I have taken occasion to verify these observations by personal inquiry in Boston markets. One intelligent meat man gave his experience with a poor seamstress, who insisted on buying tenderloin steak at 60 cents per pound. He tried to persuade her that other parts of the meat were just as nutritive, as they really are, but she would not believe him; and when he urged the wiser economy of using them, she became angry at him for what she regarded as a reflection upon her dignity. "My wealthy customers," said he, "take our cheaper cuts, but I have got through trying to sell these economical meats to that woman and others of her class."
I am told that people in the poorer parts of New York City buy the highest priced groceries, and that the meat men say they can sell the coarser cuts of meat to the rich, but that people of moderate means refuse them. I hear the same thing in Washington and other cities.
One-sidedness of Our Dietary.—I have said that our diet is one-sided, that the food which we actually eat has relatively too little protein and too much fat, starch, and sugar. In other words, it is relatively deficient in the materials which make muscle and bone and contains a relative excess of the fuel ingredients. This is due partly to our large consumption of sugar and partly to our use of such large quantities of fat meats.
Overeating—Injury to Health.—But the most remarkable thing about our food consumption is the quantity. The American dietaries examined in this inquiry were of people living at the time in Massachusetts and Connecticut, though many came from other parts of the country. It would be wrong to take their eating habits as an exact measure of those of people throughout the United States. For that matter, a great deal of careful observation will be needed to show precisely what and how much is used by persons of different classes in different regions. Just this kind of study in different parts of the country is greatly needed. But such facts as I have been able to gather seem to imply that the figures obtained indicate in a general way the character of our food consumption. Of the over 50 dietaries of reasonably well-to-do people thus far examined the smallest is that of a mechanic's family. In this the potential energy per man per day was about 3,000 calories. The next smallest was that of the family of a chemist who had been studying the subject and had learned something of the excessive amounts of food which many people with light muscular labor consume. This dietary supplied 3,200 calories of energy per man a day. The largest was that of brickmakers at very severe work in Massachusetts. They lived in a boarding house managed by their employers, who had evidently found that men at hard muscular work out of doors needed ample nourishment to do the largest amount of work. The food supplied 8,850 calories per day.
Voit's standard for a laboring man at moderate work, which is based upon the observation of the food of wage workers, who are counted in Germany as well paid and well fed, allows 118 grammes of protein and 3,055 calories of energy. The standards proposed by myself, in which the studies of American dietaries have been taken into account, allow 125 grammes of protein and 3,500 calories of energy for a man at moderately hard muscular work. The dietaries of Massachusetts and Connecticut factory operatives, day laborers and mechanics at moderate work averaged about 125 grammes of protein and 4,500 calories of energy. For a man at "severe" work, Voit's standard calls for 145 grammes of protein and 3,370 calories of energy.
The Massachusetts and Connecticut mechanics at "hard" and "severe" work had from 180 to 520 grammes of protein and from 5,000 to 7,800 calories of potential energy, and in one case they rose to the 8,500 just quoted. In the dietary standards proposed by myself it did not seem to me permissible to assign less than 4,000 calories to that for a working man at "hard," and 5,700 for a man at "severe" work.[1]
Now it is not easy to see why these men required so much more than was sufficient to nourish abundantly men of like occupation, but unlike temptation to overeating, in Europe. Difference in climate cannot account for it. We are a little more given to muscular exercise here, which is very well for us, but it cannot justify our eating so much.... I think the answer to this question is found in the conditions in which we live. Food is plenty. Holding to a tradition which had its origin where food was less abundant, that the natural instinct is the measure of what we should eat, we follow the dictates of the palate. Living in the midst of abundance, our diet has not been regulated by the restraints which obtain with the great majority of the people of the Old World, where food is dear and incomes are small.
Indeed, the very progress which we are making in our civilization brings with it increased temptation to overeating. The four quarters of the earth are ransacked to supply us with the things which will most tempt our appetites, and the utmost effort of cooks and housewives is used in the same direction. It is all the more fitting, therefore, that information as to our excesses and the ways of avoiding them should come at the same time.
How much harm is done to health by our one-sided and excessive diet no one can say. Physicians tell us that it is very great. Of the vice of overeating, Sir Henry Thompson, a noted English physician and authority on the subject, says:
"I have come to the conclusion that more than half the disease which embitters the middle and latter part of life is due to avoidable errors in diet, ... and that more mischief in the form of actual disease, of impaired vigor, and of shortened life accrues to civilized man ... in England and throughout central Europe from erroneous habits of eating than from the habitual use of alcoholic drink, considerable as I know that evil to be."