There is an old German proverb to the effect that if food is properly
chewed it is half digested: _Gut gekaut ist halb verdaut_.
This is literally true, but in England and America, although physicians
and others have long known it to be so, it was not impressed on the
general public's attention until the newspapers began to comment--some
seriously, others facetiously--on the statement that Gladstone, in
1848, adopted certain rules for chewing food to which he ever after
adhered and to which some observers attributed his remarkable physical
vigor. "Previous to that," said the "Pall Mall Gazette," "he had always
paid great attention to the requirements of nature, but at that date he
laid down as a rule for his children that thirty-two bites should be
given to each mouthful of meat and a somewhat lesser number to bread,
fish, etc."
Now Gladstone was wrong in suggesting that meat needed more munching
than bread. The stomach takes care of meat if it is not swallowed in
_too_ large chunks; whereas bread, as well as potatoes, together with
oatmeal and other cereals, no matter how soft, should be kept in the
mouth some time to enable the saliva to partly digest them and prepare
them for the lower viscera.
This error, however, did not detract seriously from the value of
Gladstone's directions. The main thing was that his "home rule" called
the attention of two nations to the unwisdom of bolting food and the
advantage to health resulting from keeping it for some time in the
mouth. In its far-reaching effect on millions in two worlds it was
perhaps of greater and more lasting value than any of his acts as a
statesman.
This assertion gains strength from the fact that it was Gladstone's
example that started Horace Fletcher on his road as a reformer of
the foolish eating habits of Americans, and others, but Americans in
particular.
He has himself related (in the "Ladies' Home Journal" for September,
1909) how it was that his thoughts were first directed into this
channel through an epicurean friend who had a snipe estate among
the marshlands of Louisiana and a truffle preserve in France, and
who faithfully followed Gladstone's rules in regard to the thorough
chewing of food. In 1898 Mr. Fletcher began to work out the problem for
himself, to the great advantage of his health.
At the age of forty he was an old man, on the way to a rapid decline.
His hair was white, he weighed 217 pounds, he was harrowed by
indigestion, and had "that tired feeling." At the age of sixty, after
eleven years of experiment, he had reduced his weight to 170 pounds,
felt strong and well, and had forgotten what it was to have the tired
feeling.
His experience thus was similar to that of the Italian nobleman, Luigi
Cornaro (1467-1566), who was a dissipated wreck at the age of forty,
but who by reforming his way of eating, regained his health and lived
to be nearly a hundred. After his eighty-third year he wrote four
treatises on diet and longevity; his autobiography has passed through
more than forty English editions. His wisdom might be summed up in
these words: "As you grow older eat less."
Horace Fletcher is the Cornaro of the nineteenth century. Everybody who
ever "knows he has a stomach" should read one or both the books he has
written on this subject: "The A B-Z of Our Own Nutrition," and "The
New Glutton or Epicure." The first named owes its value largely to the
fact that it includes reprints of valuable papers by eminent men of
science and physicians, the investigations of most of whom were in part
prompted, or inspired, by Mr. Fletcher's writings. The most important
of these are Dr. Harvey Campbell's Observations on Mastication, and
Prof. Pawlow's articles on Psychic Influence in Digestion.
Most persons labor--or act as if they labored--under the delusion
that the mouth was made chiefly for the _ingestion_ of food and that
the sole use of saliva is to lubricate it so that it can be easily
and quickly swallowed. Mr. Fletcher did not discover the fact that
the mouth is also a most important organ of _digestion_, with the
aid of saliva; but he emphasized this important fact in his writings
as no other writer had ever done, proclaiming it from the housetops
till thousands began to listen and heed and learn and benefit by his
preaching; and therein lies the importance of his name in the history
of dietetic reform.
The gist of his doctrine may be given in a few words: keep all food
(soft as well as hard, liquid as well as solid, moist as well as dry)
in the mouth and chew it till it has become thoroughly mingled with
the saliva, has lost all its flavor, and is ready to disappear down
the throat without an effort at swallowing. Gladstone's directions
in regard to thirty-two masticatory movements are all right for
some foods, but others require no more than twenty, while for some
(onions) seven hundred hardly suffice to remove the odor and make them
digestible. _Unless the mouth thus does its work, the lower digestive
tract has to do it at ten times the expenditure of vital force, and the
result is dyspepsia._
[Illustration: HORACE FLETCHER]
Never, surely, was preaching more needed than these sermons of Horace
Fletcher to the victims of America's national scourge of chronic
indigestion.
It cannot be denied that there is a considerable amount of questionable
faddism and exaggeration in his doctrines. He, himself, frankly
apologizes for such details in them as "may suggest the scrappiness and
extravagance of an intemperate screed," on the ground that "so-called
screeds sometimes attract attention where sober statement fails to be
heard"; which is unfortunately true.
Many of Fletcher's followers accept his exaggerations along with the
sound parts of his doctrines. They endorse the statements that he,
"in inaugurating the chewing reform has done more to help suffering
humanity than any other man of the present generation"; or, as another
writer, a physician, put it in a letter to him: "What you have done to
unfold physiologic mastication means more for human weal than all the
mere medical prescribes have given the world from Adam to the present
day."
It cannot be denied that medical and other scientific writers were
culpable in not enlightening the public on these important matters, and
it serves them right, therefore, if Fletcher has got the credit and the
fame for doing this. It is estimated that there are already more than
200,000 "Fletcherites" in the United States. In the hope of increasing
their number, in the rational sense of the word, let me dwell on a
few of the things in which, in my opinion, Mr. Fletcher is right, and
some of those beside which readers of his books will do well to place
question marks. In particular, I wish to call further attention to his
valuable remarks on the necessity of doing more "mouth work" than most
of us do, and on the importance of agreeable Flavor in food as an aid
to digestion.
Many thousands of otherwise healthy persons bewail the fact that they
have to avoid some of their favorite dishes because they find them
indigestible. To these individuals Fletcherism, as endorsed by Dr.
Campbell, brings the cheering message that they can eat anything they
please provided they give it the proper mouth treatment.
Inasmuch as individuals differ in regard to the supply of saliva, no
general rules can be laid down as to how many bites any particular
mouthful requires. One person may dispose of a morsel of bread in
thirty mastications while another may need fifty before it has
disappeared down the throat without an effort at swallowing. Mr.
Fletcher once had a tussle with a challot, or young onion, which
"required 722 mastications before disappearing through involuntary
swallowing." But when it was down it left no odor upon the breath and
created no disturbance whatever.
Could anything more triumphantly proclaim the wonders of Fletcherism?
Here is another miracle: "Abundant experiment has been made by those
to whom 'Boston brown bread' was formerly little less than a poison,
to prove the assertion that, sufficiently mixed with saliva, it is
perfectly digestible and that the delicious taste of the bread after
forty or fifty bites--about one-half minute--gets sweeter and sweeter,
and attains its greatest sweetness and most delicate taste at the very
last, when it has dissolved into liquid form and most of it has escaped
into the stomach."