who became physically crippled due to his coffee indulgence, illustrating the serious consequences that can arise from what may seem like a benign habit.
In practice
A parent discussing the effects of caffeine with other parents at a school event.
It has been shown as proof positive that carefully prepared chocolate is as healthful a food as it is pleasant; that it is nourishing and easily digested... that it is above all helpful to people who must do a great deal of mental work.
The limits of pleasure are as yet neither known nor fixed, and that we have no idea what degree of bodily bliss we are capable of attaining.
Place a substantial meal before a tired man and he will eat with effort and be little better for it at first. Give him a glass of wine or brandy, and immediately he feels better: you see him come to life again before you.
Gourmandism is an act of judgment, by which we prefer things which have a pleasant taste to those which lack this quality.
In the hands of an able cook, fish can become an inexhaustible source of perpetual delight.
You first parents of the human race...who ruined yourself for an apple, what might you have done for a truffled turkey?
I feel that any form of so called psychotherapy is strongly contraindicated for addicts. The question Why did you start using narcotics in the first place? should never be asked. It is quite as irrelevant to treatment as it would be to ask a malarial patient why he went to a malarial area.
Promoting health without encouraging others to seek wholeness is an exercise in futility. Not until we realize that our bodies are mirrors of our interpersonal, spiritual, professional, sexual, creative, financial, environmental, mental, and emotional health will we truly heal.
It is bad enough that people are dying of AIDS, but no one should die of ignorance.
The sheer novelty and glamor of the Western diet, with its seventeen thousand new food products every year and the marketing power - thirty-two billion dollars a year - used to sell us those products, has overwhelmed the force of tradition and left us where we now find ourselves: relying on science and journalism and government and marketing to help us decide what to eat.
...There's a lot of money in the Western diet. The more you process any food, the more profitable it becomes. The healthcare industry makes more money treating chronic diseases (which account for three quarters of the $2 trillion plus we spend each year on health care in this country) than preventing them.
People tend to think of overweight and obesity as strictly a personal matter, but there is much that communities can and should do to address these problems.
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