THE THREE INCHES OF PERSONAL RESPONSIBILITY
The Effect of Prejudice--Professor Fisher's Experiment
While Professor Cannon was groping about in Nature's alimentary
preserves in comparative darkness, I concentrated my attention upon
the first three inches of the canal which comprise the field of our
personal responsibility, and which has been neglected by most of the
students of the subject.
While the area considered was right out in front, and open to visual
inspection all the time, the opportunity to study its most important
features having to do with nutrition was not continuous. Mr. Edison
may rivet his attention on an electrical problem and stick to it for
forty-eight hours on a stretch, but Taste is only occasionally on
exhibition for observation and cannot be pressed into long service
at any one time. For test of normal Taste only the time required for
the most economic nutrition is available. A real body-need with keen
appetite is the first healthy excuse for calling on Taste to perform.
Normal appetite, too, being satisfied with appetising foods, is of
brief duration. One may linger over a meal as long as desired, enjoying
the intimate memory of the gustatory gratification in leisurely
process, but in case of a first-class labouring man's hunger and
the exigency of a railway station dinner in the midst of a desert,
industrious application of faithful Fletcherizing for fifteen minutes
will usually supply the real needs of the moment for eight hours at
least. This estimate involves a healthy condition of the nutrition
department, including an abundance of powerful saliva for the hastening
of the mouth treatment, but such a beatific facility can be secured
in a very short time by the faithful and intelligent employment of all
departments of head digestion.
A person who specialises on the mouth end of the alimentary canal has
plenty of time to rest between inspections. He will naturally watch for
any feeling of results that may happen while Mother Nature is doing her
twenty-five feet of digestion and absorption, but if his part has been
performed properly, there will be no news of the process until there
is something to excrete from the material ingested. When this occurs,
if a microscope is handy for minute inspection, it will be found that
most of the excreta is composed of what I think of as the dandruff of
the alimentary canal. It is composed of shapeless particles of skin
which have been discarded by the mucous surface of the canal in the
same manner that dead skin is being continually detached from the head
and all parts of the external surface of the body. Depending on the
nature of the food, there may be small particles also of indigestible
cellulose from vegetable foods and the condensed solids of the
digestive juices when they have been used and worn out.
THE EFFECT OF PREJUDICE
I have noticed that the early prejudices in favour of or against
foods are likely to prevail throughout life. I have observed this in
trying to secure local appreciation for my own favourite New England
dishes in foreign countries. Tinning, or canning, science has made it
possible to serve Boston baked beans and brown bread or even an entire
Thanksgiving Dinner in Japan or Borneo, but it is impossible to excite
native appreciation for them commensurate with the cost and trouble of
the transportation. In Scandinavia, where they file the appetite to the
keenest of edges with the piquancy of the "Smoer Broed," or "Smoer
Goes,"[K] the American taste for very sweet things is not appreciated.
Chocolates for that market are more bitter than sweet, and so it goes
throughout the world where head digestion is important in determining
the prescription of foods.
[K] Literally "Butter-goose"; a table set apart, with bread and butter
and a variety of snacks.
At one time, during a year and a half of travel in unusual countries
where the French, English or American _menu_ is not easily available,
I never missed an opportunity to study the effect of head prejudice on
digestion. If the fortunate opportunity occurs to sample the sumptuous
"ris tavel" of Java, there will be the best of chances to confirm my
observation in this regard. This dish is varied in sumptuousness,
or variety, but the humblest offering of it consists of a large and
deep soup plate piled high in the middle with snowy rice with each
individual grain unbroken. This, to begin with, is a triumph of
oriental culinary art. Surrounding this rice mountain are dabs of
every sort of a "relish" any one ever imagined. You select these from
tiers of plates borne in each hand by as many as a dozen servants,
following each other in procession, and presenting opportunities of
choice amounting to twenty or more, perhaps even thirty or more in
extraordinary cases. Hence it is the privilege of the guest to take
much or little of any, or all, of the condiments according to the state
of his appetite or greed. All the colours and nearly the whole food
kingdom are represented, and the temptation is increased by the art of
rearrangement. There is no way of judging what each sort of relish is:
It may be fish, fowl, vegetable, tuber, side-meat, or a combination of
nuts or fruits, as far as the intelligence of the uninitiated goes.
There were several members of the party of foreigners of different
degrees of prejudice against anything strange in appearance. To one,
all of the comestibles were "utterly impossible," and remained so to
the end; while to others curiosity got the better of suspicion, and
finally the appetites looked forward to dinner-time with especial
cordiality, for the rice-mountain relish-cordon and the complicated
combination were digested with ease.
The standard dish, however, of the Javan dinner is boiled potatoes
and beefsteak swimming in a pint of good butter gravy, so that even
the conscientious dietist with vegetarian preferences may revel in
something that smacks of home and mother, with such an abundance of
luscious fruits that nothing but gustatory delight happens as a usual
thing. Still, it is the same in Java or Japan, in London, Paris,
Berlin, Vienna, Rome or New York, the digestion of food is under the
control of the head and therefore may be called head digestion.
PROFESSOR FISHER'S EXPERIMENT
The most important large experiment for the testing of head digestion
under conditions of strict scientific control was that inaugurated and
conducted by Professor Irving Fisher, of Yale University, in America.
Professor Fisher occupies the Chair of Political Economy at Yale, has
made extensive researches into the factors that influence the economies
or extravagances of living, and is President of the Committee of One
Hundred of the American Association for the Advancement of Science on
Health.
Professor Fisher's interest in my revelations and tests relative to
the potency of head digestion came primarily from a personal test
which worked wonders for him in establishing a foundation for good
health. He was not satisfied with the later Chittenden experiments,
because they substituted academic prescription for natural selection in
formulating the rules of the inquiry. Like myself, in conducting the
original researches, Professor Fisher realised that the practical value
of my discoveries was that no one needed a biological chemist to order
his meals for him or tell his appetite what his body needed in the way
of food elements.
[Illustration: HORACE FLETCHER IN HIS MASTER OF ARTS ROBES.]
The Fisher experiment worked with nine healthy undergraduates who were
ambitious to take high scholastic honours, and who had little time for
athletics or any form of physical exercise, they being types of the
average University undergraduate.
A generous table was supplied them with meat and every variety of food
that usually composed college fare. The only instructions were that
thorough mastication and especial attention to the enjoyment of the
food as recommended by me in my books should be faithfully performed.
This course was pursued for half a year, and for the rest of the year,
in addition to the careful head treatment and enjoyment, preference
was to be given to foods known to be low in nitrogen content; but not
to the extent of suppressing any distinct call of appetite for them.
In the first half of the experiment the men held their own on about
40 per cent. less food, computed by cost, and increased their
strength-endurance ability by something more than 100 per cent., with
the added felicity of feeling unusually fit all of the time, entirely
escaping the slack or sick spells they had been accustomed to, and
improving greatly in their general studentability, that is: power of
concentration, memory, mental comfort, profundity of sleep, etc.
During the second half of the experiment still more improvement was
secured owing to the readiness of the body to accommodate itself to the
wish by favouring the economies.
I have not a copy of the report at hand. It is included in the
publications of Yale University about 1905.
[Illustration: THE AUTHOR, ON HIS SIXTIETH BIRTHDAY, PERFORMING FEATS
OF AGILITY]
[Illustration: AND STRENGTH WHICH WOULD BE REMARKABLE EVEN IN A YOUNG
ATHLETE.]
While all of the abundance of confirmatory evidence which has
accumulated since 1898 is valuable and gratifying, the verdict of the
unremitting observation since then is that the problem of nutrition is
always a personal one. After fifteen years of devotion to the study
of the head-end question, with due attention to the tell-tale excreta
and the product expressed in terms of energy and general comfort, I am
unable to predict what my body is going to want to-morrow in the way
of nutrition supply. I can say with some confidence that if I go on
doing as I have been accustomed to doing daily, and no shock of grief
or surprise intervenes to upset all calculations, I am likely to find
nutritive satisfaction as expressed by appetite among the foods that
are commonly agreeable to me.
If I am compelled or impelled to do a great stunt of walking or other
unusual exertion, or receive crushing news, all my present predictions
may be useless. The body itself, from the hair on the head to each
finger or toe-nail will know what it wants and will have given to the
caterer Appetite its requisition covering the need. In the meantime
each brain cell and all of the bones have not been neglectful of
their sustenance requirements, nor have they been backward in letting
Appetite know.
It is fortunate that the common needs of digestion may be supplied from
a limited range of food varieties. Milk is all-sufficient always for
general supply of the nutritive requisites. In the plebeian potato,
which has attained to royal rank as the result of the extensive
experiments of Dr. Hindhede, of Denmark, in co-operation with Madsen
the Faithful, has been found full nourishment for ten months, at
least, when supplemented by butter or margarine to furnish the fuel
supply. Even in this surprising revelation no academic prescription was
infallible. Potatoes differ in nutritive value as much as 50 per cent.
Fresh-cooked and well-cooked ones alone fill the bill of sufficiency,
and full head-work in assuring easy digestion was made the first rule
of the test. For four months I served as a check test-subject and speak
from experience.
Nothing is ever accomplished except by a division of labour and on the
just division of responsibility depends the success of effort. Nature
has given to us the head-end of responsibility.