“Habit hunger” is another of our handicaps. Habit hunger is said by Mr. Fletcher to be responsible for a vast deal of overeating. He refers to the fact that when we are children we eat at least one-third more proteid or tissue-building foods, in proportion to our size, than we require as adults, for the reason that our growing frames must then be nourished and upbuilt; but when we reach the adult stage we are apt to maintain this excessive consumption of proteid food—and proteid, as we shall see later on, is the chief source of dietary ills. These are some of the difficulties to be encountered by the person who sets out upon the road to health. But they are very slight barriers, indeed, to the person possessed of willpower, and when the benefits and pleasures to be gained are so enormously in excess of the few initiatory troubles, it is not to be wondered at that more than a million persons in England and America are already following Horace Fletcher’s system in whole or in part. HOW CHEWING STIMULATES DIGESTION Certain remarkable experiments conducted by Rogers, Metchnikoff, and Pawlow in Europe, and by Cannon and Kellogg in America, have thrown a new and interesting light upon the ideas of Fletcher; proving that the act of chewing the food gives to the nerves that control the digestive fluids an opportunity to assay the food, to test it and select for it the particular kind of digestive fluid which that particular kind of food requires. It appears that there are many different kinds of saliva, and each one of these kinds has a particular kind of work to do, which no other kind is able to do. Metchnikoff has shown that if one takes cane sugar into the mouth with or without other food, there is manufactured by the salivary glands a certain peculiar fluid which digests cane sugar. If the cane sugar is not taken into the mouth, then that substance is not made. The saliva that flows into the mouth when there is food there but no cane sugar with the food, will not digest cane sugar. So it readily can be seen that if cane sugar should be hastily swallowed, it is much less likely to be properly digested. And this holds good with nearly all other kinds of food. THE “FOOD FILTER”