One of the things you will find out is that your stomach is easily
fooled; it is largely guided by bulk. If you eat a meal consisting of a
moderate quantity of lean meat, a very little bread, a heaping dish of
turnip greens, and a big slice of watermelon, you will feel fully
satisfied, yet you will not have taken in one-third the calory value
that you would at an ordinary meal with gravies and dressings and
dessert. The bulky kind of food is that for which your system was
adapted in the days when it was shaped by nature. You have a large
stomach, many times as large as you would have had if you had lived on
refined and concentrated foods such as butter, sugar, olive oil, cheese
and eggs. You have a long intestinal tract, adapted to slowly digesting
foods, and to the work of extracting nutrition from a mass of roughage.
You have a very large lower bowel, which Metchnikoff, the Russian
scientist, one of the greatest minds who ever examined the problems of
health, declares a survival, the relic of a previous stage of evolution,
and a source of much disease. The best thing you can do with that lower
bowel is to give it lots of hay, as it requires; in other words, to eat
the salads and greens which contain cellulose material. This contains no
food value, and does not ferment, but fills the lower bowel and
stimulates it to activity.
If you eat too much food, three things may happen. First, it may not be
digested, and in that case it will fill your system with poisons.
Second, it may be assimilated, but not burned up by the body. In that
case it has to be thrown out by the kidneys or the sweat glands, and
this puts upon these organs an extra strain, to which in the long run
they may be unequal. Or third, the surplus material may be stored up as
fat. This is an old-time trick which nature invented to tide you over
the times when food was scarce. If you were a bear, you would naturally
want to eat all you could, and be as fat as possible in November, so
that you might be able to hunt your prey when you came out from your
winter's sleep in April. But you are not a bear, and you expect to eat
your regular meals all winter; you have established a system of
civilization which makes you certain of your food, and the place where
you keep your surplus is in the bank, or sewed up in the mattress, or
hidden in your stocking. In other words, a civilized man saves money,
and the habit of storing globules of grease in the cells of his body is
a survival of an old instinct, and a needless strain upon his health.
Not merely does the fat man have to carry all the extra weight around
with him, but his body has to keep it and tend it; and what are the
effects of this is fully shown by life insurance tables. People who are
five or ten per cent over weight have five or ten per cent more chance
of dying all the time, while people who are five or ten per cent under
weight have five or ten per cent more than the average of life
expectation.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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