Now, if you touch a piece of metal on a cool day, it feels cold and hard. But the skin of your face feels soft and warm. Why? The metal is cold and dead. That soft warm skin is alive. It is composed of living cells, untold myriads of them, each with their own special function to perform.

What has all this to do with food? A great deal. Each cell in your body is dependent upon you to keep it alive. What you eat makes all the difference between health and disease, between life and death. Form the foods you eat, each cell, whether in bone, muscle, nerve, or skin, builds u its own particular type of protoplasm. This is the living, jelly-like material of which all the cells are composed. Protoplasm is the basic material which all living things, whether plant or animal, are made. Protoplasm is build up from the proteins within our diet. Therefore they had better be good!

But this is not all. Protoplasm possesses within itself the remarkable powers of movement, reproduction, and growth. Thus from a single seed a new plant will grow, eventually consisting of untold numbers of cells. The same is true in the animal kingdom. A baby grows from one single cell-the fertilized ovum, which at first is too small to be seen by the unaided eye. Yet, that single cell will multiply itself into enormous numbers of other cells of many different types, and together they make up the human body.

The living cells draw nutriment from the fluids that flow all around it, fluids that are kept in constant motion by the heart. During the growing period, each cell enlarges to about double its normal size, and then abruptly divides into two daughter cells, each equal in size to the original before the division took place. Thus the original living protoplasm has now doubled in size and this continues indefinitely as long as the individual continues to grow. Then when he is fully mature, this process of growth and division suddenly ceases, and is not resumed expect for the repair or replacing of cells worn out though injury, or damaged by disease.