The effects for good upon the organism of efficient mastication being profound and far-reaching, it follows that inefficient mastication must lead to many evils. What these are we have now to consider; but first it will be well to inquire into the causes of the defective mastication which prevails among moderns.
1. Softness of food.—By far the most important of these lies in the nature of the food taken. The food of to-day—of the late agricultural age period, as I have termed it—is for the most part soft and pappy, of a kind which does not compel thorough mastication; so much so, indeed, that, as I have already said, we may speak of this as the age of pap. This feature is especially noticeable in the case of children’s diet: under the modern system children are kept on a liquid, or semi-liquid, diet, not merely during the first months, but during the first years of life, and at the seventh or eighth month all kinds of artificial saccharide foods in liquid or semi-liquid form are poured into the child’s stomach; thereafter he is fed on such viands as mashed potatoes and gravy, rusks soaked in milk, milk puddings, bread dipped in bacon fat, pounded mutton, thin bread-and-butter, and the like; and we are told that this is the kind of diet best suited to the young human, from the time of weaning to the end of the second year! The same pernicious methods are adopted subsequently. “Perhaps the great majority of children after they have got their complete set of temporary teeth have,” writes Dr. Sim Wallace,[21] “a dietary such as the following. Breakfast: bread-and-milk or porridge, milk, tea, coffee, or cocoa, bread-and-butter, perhaps an egg. Dinner: potatoes and gravy, or meat, milk pudding. Tea: milk or tea with bread-and-butter, jam, cakes. Supper: bread or biscuit and milk.” Now food of this kind does not invite mastication, and it finds its way into the stomach all too readily. Hence the instinct to masticate has little opportunity of exercise and, not being properly exercised, tends, as I have said, to die out. Small wonder that the child nourished on such pappy food acquires the habit of bolting it, and learns to reject hard, coarse foods in favour of the softer kinds; everything nowadays must be tender, pultaceous, or “short.” Given a choice between a food compelling little or no mastication and one necessitating prolonged mastication—as between, say, fresh Vienna bread and an Abernethy biscuit—and in nineteen cases out of twenty the one which gives the least trouble in eating will be chosen. To such absurd lengths has this harmful custom been pushed that even bread crust is avoided by many. Witness the fashion of eating bread-and-butter with a minimum of crust; order bread-and-butter at any place of refreshment, and the last thing you will be served with is a plateful of crusts of bread. Many establishments, indeed, make a regular practice of giving away their crusts as unsaleable. Thus, the rectangular loaves used for bread-and-butter in the “Aërated bread-shops” are cut transversely into slices, each loaf thus yielding two end crusts which are put into baskets for the poor, only the soft crumby pieces being reserved for the customers, to be, in due course, no doubt washed down by copious libations of tea and coffee.
When we trace the diet of the modern from childhood upwards we find the same story: it tends to remain soft and pappy to the end. Animal food, especially as it comes to the tables of the well-to-do, necessitates very little mastication. It is the coarser varieties of vegetable food alone which call out the full functional activity of the masticatory apparatus, but the vegetable food of to-day is rarely of a kind to do this; cooked vegetables, such as potatoes, greens, peas, and beans, can be, and generally are, swallowed after little or no preliminary mastication, and our flour is so carefully deprived of its fibrous portions and so cunningly dealt with in the bakehouse and kitchen in the making of bread, cakes, and pastry which shall eat light and short that these articles get very little chewing; while such vegetable products as rice, vermicelli, tapioca, and macaroni are, as served at table, so soft that they slip down into the stomach almost as readily as simple milk. Let any one run through his dietary of any one day, and he will realise how very little work his masticatory apparatus is called upon to perform. It will read something like the following. Breakfast: porridge and milk, eggs, bacon, bread, and marmalade. Lunch: fish, tender meat, boiled vegetables, bread, some “sweet,” and cheese. Tea: bread, butter, and cake. Dinner: much the same as lunch. What opportunity, I ask, does such a bill-of-fare afford for the development of teeth and jaws, and for the proper functional activity of the salivary glands?
2. Defective masticatory apparatus.—Another potent cause of inefficient mastication is some defect in the masticatory apparatus, and defects of this kind are very common in those who have not been accustomed to masticate thoroughly in early life. Foremost among these are irregularities of the teeth leading to faulty “bite” and caries of the teeth which causes them to be tender or to break away, if it does not lead to their actual extraction. Mastication cannot be thorough where the bite is defective, for this not only leads to imperfect opposition of the upper and lower teeth, but renders the lower ones incapable of that ample lateral movement, against the upper which is needful to normal mastication.
3. Idiosyncrasy.—Some are temperamentally more disposed to hurry over their meals than others. The katabolic, restless, nervous individual is more apt to swallow his food hastily than is his more deliberate and phlegmatic brother. Individual differences in this respect are even observed among the lower animals. Thus, one of a pair of horses of about the same age and build is nervous and excitable and inclined to bolt its food, while its companion of more stolid temperament is a thorough and efficient masticator. The former shows comparatively little wearing down of the teeth, and often suffers from indigestion, a large portion of corn grains passing through his digestive canal intact; in the latter the teeth are well worn, indigestion never occurs, and but very few grains pass through the digestive tract unchanged. It may be objected here that we cannot help temperament, and to a large extent this is true; but much can be done towards modifying it, and it is something to know where dangers, temperamental dangers, among others, lie.
4. Circumstances of life.—Again, in this hurrying, strenuous age people are much less deliberate than in the easy, slow-going days of long ago. A meal is too often regarded as something to be got through quickly, as taking up time which might be devoted to something more profitable. Especially is this true of breakfast and lunch; it is no uncommon thing for a business man to hurry through his breakfast in a few minutes, preparatory to rushing off to his train, and his lunch as likely as not is as hastily swallowed in his office or at a bar. Tradesmen are apt to take their meals in mere snatches; apprentices, shop girls, and other “hands” are often not allowed sufficient time for their meals; while, to come to the professions, we all know how the busy medical man, for instance, is often obliged to take a hurried snack in the short intervals between seeing his patients. No wonder that thus circumstanced people acquire the habit of bolting their food. A meal should be regarded as an end, and an important end, in itself. It should be taken at leisure, body and mind being, for the time being, given up to it, and to agreeable social intercourse. If this rule were always observed a most important source of inefficient mastication would be removed.
Section III. From London Lancet, July 25, 1903
Evils resulting from Inefficient Mastication
Too much food is eaten.—Inefficient mastication conduces to excessive eating. Now it is obvious that soft foods, and these constitute the bulk of our modern dietary, pass much more readily into the stomach than coarse, hard foods which compel a certain amount of preliminary mastication, and for this reason the former predispose to excessive eating: hence a danger at all periods of life, not only in grown-ups but in children, even infants; brought up as the latter are, mainly on liquid and pappy foods, many of them consume not only far more than is needful, but far more than is healthful, their stomachs being literally deluged with nutriment.
When the food is of a kind necessitating abundant mastication it is much less likely to be taken in excess, for the longer the time spent in mastication the less will the individual be tempted to consume; even in the case of soft food, less will probably be eaten if it be thoroughly masticated and insalivated than if it be bolted. Thorough mastication, however, not only tends to diminish the amount of food consumed on account of the time and labour which it entails; it actually reduces the amount needful to constitute a sufficiency, for the more perfectly the food is chewed the more perfectly is it digested and the more economically is it disposed of in the system; the less, moreover, is the tendency to that morbid craving for food which is so frequent an accompaniment of defective digestion. It is certain that appetite and the needs of the system are sooner satisfied when food is well masticated and digested than when it is swallowed whole.