Fletcherism: What It Is; Or, How I Became Young at SixtyFletcher, Horace
Science
Fletcherism: What It Is; Or, How I Became Young at Sixty
Fletcher, Horace
Mastication; Nutrition
While writing this chapter I have been forwarded material for
indignation and a text for condemnation in the form of a book so full
of food prescription that it is positively poisonous, as read with
the intelligence of my own and current knowledge of the subject, that
it ought to be pilloried as a "Horrible Example" of presumptuous
prescription and proscription. It is an advertisement pure and simple,
but so prejudicial to the natural facts in the case that it again
raises the question of the advisability of a Supreme Court of the
Physiology of Nutrition, to try such nutrition perverters for high
treason to Mother Nature.
I will not name the book or the author, to further the advertisement.
I once stopped a controversy with the doctor-father of the author by
offering to wager him one hundred pounds that I could beat him out on
a ten mile go-as-you-please tramp, which he had mentioned as one of
his stunts to prove his contentions. Our ages were nearly equal, and
the difference of training consisted of his prescribing for himself
over 100 grams of proteid daily (less by 20 per cent. than the vicious
Voit[N] or Koenig Standards, and less by 30 per cent. than the
Standard that killed poor Professor Atwater), while I had subsisted
for years on less than half his prescription. He warned me that I was
courting death, but that he was providing for himself longevity by the
mile. He got mad with me, and nearly fumed at the mouth, because I
assumed to insist that only Mother Nature was a competent prescriber,
intimating that he was not. I could not out-talk him, and so I sent
him a challenge. He made the excuse that he was leaving for the
Continent for a rest, but would talk further with me when he returned.
His reputed forty-thousand-pound office practice of prescribing his
favourite dietaries had worn him out and he was going for a rest.
Later I heard of him in a sanatorium--surely disgraceful to a doctor to
be compelled to go to such a place for "treatment."
[N] Carl Voit, of Munich, prescribed as Standard daily diet for a
man doing moderate work: 118 grams of Protein, 56 grs. Fat, 500 grs.
Carbohydrates, with a total fuel value of 3,055 large calories;
increasing the same to 145 grams Protein, 160 grs. Fat, 450 grs.
Carbohydrates, with a total fuel value of 3,370 large calories.
This is the celebrated Voit Diet Standard. Professor Atwater, of
Connecticut, went further, prescribing as Daily Diet Standard no less
than 125 grams of Proteins, with sufficient fat and carbohydrates to
equal a total fuel value of 3,500 large calories for a man doing a
moderate amount of labour; increasing the amount of Protein to 150
grams, with fats and carbohydrates to a total fuel value of 4,500
large calories per diem.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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