“We believe that it has been demonstrated as a fact that health can be bettered, endurance increased, and life lengthened, by cutting down the commonly accepted standards of how much meat, eggs, fish and other proteid food we should eat and drink by about one-half.”
After Horace Fletcher had attracted the notice of the scientific world in 1902, Professor Chittenden invited him to become the subject of a series of experiments at Yale, where the Sheffield Scientific School possessed an equipment suitable for an elaborate inquiry of this kind much superior to any to be found in Europe.
FLETCHER’S CLAIMS SUPPORTED
Professor Chittenden first made certain, by experiments which precluded any chance of error, that Horace Fletcher’s claims were justified so far as Horace Fletcher himself was concerned. But this, of course, by no means solved the problem. Mr. Fletcher might simply be a physiological curiosity—a digestive freak—of whom there are many known cases. He lived and thrived on an amount of proteid food startlingly less than was deemed necessary by all existing standards, but this could not be taken as proof that people in general could do likewise. Only an exhaustive series of tests on a large number of people of varying ages and conditions of life could prove this. Professor Chittenden resolved to make these tests.
At the very outset, however, he faced this difficulty. If Mr. Fletcher’s was merely a freak case, there would be a grave danger in putting other men upon his dietary. Mr. Fletcher was flourishing on a daily consumption of proteid foodstuffs amounting to an average of only 45 grams, and the fat, sugar and starch consumed by him were in quantities only sufficient to bring the total food value of the daily food up to a little more than 1600 “calories,” or units of fuel energy. The Voit standard—which is the typical one, the one most commonly accepted, and which is based upon thousands of studies of what men and women actually eat—demands that the average man shall eat at least 118 grams of proteid, with a total fuel value of 3000 large “calories” for the daily ration.
To make clear to the non-scientific reader just what quantity of foodstuffs is represented by 50 grams of proteid, which is 5 grams more than that consumed daily by Mr. Fletcher in his tests, and is approximately the amount consumed daily by other men in the Yale experiments, it may be said that 50 grams is about equal to 772 grains, which are equal to about 1¾ ounces. This quantity would be represented by the proteid contents of 9½ ounces of lean meat, or 7 eggs, or 27 ounces of white bread. Nine and one-half ounces of meat (using comparisons furnished by Dr. Edward Curtis) is about the weight of a slice measuring 7 by 3 inches and cut ¼ of an inch thick. Twenty-seven ounces of bread represent somewhat less than two loaves, the standard loaf weighing one pound (16 ounces). Of course, few people ever eat 7 eggs, or 2 loaves of bread in a day; but the vast majority of people in America do eat a great deal more proteid than would be represented by 7 eggs, or 2 loaves of bread or a slice of meat of the size named, since proteid is found in a great number of other foodstuffs besides those mentioned.
CHITTENDEN’S EXPERIMENTS ON HIMSELF
Professor Chittenden realized that to ask a number of men to subsist on a ration similar to that which nourished Mr. Fletcher might possibly result in seriously weakening their constitutions. This is the problem which has often confronted other scientists, and Professor Chittenden solved it in a way characteristic of the true scientist—the devoted warrior in humanity’s cause who wages warfare against the forces of evil. He began his experiments upon himself.
The result rewarded his self-sacrificing spirit; for within a few months a severe case of muscular rheumatism (which had plagued him for years, refusing to yield to treatment) disappeared; and with it went a recurrent bilious headache. And it may be stated that these have never returned. Professor Chittenden has adopted as a habit of life the dietary which he began as an experiment five years ago. At that time he was a hearty eater of three meals a day, meals rich in meat and other proteid foodstuffs.