Part 7

These are some of the difficulties to be encountered by the person who sets out upon the road to health. But they are very slight barriers, indeed, to the person possessed of willpower, and when the benefits and pleasures to be gained are so enormously in excess of the few initiatory troubles, it is not to be wondered at that more than a million persons in England and America are already following Horace Fletcher’s system in whole or in part.

HOW CHEWING STIMULATES DIGESTION

Certain remarkable experiments conducted by Rogers, Metchnikoff, and Pawlow in Europe, and by Cannon and Kellogg in America, have thrown a new and interesting light upon the ideas of Fletcher; proving that the act of chewing the food gives to the nerves that control the digestive fluids an opportunity to assay the food, to test it and select for it the particular kind of digestive fluid which that particular kind of food requires. It appears that there are many different kinds of saliva, and each one of these kinds has a particular kind of work to do, which no other kind is able to do. Metchnikoff has shown that if one takes cane sugar into the mouth with or without other food, there is manufactured by the salivary glands a certain peculiar fluid which digests cane sugar. If the cane sugar is not taken into the mouth, then that substance is not made. The saliva that flows into the mouth when there is food there but no cane sugar with the food, will not digest cane sugar. So it readily can be seen that if cane sugar should be hastily swallowed, it is much less likely to be properly digested. And this holds good with nearly all other kinds of food.

THE “FOOD FILTER”

“But how is a person to know when he has chewed a mouthful long enough?” the reader asks. Mr. Fletcher answers that nature has provided us with a food filter—an automatic safety device. Professor Hubert Higgins, formerly demonstrator of anatomy at Cambridge University in England, and Professor Hasheby of Brussels, Belgium, have lately conducted a series of experiments which throw light on this question on its scientific side. At the back of the tongue there are a number of little knobs, which are really taste buds, or apparatus for the tasting of food. During the time that mastication is going on, the mouth is closed and is completely air tight, and germproof. This fact one can readily demonstrate by filling out the lips with air. The mouth is full of air, yet one can breathe behind this curtain of air, showing that the mouth is thoroughly cut off. This is what happens during mastication, for of course one should masticate with the lips closed. Now, when the food has become sufficiently ensalivated, or mixed up, the circumvallate papillæ at the back of the throat, where the taste buds are, relax, and behind that the soft palate forms a negative pressure. This soft palate is muscled just as it is in the horse—which is an animal that masticates, but is not found in the dog, which is an animal that bolts its food. Whenever the food is ready for the body, the soft palate relaxes, and is sucked back, and the swallowing of a mouthful of the prepared food takes place involuntarily.

The body is thus supplied with as perfect a protection as could be devised, and perfectly automatic; all that is necessary being that one should masticate the food until it naturally disappears. One must not attempt to keep the food too long in the mouth, but let it have its own course. There are some sorts of food which, when one has chewed them three or four times, are sucked up, showing that they have received all the mouth treatment that nature requires they should. With other foods one can masticate up to one hundred and fifty times, and still they are not sucked up.

This food filter is a perfectly instinctive apparatus; but as people have acquired the habit of flavoring foods with artificial sauces and relishes, most of them have spoiled this protective device. In the words of Mr. Fletcher himself: “This is a gift of Nature to man which we have been neglecting. It is not a gift which has been given to me and a few others alone. I think everybody could acquire the use of it if they would give Nature a chance by eating slowly, by eating with a sense of enjoyment, and by never eating save when they are really hungry and in a mood to enjoy the food.”

III

THE YALE EXPERIMENTS

At Yale University, Professor Russell H. Chittenden, Director of the Sheffield Scientific School, Lafayette B. Mendel, Professor of Physiological Chemistry, and Irving Fisher, Professor of Political Economy, have carried on a long series of experiments, begun six years ago as a test of the claims made by Fletcher. The net results of these experiments up to date (for they are still in progress) may be put into a nutshell. The following statement was drawn up by one of the writers of this book and submitted to Professors Chittenden and Fisher, who have accepted it as a summary of their present views:

“The commonly accepted standards which claim to tell the quantity of food needed each day by the average man are based upon many careful observations of what men actually do eat.

“We challenge these standards, however, as the exact science of to-day cannot accept as authority common customs and habits in any attempt to ascertain the right principles of man’s nutrition, since experiments have demonstrated how readily one set of habits may be substituted for another and how easily wrong habits become hardened into laws. The evidence presented by observers of common customs, while they must be duly considered, cannot, therefore, be taken as proof that these habits and customs are in accord with the true physiological needs of the body.

“We believe that the following propositions have been demonstrated as truths by the experiments we have made at Yale.

“People in general eat and drink too much.

“Especially do they eat too much meat, fish and eggs.

“This is so because meat, fish and eggs are the principal proteid-containing foodstuffs.

“Proteid is an essential food element, absolutely necessary for the upbuilding of tissue, for the maintenance of life. It is one of three main elements into which all foodstuffs may be divided—the others being Carbohydrates (the sugars and starches) and Fat. While it is indispensable, it is also the element which the body machinery finds most difficult to dispose of. Proteid is ‘nitrogenous.’ Nitrogen is never wholly consumed in the body furnace as fats, sugars and starches are. There is always solid matter left unconsumed, like clinkers in a furnace; which clinkers the kidneys and liver have to labor to dispose of. If the clinkers are produced in excess of the ability of these organs to handle them without undue wear and tear, damage of a serious, and sometimes permanent, nature follows. The ideal amount of proteid is the amount which will give the body all of that substance which it needs without entailing excessive work upon the body machinery.

“Excessive consumption of proteid foodstuffs—like meat, fish and eggs—is the greatest evil affecting man’s nutrition. The excess of proteid not only remains unburned in the bodily furnace, but this waste matter very often decays in the body, forming a culture bed for germs which effect the whole system, a condition scientifically known as autointoxication, or self-poisoning of the body through the action of the germs of putrefaction, and of other germs, which are bred in the colon, or large intestine. The researches of Metchnikoff, Bouchard, Tissier, Combe, and other eminent scientists, have shown that autointoxication is the source of a great number of the most serious chronic diseases which afflict mankind.

“We say, then, that the existing dietary standards place in all cases the minimum of proteid necessary for the average man’s daily consumption at far too high a figure. It may be safely said that it is placed twice as high as careful and repeated experiments show to be really necessary.

“There can be little doubt that the habit of excessive eating and drinking, combined with the habit of too hasty eating and drinking, especially of meat, fish and eggs, are probably the most prolific sources of many bodily disabilities affecting men and women, and are consequently the greatest deterrents to the attaining by men and women of a high grade of efficiency in work, of better health, of greater happiness, and of longer life.

“We believe that it has been demonstrated as a fact that health can be bettered, endurance increased, and life lengthened, by cutting down the commonly accepted standards of how much meat, eggs, fish and other proteid food we should eat and drink by about one-half.”

* * * * *

After Horace Fletcher had attracted the notice of the scientific world in 1902, Professor Chittenden invited him to become the subject of a series of experiments at Yale, where the Sheffield Scientific School possessed an equipment suitable for an elaborate inquiry of this kind much superior to any to be found in Europe.

FLETCHER’S CLAIMS SUPPORTED

Professor Chittenden first made certain, by experiments which precluded any chance of error, that Horace Fletcher’s claims were justified so far as Horace Fletcher himself was concerned. But this, of course, by no means solved the problem. Mr. Fletcher might simply be a physiological curiosity—a digestive freak—of whom there are many known cases. He lived and thrived on an amount of proteid food startlingly less than was deemed necessary by all existing standards, but this could not be taken as proof that people in general could do likewise. Only an exhaustive series of tests on a large number of people of varying ages and conditions of life could prove this. Professor Chittenden resolved to make these tests.

At the very outset, however, he faced this difficulty. If Mr. Fletcher’s was merely a freak case, there would be a grave danger in putting other men upon his dietary. Mr. Fletcher was flourishing on a daily consumption of proteid foodstuffs amounting to an average of only 45 grams, and the fat, sugar and starch consumed by him were in quantities only sufficient to bring the total food value of the daily food up to a little more than 1600 “calories,” or units of fuel energy. The Voit standard—which is the typical one, the one most commonly accepted, and which is based upon thousands of studies of what men and women actually eat—demands that the average man shall eat at least 118 grams of proteid, with a total fuel value of 3000 large “calories” for the daily ration.

To make clear to the non-scientific reader just what quantity of foodstuffs is represented by 50 grams of proteid, which is 5 grams more than that consumed daily by Mr. Fletcher in his tests, and is approximately the amount consumed daily by other men in the Yale experiments, it may be said that 50 grams is about equal to 772 grains, which are equal to about 1¾ ounces. This quantity would be represented by the proteid contents of 9½ ounces of lean meat, or 7 eggs, or 27 ounces of white bread. Nine and one-half ounces of meat (using comparisons furnished by Dr. Edward Curtis) is about the weight of a slice measuring 7 by 3 inches and cut ¼ of an inch thick. Twenty-seven ounces of bread represent somewhat less than two loaves, the standard loaf weighing one pound (16 ounces). Of course, few people ever eat 7 eggs, or 2 loaves of bread in a day; but the vast majority of people in America do eat a great deal more proteid than would be represented by 7 eggs, or 2 loaves of bread or a slice of meat of the size named, since proteid is found in a great number of other foodstuffs besides those mentioned.

CHITTENDEN’S EXPERIMENTS ON HIMSELF