(d) That we have still to find the optimum health and the optimum diet.
He only kicks at the low proteid. Now I don’t care a “kuss” for the low proteid, as such, or high proteid. Proteid like everything else will be demanded by the appetite when it is wanted.
Our great danger, to my mind, is the tendency so strongly exemplified by some of prescribing diets and quantities and the length of time food should be chewed.[1] Now the very errors we are fighting against are the prescription of methods on insufficient information or knowledge. You have gone straight back to Nature. There is your strength in convincing the scientific world, and we must study the problem from that point of view if we are to get any great degree of success.
A. had nothing to say when I told him that I did not hold by either high or low proteid but only by my appetite and taste, developed by ample mouth opportunity to discriminate, which I hoped, in time, to understand more thoroughly than I do now. He told me that he feared that there would be great physical deterioration after a long period of low proteid. I said that I did not believe it would be the case by your method. For instance, right in the midst of a long period of most satisfactory low-proteid supply, I once ate nearly a whole chicken with some ham at Penegal. I could not get saliva for anything else.[2] In short, then, I insisted only on thorough mastication to protect taste and appetite, and had no other theories. I was only concerned in observing the factors determining my taste and appetite. I would be more than contented to leave the question of minimum and maximum quantity of proteid to be settled in the future after normality had been established by practical demonstration.
Yours faithfully,
Hubert Higgins.
Extracts from Dr. Kellogg’s Letter
Battle Creek, Mich.
October 7, 1903.
Mr. Horace Fletcher.
Dear Friend,—Yours of September 30th just reached my hands and I hasten to reply.