While the greatest emphasis has been placed on the dangers to health in overeating, the number of people who, for one reason or another, eat too little is, as has been said, quite surprising. A very large proportion of those under normal weight are so merely because they have wrong habits of eating. Indeed, it may be laid down as a practical rule of health that wherever there is no organic disease the condition of being underweight is a symptom of undereating. A great many thin people insist that the reason why they are underweight is that it is a family trait and that father and mother, or at least one of them, and some of their grandparents exhibited this {150} peculiarity; and thus it is not surprising that they should have it. A careful analysis of the family eating in such cases has shown me in a large number of instances, indeed almost without exception, that what my patients had inherited was not a constitutional tendency to thinness, but a family habit of undereating. This accrued to them not from nature but from nurture, and was acquired in their bringing up. Most of them were eating one quite abundant meal a day and perhaps a pretty good second meal, but practically all of them were skimping at least one meal very much. In some way or other, a family habit of eating very little at this meal had become established and was now an almost inviolable custom. A great many thin individuals, that is persons who are somewhat more than ten per cent. under the average normal weight for their height, either do not eat breakfast at all or eat a very small one. It is not unusual for the physician analyzing their day's dietary to be told that the meal consists of a cup of coffee and a piece of bread. Sometimes there is a roll, but more often only part of a roll, though occasionally in recent years there may be some fruit and some cereal; the fruit will usually be a half of one of the citrus fruits {151} which contains practically no nutrition and is only a pleasant appetizer, while more often than not the cereal will be one of the dry, ready-to-eat varieties which, apart from the milk or cream that may be served with them, contain in the usual small helpings very little nutriment. Such breakfasts are particularly the rule among women who are under weight. Sometimes lunch is comparatively light so that there are two daily apologies for meals. To make up for these, the third meal may be very hearty. City folk often eat at dinner more than is good for them. This may produce a sense of uncomfortable distention and overfulness followed by sleepiness which may be set down as due to indigestion, though it is just a question of overeating for the nonce.