Hippocrates

Hippocrates identified three categories of nutriments required for life: solids, bev-
erages, and air. Health, he explained, was the state of balance of elements and
humours, whereas disease represented imbalance. Hippocrates urged dietary mod-
eration and recommended that diet should reflect seasonality:

[During Winter]: Eat as much as possible, drink as little as possible; eat bread; all meat
and fish should be roasted; eat as few vegetables as possible;
[During Spring]: Take more to drink [than in winter], increasing quantity a little at a
time; take softer cereals, substituting barley cake for bread; boiled meat should replace
roasted; eat a few vegetables once Spring has begun, both raw and boiled;
[During Summer]: Live on soft barley-cake, watered wine in large quantities, and all
meat should be boiled;
[During Fall]: Cereal [intake] should be increased and made drier, and likewise the
meat in the diet. Quantity of drink taken should be decreased and less diluted; take in
the smallest quantity of the least diluted drink and the largest quantity of cereals of
the driest kind; this will keep the person in good health.
Hippocrates stressed the importance of moderation in diet, that food should be
eaten at established meal times, and that illness was caused by incautious diet:
A simple diet of food and drink, if it be preserved in without a break, is on the whole
safer for health than a sudden violent change . Those who are not in the habit of
lunching, if they have taken lunch, immediately become feeble, heavy in all the body,
weak and sluggish. Should they also dine, they suffer from acid [indigestion]. Diarrhea,
too, may occur in some cases because the digestive organs have been loaded . It is
beneficial, then, in these cases [to take] a slow, long walk without stopping. Such a
man will suffer yet more if he eat three times a day to surfeit, and still more if he eats
more often.
Several Hippocratic dietary recommendations parallel 20th-century approaches
to patient care:
Those who eat only once a day become exhausted and weak . Their mouth becomes
salty, or even bitter, and [they] are unable to digest their dinner as they would have if
they had had a breakfast. [Such persons] must eat less at dinner than they are used to,
[they should] replace bread with quite moist barley-cake and [from] vegetables [select]
dock, mallow, peeled barley or beets. With their food, let them drink wine in a
reasonable amount and quite dilute . Let [such people also] eat boiled fish . pork
is the best of all meats; the most nutritious is that which is neither very fat nor very
lean, and which has not the age of an old slaughter-animal; eat it without the skin, and
slightly cooled.