WHAT IS PROPER MASTICATION?
Not Excessive Chewing--Gladstone's Advice--Salival Action on Starch
Foods
Notwithstanding the fact that Fletcherizing stands for tasting as
the important thing to accomplish before food is swallowed, and that
biting, chewing, or masticating is merely a means to secure the end of
thorough tasting, nine-tenths of all who know anything about the claims
for Fletcherizing insist on thinking that it merely means "excessive
mastication." The National Food Reform Association of England, in a
bulletin giving advice concerning the feeding of school children,
intended to be posted in school-rooms and private dining rooms, speak
of Fletcherizing in its ideal practice as "Excessive Mastication."
This is just what Fletcherizing is not. The very essence of the method
of performing the personal responsibility is avoiding excess of
anything, excessive or laboured chewing among the rest.
There is little if any harm in keeping food in the mouth as long as
possible, and I believe that it is impossible to have too much saliva
mixed with it when it is swallowed, because when it is properly tasted
and insalivated it is almost impossible to hold it back from the food
gate at the back of the mouth. There is always suction there ready to
draw welcome nourishment in when it is ready, and readiness touches a
button, electrically relieving the muscular springs that close the gate
tightly during tasting, and, literally a "team of horses could not hold
it."
What the mystics of the stomach-diseases profession called _bradefagy_,
or, in plain English, excessive chewing, can only be performed with
painful tediousness. It makes work--hard work--of the act, and that is
just as much opposed to Fletcherizing as it is to common sense, horse
sense, and all of the natural senses.
Now just for one moment please pay attention to one who is telling you
something Mother Nature wants you to know more than anything else in
the whole category of intelligence. Fletcherizing is
NOT EXCESSIVE CHEWING
or tedious chewing, or long chewing. The things that require to be
chewed long are not good food, and by that sign you may find out their
unprofitableness better than in any other way. Good taste from good
food is not long lasting. When the mouth is "watering" for the food
in sight, or even in thought of it, the coupons of taste they carry
with them are short, but represent large figures of satisfaction and
nourishment.
MR. GLADSTONE'S ADVICE
Now listen to some figures regarding the number of bites or chews
that some foods require under varying circumstances. Mr. Gladstone's
advice to his children which has become classic, viz.: "Chew your
food thirty-two times at least, so as to give each of your thirty-two
teeth a chance at it," was a general recommendation. Mr. Gladstone
was observed once when he was a guest at "high table" at Trinity
College, Cambridge, and the average number of his "bites" (masticatory
movements) as far as they could be counted, was about seventy-five.
That did not speak very well for Trinity fare, unless Mr. Gladstone
happened to choose food that required that amount of chewing.
Even if Mr. Gladstone did devote seventy-five masticatory movements to
each morsel, as an average, such thoroughness would not have involved
an unusual length of time for a hearty meal. If you will try the
experiment when you are "good and hungry," having a "working-man's
appetite," and disposing of good bread and butter the while, which
should have nearly, or quite, seventy bites to the ordinary mouthful,
you will find that thirty mouthfuls will pretty nearly, or completely,
satisfy your working-man's appetite. Mixed foods take much less time,
usually about half, and still the seventy-five-rhythm act will consume
only about twenty minutes to perform with physiologic thoroughness.
SALIVAL ACTION ON STARCH FOODS
Here are some statements easy to prove or disprove by anyone, with
real compensation in the way of new revelations relative to the
possibilities of gustatory enjoyment.
Starchy foods, such as bread, potatoes, etc., require from thirty to
seventy masticatory movements to assist saliva to turn the starch
into "grape sugar," which is the form in which it can be used as
nourishment.[I]
[I] Although I have been a close student of the subject for more
than fifteen years in the best physiological-chemical laboratories
for long periods of time--and always emulating the man from Missouri
in demanding of the wise ones in the science of the laboratories to
"Show me!"--I make the statements relative to what happens below
the guillotine line in Mother Nature's exclusive territory of
responsibility on the authority of the laboratory territory experts;
but only, mind you, when my personal observations and business logic
approve the conclusion. Therefore, when I tell you that starch turned
into dextrose, or "grape sugar," is assimilable as nourishment,
and that starch which is not thus chemically transformed by saliva
is not capable of becoming nourishment, I am not "speaking by
the book," which Mother Nature has opened for me to read--unless
biological-chemists can be considered to be extra-enlightened forms of
nature.
You will at once think, no doubt, that a range of numbers extending
from thirty to seventy is pretty wide. So it is; but conditions
regarding the qualities of not only breads, but potatoes, and also
conditions relative to the strength or supply of saliva, differ
greatly. When the appetite is keen, the mouth watering, as they are
at the beginning of a meal, bread or potatoes may be negotiated into
nutriment ready for the stomach in much less time than later on.
Appetite "peters," as miners say, gradually, and does not stop with a
bang and shut off like an electric light when connection is broken. It
checks up, slows down, and tapers off gradually, and that is where the
canny intelligence of a faithful Fletcherizer stands himself in good
usefulness. When Appetite gently says: "Now, really, you are still
rather good to my assistant Taste, and he would not object to a few
bites more; but if you stop now and change off to something else which
I have in mind, and for which I have a use in our organism, I will not
object." In plain words: "I have enough for the present; switch off on
to----"
[Illustration: THE AUTHOR FEELING HIMSELF TO BE THE MOST FORTUNATE
PERSON ALIVE.]
The difference between putting on fat in the case of the person who
is disposed or permitted to put on more fat than is comfortable, and
losing some of the surplus carried on the abdomen or elsewhere, is
the discrimination exercised in regard to the final satisfaction of
appetite. Those last two, three, or a few mouthfuls after Appetite
has said gently "Enough," and before the same Appetite says, loudly,
"Stop!" are the difference between obesity and decency of form.
I really believe, from the results of my experiences for the past
fifteen years in getting tips from Mother Nature, and trying to induce
mankind in general and my friends in particular to accept them as
"straight" from Mother Nature, that persons who have enough respect for
themselves to be interested in physical culture must come to the rescue
of the pseudo-scientists who are dulled by their own dope, and who are
suffering from the malaria which collects in the dark ruts they are
following in the tortuous complications of the alimentary canal. The
physical culturists must build models of normality for the scientists
to study.
When giving information as to what happens in the mouth, and as to
what happens as a result of proper head digestion, I feel as if I am
sitting on the upper lip of Mother Nature herself, and entrusting her
messages to the current of her own sweet breath for distribution among
her human children.