instead of being gulped down, it was drawn in easily by the throat. And
in this manner did he stumble upon his pathway to deliverance. He had
not been “toying” with his food—as he then considered he was doing—for
more than a few weeks before he noticed that he was losing a great
deal of superfluous fat, that he was eating less, but with far greater
enjoyment, than ever before in his life, that his taste for simpler
foods increased as his taste for highly seasoned and complex dishes
decreased, and that he was feeling better both physically and mentally
than he had felt in many years.
THE MAGIC OF MASTICATION
What did these things mean? Some hidden virtue in the food he was
eating? Some hitherto quite unsuspected tonic in the smoke of
Chicago? Or a lesson in health furnished by the “how” of his eating?
At this point there flashed through Mr. Fletcher’s memory the
story of Gladstone’s advice to his children to chew each morsel of
food thirty-two times (once for each tooth in their heads) if they
would preserve their health. In that moment, Mr. Fletcher began his
investigation of the many processes that go to make up the simple act
of mastication, an investigation which has now been going on for more
than ten years, and which has resulted in directing public attention
to the supremely important subject of nutrition with more emphasis,
and in the arousing of more general interest and the production of
more telling effect than any other circumstance or event has done in
the history of physiologic science. The word “Fletcherizing” was first
applied by Dr. J. H. Kellogg, of Battle Creek, after the analogy of
“pasteurizing,” in describing the act of mastication as recommended by
Mr. Fletcher. “Fletcherism,” as Mr. Fletcher’s system of mental science
and of physical culture through mastication has come to be known, after
first being for years a stock jest of the newspaper funnyman, has now
been recognized, even by those scientists who detest all “isms,” as a
most valuable bridge from the land of bad food habits and disease to
the land of good food habits and health.
The bridge certainly afforded its builder a passage from one region to
the other. Following a constant improvement in his general condition,
beginning almost simultaneously with the adoption of his new way of
life, Mr. Fletcher is to-day one of the strongest and most enduring men
alive. Tests of his strength and endurance made at the Yale gymnasium
at different times prove beyond a doubt that this is so. The following
is a quotation from the report of Dr. William G. Anderson, director of
the Yale Gymnasium:
DR. ANDERSON’S REPORT
“In February, 1903, I gave to Mr. Horace Fletcher the exercises used
by the ‘Varsity’ crew. He went through these movements with ease and
showed no ill effects afterwards. At that time Mr. Fletcher weighed
157½ pounds, and was in his fifty-fifth year. On June 11, 1907,
Mr. Fletcher again visited the Yale Gymnasium and underwent a test
on Professor Fisher’s dynamometer. This device is made to test the
endurance of the calf muscles.
“The subject makes a dead lift of a prescribed weight as many times
as possible. In order to select a definite weight, the subject first
ascertains his strength on the Kellogg mercurial dynamometer by one
strong, steady contraction of the muscles named—and then he finds
his endurance by lifting three-fourths of this weight on the Fisher
dynamometer as many times as possible at two or three second intervals.
One leg only is used in the lift, and as indicated, the right is
usually chosen.
“Mr. Fletcher’s actual strength as indicated on the Kellogg machine
was not quite four hundred pounds, ascertained by three trials. In his
endurance test on the Fisher machine he raised three hundred pounds
three hundred and fifty times and then did not reach the limit of his
power.
“Previous to this time, Dr. Frank Born, the medical assistant at the
Gymnasium, had collected data from eighteen Yale students, most of whom
were trained athletes or gymnasts. The average record of these men was
87.4 lifts, the extremes being 33 and 175 lifts.
[Illustration: MR. HORACE FLETCHER
Making a World’s Record on the Dynamometer without previous training.
Dr. William G. Anderson, Director of the Yale Gymnasium, in the
Background.]
“You will notice that Mr. Fletcher _doubled_ the best record made
previous to his feat, and numerous subsequent tests failed to increase
the average of Mr. Fletcher’s competitors. Mr. Fletcher informs me
that he had done no training nor had he taken any strenuous exercise
since February, 1907. On two occasions only during the past year he
reports having done hard work in emergencies; once while following
Major-General Wood in the Philippines in climbing a volcanic mountain
through a tropical jungle on an island near Mindanao for nine hours;
and once wading through deep snow in the Himalayan Mountains, some
three miles one day and seven miles the next day, in about as many
hours. This last emergency experience came through being caught in a
blizzard near Murree, in Northern India, at 8500 feet elevation, on
the way to the vale of Kashmir. These two trials represented climatic
extremes, and Mr. Fletcher states that neither the heat nor the
cold gave him discomfort, a significant fact in estimating physical
condition.
“Before the trial on the Fisher machine, the subject’s pulse was normal
(about 72); afterwards it ran 120 beats to the minute. Five minutes
later it had fallen to 112. No later reading was taken that day.
“The hands did not tremble more than usual under resting conditions,
as Mr. Fletcher was able to hold in either hand immediately after the
test a glass brimming with water without spilling a drop. The face was
flushed, perspiration moderate, heart action regular and control of
the right foot and leg used in the test normal immediately following
the feat. I consider this a remarkable showing for a man in his
fifty-ninth year; 5 feet, 6½ inches in height, weighing 177½ pounds and
not in training.”
In order to make a more thorough test of Mr. Fletcher’s power of
endurance under varying degrees of physical strain, he underwent on
the 17th, 18th, 19th, 21st and 22nd of June, 1907, a number of other
exceedingly severe tests, of which Dr. Anderson says: “After each test
the respiration and heart action, while active, were healthy, and,
under such conditions, normal.
“There was not the slightest evidence of soreness, stiffness or
muscular fatigue either during or after the six days of the trials. Mr.
Fletcher made no apparent effort to conceal any evidence of strain or
overwork and did not show any. He informs me that he felt no distress
whatever at any time. Should any one wish to become more familiar with
the strenuousness of the movements selected, let him try them. The
effort will be more convincing than any report.
“During the thirty-five years of my own experience in physical training
and teaching, I have never tested a man who equalled Mr. Fletcher’s
record.
“The later tests, given in June, 1907, were more taxing than those
given in 1903, but Mr. Fletcher underwent the trials with more apparent
ease than he did four years ago.
“What seems to me to be the most remarkable feature of Mr. Fletcher’s
test is that a man nearing sixty years of age should show progressive
improvement of muscular quality merely as the result of dietetic care
and with no systematic physical training. The method of dietetic care,
too, as given by Mr. Fletcher, is so unusual that the results seem all
the more extraordinary. He tells me that during the four and a half
years intervening between the first and the recent examinations he has
been guided in his choice of foods and in the quality also, entirely
by his appetite, avoiding as much as possible any preconceived ideas
as to the values of different foods or the proportions of the chemical
constituents of the nourishment taken.
“During this four year period he has more than ever catered to his
body nourishment in subservience to instinctive demand. He has
especially avoided eating until appetite has strongly demanded food,
and has abstained from eating whenever he could not do so in comfort
and enjoyment. Mastication of solid food and sipping of liquids
having taste to the point of involuntary swallowing, according to
his well-known theory of thoroughness in this regard, has also been
faithfully followed.
“There is a pretty good evidence that taking food as Mr. Fletcher
practices and recommends limits the amount ingested to the bodily need
of the moment and of the day, leaving little or no excess material to
be disposed of by bacterial agency. This might account for the absence
of toxic products in the circulation to depress the tissue.
“The possible immunity from lasting fatigue and from any muscular
soreness, resulting from the unaccustomed use, and even the severe use,
of untrained muscles is of utmost importance to physical efficiency.
“My own personal observance and trial of Mr. Fletcher’s method of
attaining his surprising efficiency, strengthened by my observation of
the test-subjects of Professors Chittenden and Fisher who have come
under my care meantime, lead me to endorse the method as not only
practical but agreeable. As Mr. Fletcher states, both the mental and
mechanical factors in selecting and ingesting food are important, the
natural result of the care being a wealth of energy for expression in
physical exercise.”
FLETCHERISM
So much for Horace Fletcher’s own case.
Yet when he first announced his discovery, his own family laughed
at him, and the medical world called him crank. But by quiet, sane,
persistent work—by applying to the propaganda of his idea the same
methods that had brought him success in business, he succeeded in
impressing the scientific world with the value of his method.
An extensive literature has grown up around Mr. Fletcher’s own books.
The most important medical bodies in Europe and America have invited
him to lecture before them. Hospitals in larger cities have printed his
own code of the rules of mastication for distribution. And no large
sheet of paper was required, for the whole system could be printed on a
postal card, and room would be left for a picture of its author.
Why is complete mastication the best way of eating? Why does its
practice lead to recovery of lost health, or increase of health; to
increase of strength, to increase of endurance. Is it not a very
tedious method, and thus of more trouble than its promised benefits are
worth? Does it not waste time? Does it not lead to loss of enjoyment of
food?
These are a few of the questions which a discussion of Fletcherism
invariably arouses. We speak with a deep conviction of truth when we
say that Fletcherism leads to saving of time, instead of loss of
time; that it brings increase of sensuous enjoyment of food instead
of decrease of it; and that if it is tedious or a bore, then it is
not Fletcherizing. The very essence of Fletcherism is the dropping of
worry, the elimination of stress and strain. If you do as Fletcher
says, instead of doing as somebody says that Fletcher says, you will
chew for taste, and not for time; you will take a crust of bread, or a
morsel of potato, for instance, into your mouth and roll it with your
tongue, and press it against the roof of your mouth, and pass it to
and fro, and crunch it, and crush it; and all the while you will not
be counting the chews, nor even thinking about chewing, but on the
contrary you will be thinking of the taste of the morsel, and seeking
that taste—and finding it.
Yes, finding it, even in a crust of bread or in a morsel of potato, in
those humble foods which the most of us seem to take more as matters of
habit; for by giving the saliva in the mouth a chance to fulfill the
work for which it is put in our mouths by nature, we find that the
starch in the bread and in the potato is turned into a sweet, toothsome
and partly digested morsel of sugar.
Here is a point that answers another of the questions which arose a
paragraph or so back. This turning of the starch in bread into sugar
by the action of saliva is only one of the numerous acts of digestion
which is accomplished in the mouth by the teeth, the tongue, the
palate, and the various kinds of juices, or saliva, which are in the
mouth. Horace Fletcher pointed out, and medical science now confirms
his assertions, that many of the most important parts of the digestive
process are meant by nature to be carried out in the first three inches
of the alimentary canal. And this is the only place in all the thirty
feet or so of the alimentary canal where digestion is in our own
control. If we bolt or insufficiently masticate our food, these mouth
processes of digestion are simply not accomplished; and for this the
whole system suffers sooner or later. The stomach and the intestines
are called on to do a great deal of extra work, and much of this
extra work is of a kind which they are unable to do. Consequently,
what food can not be digested must decompose in the intestines, with
the consequent production of poisonous fluids and gases which permeate
the body. The whole machinery of digestion is thrown out of gear. All
the various germs of disease race to be first to enter the disarranged
mechanism, as criminals rush to a city that is in disorder. The blood
not being as well nourished as it should be, the white army of the
soldiers of the body begin to weaken and to die, and the forces of
disease penetrate through their warding lines and attack the fort of
life from many sides, or else concentrate their strength in the form of
some virulent sickness.
Thorough mastication, on the other hand, means the reverse of these
conditions. Almost incredible seem the hundreds of stories which
we personally know to be true of men and women who have used Mr.
Fletcher’s method as a means to enter the land of good health. In
the opinion of Dr. Kellogg of Battle Creek, “There is no doubt that
thorough mastication of food solves more therapeutic problems than any
other thing that can be mentioned. It solves the whole question of
the right combination of foods; solves the question of the quantity
of foods, and the quality of foods, after one has got his appetite
trained, his natural instinct trained; and when it comes to certain
diseases like acidity of the stomach, hyper-acidity or hypo-acidity,
dilation of the stomach or cirrhosis of the liver, or any other trouble
with the digestive organs, if it does not effect a radical cure it
makes it possible to tolerate a condition which otherwise would be
deadly in a short time. It makes it possible for a patient to live a
long time, enjoying comfortable health, where otherwise he would be
crippled so that he could not live long at all.”
Although we insist upon the fact that Fletcherism is simple, and easy,
too, once you have really begun its proper use, yet we also know that
there are many difficulties which the average man or woman has to face
at the outset. Professor Fisher encountered these difficulties when
experimenting with his students at Yale, and we are indebted to him for
enumerating some of them. And these difficulties, like the habit of
hasty eating itself, are products of our civilization.
We mean such difficulties as, first, _conventionality_, or the desire
to eat what others eat, and the unwillingness to appear different;
_politeness_, the desire to please one’s host, or hostess, and eat
“what’s set before you,” or to eat something which you know you don’t
want or which you know is bad for you, because you fear to offend
somebody or other who has cooked it, or bought it for you; _food
notions_, or the opinion that certain foods are “wholesome,” and that
certain foods should be avoided as injurious even if delicious to the
taste; _narrowness of choice_, as at a boarding house table (and a
great number of home tables!) which often supplies what is not wanted
and withholds what is; and, lastly, habit, by which the particular
kinds and amounts of food which have become customary through the
action and interaction of the causes previously named, are repeated
day after day, without thought.
“Habit hunger” is another of our handicaps. Habit hunger is said by Mr.
Fletcher to be responsible for a vast deal of overeating. He refers
to the fact that when we are children we eat at least one-third more
proteid or tissue-building foods, in proportion to our size, than we
require as adults, for the reason that our growing frames must then be
nourished and upbuilt; but when we reach the adult stage we are apt to
maintain this excessive consumption of proteid food—and proteid, as we
shall see later on, is the chief source of dietary ills.
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.
[Illustration: PROF. RUSSELL H. CHITTENDEN, PH.D., LL.D., SC.D.,
Director Sheffield Scientific School, Yale University. He has
conducted many dietary experiments from the physiologist’s point
of view.]
“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.