Good Health and How We Won It, With an Account of the New Hygiene

by Upton Sinclair; Michael Williams

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.