“Excessive consumption of proteid foodstuffs—like meat, fish and eggs—is the greatest evil affecting man’s nutrition. The excess of proteid not only remains unburned in the bodily furnace, but this waste matter very often decays in the body, forming a culture bed for germs which effect the whole system, a condition scientifically known as autointoxication, or self-poisoning of the body through the action of the germs of putrefaction, and of other germs, which are bred in the colon, or large intestine. The researches of Metchnikoff, Bouchard, Tissier, Combe, and other eminent scientists, have shown that autointoxication is the source of a great number of the most serious chronic diseases which afflict mankind. “We say, then, that the existing dietary standards place in all cases the minimum of proteid necessary for the average man’s daily consumption at far too high a figure. It may be safely said that it is placed twice as high as careful and repeated experiments show to be really necessary. “There can be little doubt that the habit of excessive eating and drinking, combined with the habit of too hasty eating and drinking, especially of meat, fish and eggs, are probably the most prolific sources of many bodily disabilities affecting men and women, and are consequently the greatest deterrents to the attaining by men and women of a high grade of efficiency in work, of better health, of greater happiness, and of longer life. “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.