Why Light Lunches
¶ When your stomach is busy digesting a big meal your brain takes a vacation. This little fact is responsible for millions of light luncheons daily. The strenuous manual worker can empty a full dinner pail and profit by it but the brain worker long ago discovered that a heavy midday meal gave him a heavy brain for hours afterwards.
Clear Thinking and a Clear Stomach
¶ Clear thinking demands a clear stomach because an empty stomach means that the blood reserves so necessary to vivid thinking are free to go to the brain. Without good blood coursing at a fairly rapid rate through the brain no man can think keenly or concentratedly. This explains why you think of so many important things when your stomach is empty that never occur to you when your energy is being monopolized by digestion.
Heavy Dinners and Heavy Speeches
¶ All public speakers have learned that a heavy dinner means a heavy speech.
Elbert Hubbard's rule when on his speaking tours was one every orator should follow. "Ten dollars extra if I have to eat," said Fra Elbertus—a far cry from the days when we "fed up" the preacher at Sunday dinner with the expectation of hearing a better sermon!
Uses His Head
¶ Just as assimilation is the favorite activity of the Alimentive type, head work is the favorite activity of the large-headed Cerebral. He is so far removed, evolutionally, from the stomach stage that his stomach is as much a remnant with him as the brain is a rudiment with the extreme Alimentive.
The extra blood supply which nature furnishes to any over-developed part of the body also tends to encourage him in thinking, just as the same condition encourages the fat man in eating.