[Sidenote: Faulty standards due to inexperience] It is generally recognized by investigators that these so-called standards are faulty, but by mutual agreement it seems that they have been accepted as the best that could be given. They lack accuracy because the men who prepared them lacked experience. Accuracy can come only from experience gained in the practical work; that is, in prescribing food, and combinations of food, for people under all the varying conditions of age, climate, and activity, and having these people report, at stated periods, the results of their dietetic prescriptions. [Sidenote: Importance of correct dietary standards] The average person eats what is set before him and asks no question about nitrogen and energy; nevertheless, advice so universally distributed as the Government Dietary Standards must exert much influence and have a considerable effect upon the habits of the people. Obviously the correctness of these standards is of vital importance to the health and the welfare of the nation. [Sidenote: What a dietary standard should contain] A dietary standard should tell the quantity and the proportion of food required to keep the human body in its very best working state. The great error committed by the man who planned the above-named standards has been that he assumed that an average of what a man _does_ eat is a criterion of what he _should_ eat in order to maintain the best mental and physical condition. A greater error could not have been made. _Our feeding instincts have been lost in the chaos of civilization._ Both our appetite and our food have been perverted. We have been trained to want or to crave intoxicants, stimulants and sedatives; we have learned to relish things that have no food value, and we have grown to dislike the best food that nature produces, and to accept many of her worst. Dietary standards, therefore, made up from the conventional eating habits of the people, merely endorse their errors and pass them on to future generations. The work, therefore, of the true scientist is to point out these errors and to prescribe a remedy. [Sidenote: We are creatures of many (bad) habits] Man is a creature of habits, and civilized man is a creature of a great many bad habits. The argument that the average amount of food eaten is the amount that should be eaten falls under suspicion at once when we consider the fact that by a similar line of reasoning we could prove that the use of tobacco is necessary because the majority of men use it, or that slender waists are necessary to good social standing because a few million women so consider them. [Sidenote: American prosperity not due to rich diet]