The investigation at Yale is a link in a chain of effort that has developed in logical sequence and has been planned to effect a cure of the common ignorance and practice relative to right human nutrition in its relation to profitable thinking and doing; and to discourage the personal neglect which has been responsible for the existing ignorance, this book is issued to show what may easily be done and what has been done, so far, in this direction. It is a compilation of important knowledge which has been born of recent scientific research but which is hidden away from common comprehension in scientific publications; and it relates the story of the development of which this book is an exponent. Herein are given the reasons why the government and the most eminent scientists in the line of researches in nutrition are coöperating so earnestly and so unusually in a commonweal inquiry.
About ten years ago, at the critical age of forty-four, the author was fast becoming a physical wreck in the midst of a business, club, and social tempest. Although he was trained as an athlete in his youth and had lived an active and most agreeable life, he had contracted a degree of physical disorder that made him ineligible as an insurance risk. This unexpected disability, with such unmistakable warning, was so much a shock to his hopes of a long life that it led to his making a strong personal effort to save himself. The study was taken up in systematic manner, account of which is too long to relate here; but the eager auto-reformer soon learned that his troubles came from too much of many things, among them too much food and too much needless worry; and realising the danger ahead, he sought a way to cure himself of his disabilities by the help of an economic food supply, as did Luigi Cornaro; but what is even more important, he found a way to enjoy the smaller quantity of food much more than any plethoric luxury can give, and arrived at the method by a route that showed a means of conserving a healthy economy and an increased pleasure of eating, at the same time, in quite a simple and scientific manner, that any one may learn and practise without any ascetic deprivation whatever. Cornaro buried the real clew to his economic and pleasurable success with his body, owing to his vague generality of description of his method. The author is determined not to make the same mistake, and thereby bury his key to a happy and easy life.
The secret of the method is all told in this book and is confirmed herein by both theoretically scientific and scientifically practical authority; but the experiments which are being conducted at Yale by Professor Chittenden, in coöperation with Surgeon-General O’Reilly of the army, of which the Daily Press has given notice, together with experiments which are in progress in many university laboratories in this country and in Europe, are for the purpose of explaining the “reasons for things” by complete scientific reasoning, so that none may doubt the disadvantage and sin of dietic ignorance and carelessness.
The acceptance of the theory and method of the author at the great Battle Creek Sanitarium, after more than a year’s trial, and elsewhere among curative agencies, and their adoption and use as the first requisite of treatment, of which the public have not so generally heard, are indorsements coming from practical, intelligent, and expert sources of experience and judgment, and hence they are of the utmost value and significance.
This introductory chapter is being written after the “clippings” of newspaper comment relative to the presence of the soldiers at Yale have begun to come in. The majority of comments are generous in spirit, but indicate a lack of complete understanding which this “Introduction” is intended to correct.
Some of the comments are couched in ridicule, and express pity for the poor soldiers who are being “misused” as subjects of starvation in an investigation which promises to make starvation a rule in the army. To the writers of such trifling and unfair paragraphs let me, one of the fraternity in an amateurish way, beg consideration of the following.