Luigi Cornaro suggested that all persons in his time ate more than was necessary; most persons ate twice as much as was good for them; and some, who were extravagantly gluttonous, ate ten times as much as was their most economic need; and Cornaro, who was a dissipated wreck at forty, reformed his manner of eating and lived to be a hundred to prove his declaration.
Experiments carried on in this country and in Europe during the past five years confirm this estimate of habitual excess; but fortunately they have also revealed a natural protection, heretofore unappreciated, available to all, which can regulate the appetite to suit the real needs of nutrition and thus avoid the dangerous excess which predisposes to discomfort and disease.
Luigi Cornaro lived more than three hundred years ago. His charmingly frank and interesting autobiography has been published in English upwards of forty times in different new editions, and no one has disproved the possibility or probability of his claim. We all know that Cornaro was right. We know, in a general way, that the great Italian dietitian and philosopher was wise and uttered wisdom, and we are told that most, if not all, of the diseases which pain, worry, and afflict us are caused by indigestion or mal-assimilation of food, the result of some indiscretions of eating. The questions then are “What are our indiscretions?” “How can we avoid them?” and “What is the new discovery that will protect us and, at the same time, add to the pleasures of the palate and of living?”
The answers to all these queries will be found herein, as will also an explanation of the very active interest which is being taken just now in the problem of human nutrition by scientific and military authorities, as evidenced by the Yale investigation.
The author has, in collaboration with several others, found a way how not to eat too much while eating all that the appetite desires, and in a way that leads to a maximum of good taste and at a minimum of cost and waste, but it is necessary to test many persons of different physiques and varying temperaments, and also to test other methods of attainment of economy, to learn what is best for general application, and that is what is being done at Yale.
The cost to the pocket that is saved by economic nutrition is of little matter as compared with the saving of the waste of energy and the menace of disease.
Nature certainly never intended that we should weaken, depress, and distress ourselves in the way that is common to present-day living, as is made evident by the prevalence of discomfort and disease relative to our daily food. Nature’s plan of evolution does not work that way in general, does not retrograde in the progress of the improvement of plants and dumb animals, and certainly does not intend that Man, the First Assistant of Nature in the cultivation of things and in the domestication of the powerful natural forces, should suffer and become degenerate contrary to her general law.