DIET STANDARDS
(Discusses various foods and their food values, the quantities we
need, and their money cost.)
I think there is no more important single question about health than the
question of how much food we should eat. It is one about which there is
a great deal of controversy, even among the best authorities. We shall
try here for a common-sense solution. At the outset we have to remind
ourselves of the distinction we tried to draw between nature and man. To
what extent can civilized man rely upon his instincts to keep him in
perfect health?
Let us begin by considering the animals. How is their diet problem
solved? Horses and cattle in a wild state are adjusted to certain foods
which they find in nature, and so long as they can find it, they have no
diet problem. Man comes, and takes these animals and domesticates them;
he observes their habits, and gives to them a diet closely approaching
the natural one, and they get along fairly well. But suppose the man,
with his superior skill in agriculture, taking wild grain and planting
it, reaping and threshing it by machinery, puts before his horse an
unlimited quantity of a concentrated food such as oats, which the horse
can never get in a natural state--will that horse's instincts guide it?
Not at all. Any horse will kill itself by overeating on grain.
I have read somewhere a clever saying, that a farm is a good place for
an author to live, provided he can be persuaded not to farm it. But once
upon a time I had not heard that wise remark, and I owned and tried to
run a farm. I had two beautiful cows of which I was very proud, and one
morning I woke up and discovered that the cows had got into the pear
orchard and had been feeding on pears all night. In a few hours they
both lay with bloated stomachs, dying. A farmer told me afterwards that
I might have saved their lives, if I had stuck a knife into their
stomachs to let out the gas. I do not know whether this is true or not.
But my two dead cows afford a perfect illustration of the reason why
civilized man cannot rely upon his instincts and his appetites to tell
him when he has had enough to eat. He can only do this, provided he
rigidly restricts himself to the foods which he ate in the days when his
teeth and stomach and bowels were being shaped by the process of natural
selection. If he is going to eat any other than such strictly natural
foods, he will need to apply his reason to his diet schedule.
In a state of nature man has to hunt his food, and the amount that he
finds is generally limited, and requires a lot of exercise to get.
Explorers in Africa give us a picture of man's life in the savage state,
guided by his instincts and very little interfered with by reason. The
savages will starve for long periods, then they will succeed in killing
a hippopotamus or a buffalo, and they will gorge themselves, and nearly
all of them will be ill, and several of them will die. So you see, even
in a state of nature, and with natural foods, restraint is needed, and
reason and moral sense have a part to play.
What do reason and moral sense have to tell us about diet? Our bodily
processes go on continuously, and we need at regular intervals a certain
quantity of a number of different foods. The most elementary experiment
will convince us that we can get along, maintain our body weight and our
working efficiency upon a much smaller quantity of food than we
naturally crave. Civilized custom puts before us a great variety of
delicate and appetizing foods, upon which we are disposed to overeat;
and we are slow observers indeed if we do not note the connection
between this overeating and ill health. So we are forced to the
conclusion that if we wish to stay well, we need to establish a
censorship over our habits; we need a different diet regimen from the
haphazard one which has been established for us by a combination of our
instincts with the perversions of civilization.
Up to a few years ago, it was commonly taken for granted by authorities
on diet that what the average man actually eats must be the normal thing
for him to eat. Governments which were employing men in armies, and at
road building, and had to feed them and keep them in health, made large
scale observations as to what the men ate, and thus were established the
old fashioned "diet standards." They are expressed in calories, which is
a heat unit representing the quantity of fuel required to heat a certain
small quantity of water a certain number of degrees. In order that you
may know what I am talking about, I will give a rough idea of the
quantity of the more common foods which it takes to make 100 calories:
one medium sized slice of bread, a piece of lean cooked steak the size
of two fingers, one large apple, three medium tablespoonfuls of cooked
rice or potatoes, one large banana, a tablespoonful of raisins, five
dates, one large fig, a teaspoonful of sugar, a ball of butter the size
of your thumbnail, a very large head of lettuce, three medium sized
tomatoes, two-thirds of a glass of milk, a tablespoonful of oil. You
observe, if you compare these various items, how little guidance
concerning food is given by its bulk. You may eat a whole head of
lettuce, weighing nearly a pound, and get no more food value than from a
half ounce of olive oil which you pour over it. You may eat enough lean
beefsteak to cover your plate, and you will not have eaten so much as a
generous helping of butter. A big bowl of strawberries will not count
half so much as the cream and sugar you put over them. So you may
realize that when you eat olive oil, butter, cream, and sugar, you are
in the same danger as the horse eating oats, or as my two cows in the
pear orchard; and if some day a surgeon has to come and stick a knife
into you, it may be for the same reason.
The old-fashioned diet standards are as follows: Swedish laborers at
hard work, over 4,700 calories; Russian workmen at moderate work, German
soldiers in active service, Italian laborers at moderate work, between
3,500 and 3,700 calories; English weavers, nearly 3,500 calories;
Austrian farm laborers, over 5,000 calories. Some twenty years ago the
United States government made observations of over 15,000 persons, and
established the following, known as the "Atwater standards": men at very
hard muscular work, 5,500 calories; men at moderately active muscular
work, 3,400 calories; men at light to moderate muscular work, 3,050
calories; men at sedentary, or women at moderately active work, 2,700
calories.
In the last ten or fifteen years there has arisen a new school of
dietetic experts, headed by Professors Chittenden and Fisher of Yale
University. Professor Chittenden has published an elaborate book, "The
Nutrition of Man," in which he tells of long-continued experiment upon a
squad of soldiers and a group of athletes at Yale University, also upon
average students and professors. He has proved conclusively that all
these various groups have been able to maintain full body weight and
full working efficiency upon less than half the quantity of protein food
hitherto specified, and upon anywhere from one-half to two-thirds the
calory value set forth in the former standards.
When I first read this book, I set to work to try its theories upon
myself. During the five or six months that I lived on raw food, I took
the trouble to weigh everything that I ate, and to keep a record. It is,
of course, very easy to weigh raw foods exactly, and I found that I
lived an active life and kept physical health upon slightly less than
2,500 calories a day. I have set this as my standard, and have
accustomed myself to follow it instinctively, and without wasting any
thought upon it. Sometimes I fall from grace; for I still crave the
delightful cakes and candies and ice cream upon which I was brought up.
I always pay the penalty, and know that I will not get back to my former
state of health until I skip a meal or two, and give my system a chance
to clean house. The average man will find the regimen set forth in this
book austere and awe-inspiring; I do not wish to pose as a paragon of
virtue, so perhaps I should quote a sarcastic girl cousin, who remarked
when I was a boy that the way to my heart was with a bag of
ginger-snaps. I live in the presence of candy stores and never think of
their existence, but if someone brings candy into the house and puts it
in front of me, I have to waste a lot of moral energy in letting it
alone. A few years ago I had a young man as secretary who discovered
this failing of mine, and used to afford himself immense glee by buying
a box of chocolates and leaving it on top of my desk. I would give him
back the box--with some of the chocolates missing--but he would persist
in "forgetting it" on my desk; he would hide and laugh hilariously
behind the door, until my wife discovered his nefarious doings, and
warned me of them.
Professor Chittenden states quite simply the common sense procedure in
the matter of food quantity. Find out by practical experiment what is
the very least food upon which you can do your work without losing
weight. That is the correct quantity for you, and if you are eating
more, you certainly cannot be doing your body any good, and all the
evidence indicates that you are doing it harm. You need not have the
least fear in making this experiment that you will starve yourself.
Later on, in a chapter on fasting, I shall prove to you that you carry
around with you in your body sufficient reserve of food to keep you
alive for eighty or ninety days; and if you draw on a small quantity of
this you do not do yourself the slightest harm. Cut down the amount of
your food; eat the bulky foods, which contain less calory value, and
weigh yourself every day, and you will be surprised to discover how much
less you need to eat than you have been accustomed to.
One of the things you will find out is that your stomach is easily
fooled; it is largely guided by bulk. If you eat a meal consisting of a
moderate quantity of lean meat, a very little bread, a heaping dish of
turnip greens, and a big slice of watermelon, you will feel fully
satisfied, yet you will not have taken in one-third the calory value
that you would at an ordinary meal with gravies and dressings and
dessert. The bulky kind of food is that for which your system was
adapted in the days when it was shaped by nature. You have a large
stomach, many times as large as you would have had if you had lived on
refined and concentrated foods such as butter, sugar, olive oil, cheese
and eggs. You have a long intestinal tract, adapted to slowly digesting
foods, and to the work of extracting nutrition from a mass of roughage.
You have a very large lower bowel, which Metchnikoff, the Russian
scientist, one of the greatest minds who ever examined the problems of
health, declares a survival, the relic of a previous stage of evolution,
and a source of much disease. The best thing you can do with that lower
bowel is to give it lots of hay, as it requires; in other words, to eat
the salads and greens which contain cellulose material. This contains no
food value, and does not ferment, but fills the lower bowel and
stimulates it to activity.
If you eat too much food, three things may happen. First, it may not be
digested, and in that case it will fill your system with poisons.
Second, it may be assimilated, but not burned up by the body. In that
case it has to be thrown out by the kidneys or the sweat glands, and
this puts upon these organs an extra strain, to which in the long run
they may be unequal. Or third, the surplus material may be stored up as
fat. This is an old-time trick which nature invented to tide you over
the times when food was scarce. If you were a bear, you would naturally
want to eat all you could, and be as fat as possible in November, so
that you might be able to hunt your prey when you came out from your
winter's sleep in April. But you are not a bear, and you expect to eat
your regular meals all winter; you have established a system of
civilization which makes you certain of your food, and the place where
you keep your surplus is in the bank, or sewed up in the mattress, or
hidden in your stocking. In other words, a civilized man saves money,
and the habit of storing globules of grease in the cells of his body is
a survival of an old instinct, and a needless strain upon his health.
Not merely does the fat man have to carry all the extra weight around
with him, but his body has to keep it and tend it; and what are the
effects of this is fully shown by life insurance tables. People who are
five or ten per cent over weight have five or ten per cent more chance
of dying all the time, while people who are five or ten per cent under
weight have five or ten per cent more than the average of life
expectation. There is no answer to these figures, which are the result
of the tabulation of many hundreds of thousands of cases. The meaning of
them to the fat person is to put himself on a diet of lean meat, green
vegetables and fresh fruits, until he has brought himself down, not
merely to the normal fatness of the civilized man, but to the normal
leanness of the athlete, the soldier on campaign, and the student who
has more important things to think about than stuffing his stomach.
There is, of course, a certain kind of leanness which is the result of
ill health. There are wasting diseases; tuberculosis, for example, and
anemia. There are people who worry themselves thin, and there are a few
rare "spiritual" people, so-called, who fade away from lack of
sufficient interest in their bodies. That is not the kind of leanness
that I mean, but the active, wiry leanness, which sometimes lives a
hundred years. Nearly always you will find that such people are spare
eaters; and you will find that our ideal of rosy plumpness, both for
adults and children, is a wholly false notion. We once had in our home
as servant an Irish girl, who was what is popularly called "a picture of
health," with those beautiful flaming cheeks that Irish and English
women so often have. She was in her early twenties, and nobody who knew
her had any idea but that her health was perfect. But one morning she
was discovered in bed with one side paralyzed, and in a couple of weeks
she was dead with erysipelas. The color in her cheeks had been nothing
but diseased blood vessels, overloaded with food material; and with the
blood in that condition, one of the tiny vessels in the brain had become
clogged.
In the same way I have seen children, two or three years old, plump and
rosy, and considered to be everything that children should be; but
pneumonia would hit them, and in two or three days they would be at
death's door. I do not mean that children should be kept hungry; on the
contrary, they should have four or five meals a day, so that they do not
have a chance to become too hungry. But at those meals they should eat
in great part the bulky foods, which contain the natural salts needed
for building the body. If a child asks for food, you may give it an
apple, or you may give it a slice of bread and butter with sugar on it.
The child will be equally well content in either case; but it is for
you, with your knowledge of food values, to realize that the bread with
butter and sugar contains two or three times as much nutriment as the
apple, but contains practically none of the precious organic salts which
will make the child's bones and teeth.
So far I have discussed this subject as if all foods grew on bushes
outside your kitchen door, and all you had to do was to go and pick off
what you wanted. But as a matter of fact, foods cost money, and under
our present system of wage slavery, the amount of money the average
person can spend for food is strictly limited. In a later book I am
going to discuss the problem of poverty, its causes and remedies. All
that I can do here is to tell you what foods you ought to have, and if
society does not pay you enough for your work to enable you to buy such
foods, you may know that society, is starving you, and you may get busy
to demand your rights as human beings. Meantime, however, such money as
you do have, you want to spend wisely, and the vast majority of you
spend it very unwisely indeed.
In the first place, a great many of the simplest and most wholesome
foods are cheap--often because people do not know enough to value them.
We insist upon having the choice cuts of meats, because they are more
tender to the teeth, but the cheaper cuts are exactly as nutritious. We
insist upon having our meats loaded with fat, although fatness is an
abnormal condition in an animal, and excess of fat is a grave error in
diet. I live in a country where jack rabbits are a pest, and in the
market they sell for perhaps one-fourth the cost of beef, and yet I can
hardly ever get them, because people value them so little as food; they
prefer the meat of a hog which has been wallowing in a filthy pen, and
has been deliberately made so fat that it could hardly walk!
I have already spoken of prunes, a much despised and invaluable food.
All the dried fruits are rich in food values, and if we could get them
untreated by chemicals, they would be worth their cost. I was brought up
to despise the cheaper vegetables, such as cabbage and turnips; I never
tasted boiled cabbage until I was forty, and then to my great surprise I
made the discovery that it is good. Raw cabbage is as valuable as any
other salad; it is a trifle harder to digest for some people, but I do
not believe in pampering the stomach. Both potatoes and rice are cheap
and wholesome, if only we would get unpolished rice, and if we would
leave the skins on the potatoes until after they are cooked. Nearly all
the mineral salts of the potato are just under the outer skin, and are
removed by the foolish habit of peeling them.
The prices of food differ so widely at different seasons and in
different parts of the world, that there is not much profit in trying to
figure how cheaply a person can live. I have found that I spend for the
diet I have indicated here, from sixty to eighty cents a day. I do not
buy any fancy foods, but on the other hand, I do not especially try to
economize; I buy what I want of the simple everyday foods in their
season. Most everyone will find that it is a good business proposition
to buy the foods which he needs to keep in health. If the average
workingman would add up the money he spends, not merely in the
restaurants, but in the candy stores, the drug stores, the tobacco
stores, and the offices of doctors and dentists, he would find, I think,
that he could afford to buy himself the necessary quantity of wholesome
natural foods. For a family of three, in the place where I live, enough
of these foods can be purchased for a dollar a day, and this is about
one-fourth what common labor is being paid, and one-eighth of what
skilled labor is being paid. I will specify the foods: a pound and a
half of shoulder steak, a loaf of whole wheat bread or a box of shredded
wheat biscuit, a head of cabbage, a pound of prunes, and four or five
pounds of apples.
There are many ways of saving in the purchase of food if you put your
mind upon it. If you are buying prunes, you may pay as high as fifty
cents or a dollar a pound for the big ones, and they are not a bit
better than the tiny ones, which you can buy for as low as eight cents a
pound in bulk. When bread is stale, the bakers sell it for half price,
despite the fact that only then has it become fit to eat. If you buy
canned peaches, you will pay a fancy price for them, and they will be
heavy with cane sugar; but if you inquire, you find what are known as
"pie peaches," put up in gallon tins without sugar, and at about half
the price. The butcher will sell you what he calls "hamburg steak" at a
very low price, and if you let him prepare it out of your sight, he will
fill it with fat and gristle; but let him make some while you watch, and
then you have a very good food. One of my diet rules is that I do not
trust the capitalist system to fix me up any kind of mixed or ground or
prepared foods. I have not eaten sausage since I saw it made in Chicago.
Also there is something to know about the cooking of foods, since it is
possible to take perfectly good foods and spoil them by bad cooking.
Once upon a time our family discovered a fireless cooker, and thought
that was a wonderful invention for an absent-minded author and a wife
who is given to revising manuscripts. But recent investigations which
have been made into the nature of the "vitamines," food ferments which
are only partly understood, suggest that prolonged cooking of food may
be a great mistake. The starch has to be cooked in order to break the
cell walls by the expansion of the material inside. Twenty minutes will
be enough in the case of everything except beans, which need to be
cooked four or five hours. Meat should be eaten rare, except in the case
of pork, which harbors a parasite dangerous to the human body; therefore
pork should always be thoroughly cooked. The white of eggs is made less
digestible by boiling hard or frying. Eggs should never be allowed to
boil; put them on in cold water, and take them off as soon as the water
begins to boil. It is not necessary to cook either fresh fruit or dried.
The dried fruits may be soaked and eaten raw, but I find that several
fruits, especially apples and pears, do not agree with me well if they
are eaten raw, so I stew them for fifteen or twenty minutes. I have no
objection to canned fruits and vegetables, provided one takes the
trouble in opening them to make sure there is no sign of spoiling. If
you put up your own fruits, do not put in any sugar. All you have to do
is to let them boil for a few minutes, and to seal them tightly while
they are boiling hot. The whole secret of preserving is to exclude the
air with its bacteria.
If you live on a farm, you will have no trouble in following the diet
here outlined, for you can produce for yourselves all the foods that I
have recommended; only do not make the mistake of shipping out your best
foods, and taking back the products of a factory, just because you have
read lying advertisements about them. Take your own wheat and oats and
corn to the mill, and have it ground whole, and make your own breads and
cereals. Try the experiment of mixing whole corn meal with water and a
little salt, and baking it into hard, crisp "corn dodgers." I do not eat
these--but only because I cannot buy them, and have no time to make
them.
Another common article of food which I do not recommend is salted and
smoked meats. I do not pretend to know the effects of large quantities
of salt and saltpetre and wood smoke upon the human system, but I know
that Dr. Wiley's "poison squad" proved definitely that a number of these
inorganic minerals are injurious to health, and I prefer to take fresh
meat when I can get it. I use a moderate quantity of common salt on meat
and potatoes, because there seems to be a natural craving for this. I
know that many health enthusiasts insist that I am thus putting a strain
on my kidneys, but I will wait until these health enthusiasts make clear
to me why deer and cattle and horses in a wild state will travel many
miles to a salt-lick. I have learned that it is easy to make plausible
statements about health, but not so easy to prove them. For example, I
was told that it is injurious to drink water at meals, and for years I
religiously avoided the habit; but it occurred to some college professor
to find out if this was really true, and he carried on a series of
experiments which proved that the stomach works better when its contents
are diluted. The only point about drinking at meals is that you should
not use the liquid to wash down your food without chewing it.
I can suggest two other ways by which you may save money on food. One is
by not eating too much, and another is by eating all that you buy. The
amount of food that is wasted by the people of America would feed the
people of any European nation. The amount of food that is thrown out
from any one of our big American leisure class hotels would feed the
children of a European town. I think it may fairly be described as a
crime to throw into the garbage pail food which might nourish human
life. In our family we have no garbage pail. What little waste there is,
we burn in the stove, and my wife turns it into roses. It consists of
the fat which we cannot help getting at the butcher's, and the bones of
meat, and the skins of some fruits and vegetables. It would never enter
into our minds to throw out a particle of bread, or meat, or other
wholesome food. If we have something that we fear may spoil, we do not
throw it out, but put it into a saucepan and cook it for a few minutes.
If you will make the same rule in your home, you will stop at least that
much of the waste of American life; and as to the big leisure class
hotels, and the banquet tables of the rich--just wait a few years, and I
think the social revolution will attend to them!