How to Eat – An Ancient Guide to Healthy Living

In some ways, this book contains elements of what we know called the Mediterranean diet, but with very different medical categorisations drawing on the humours. This means that advice for summer and winter is very different. The first part consists of three texts from Hippocrates, Diocles, and Celsus, and the second selections on what to eat in terms of relishes, vegetables and legumes, grains, dairy, meat, poultry and eggs, fish and seafood, and finally fruit, nuts and sweets. Beans were considered as producing flatulence even then (and in Pythagoras) while oats were for animals, and rice for settling the stomach. Fruit was considered to give little nourishment, with the exception of figs, and it is recommended that they should be eaten before other foods. All this makes intriguing reading.