SUMMARY (Ridvan Askin, edited Deborah Madsen):

In this short article, Nichols promotes grain-based foods, particularly bread “made of unbolted wheat meal” (Graham bread) as “the best food for man.” No other ingredient, he writes, “combines so many valuable properties of nutriment, mixed in their proper proportions, as WHEAT.” As a result, Nichols is concerned that “[m]uch of the so-called 'Graham flour'” sold in cities “seems to be nothing but shorts and bran. The richest part of the wheat is missing.” He then reports how, having purchased a little hand-mill, he proceeded to produce his own meal, which he then used to bake a “light, and sweet, and most salubrious bread.” Satisfied with the result, he “gave one of my patients a loaf of this bread, pretty coarse, to try it; he found it delicious, but its effect was better than the taste, as it caused, for the first time in several years, a perfectly natural action of his bowels.” Nichols concludes that “[h]aving clean good wheat, coarsely and freshly ground, is, I am certain, a great advantage” (148).