EVERY MAN MASTER OF HIS OWN STOMACH.
Instinct Best Determines What You
Should Eat, So Eat What Your
Normal Instinct Tells You To.
In that series of compromises which we call life there is no compromise more perplexing than the compromise with the stomach. No problem requires more earnest thought than the food problem. It is the stomach that makes men work. There would be no produce exchange were it not for the stomach—no yellow fields of wheat and corn, no grazing herds of cattle, no fleets of white-sailed fishing-vessels. Clothing and shelter are secondary demands. The stomach is master; and, as is ever likely to be the case with autocrats, it is selfish—wherefore we humor it—we hold out crutches to it—we offer it tempting inducements to be lenient with us.
A sense of relief, therefore, is produced by reading Dr. Woods Hutchinson's article, "Some Diet Delusions," in the April McClure's; for therein is advanced the doctrine of "intelligent omnivorousness." Says Dr. Hutchinson:
Every imaginable experiment upon what would and what would not support life must have been tried thousands of years ago, and yet our most striking proofs of how highly men value their "precious right of private haziness," as George Eliot shrewdly terms it, are to be found in the realm of dietetics. The "light that never was on sea or land" still survives for the most matter-of-fact of us in the memory of "the pies that mother used to make," and nowhere else do we find preferences so widely accepted as evidence, and prejudices as matters of fact, as in this arena. In fact, if we were merely to listen to what is said, and still more to read what is printed, we would come to the conclusion that the human race had established absolutely nothing beyond possibility of dispute in this realm.