During the original experiments in Chicago, and in Dayton, Ohio,
the originator was much indebted to James H. Lacey, Esquire, of New
Orleans, La., and Cedar Rapids, for helpful suggestions, which his
early training as a pharmaceutical chemist rendered him able to give.
There are also numerous altruistic, self-sacrificing women, who have
been active colleagues of the author in testing the virtues of an
economic nutrition, and who have greatly assisted in making the
economy an added new pleasure of life, instead of being a restraint
or a deprivation. This is accomplished easily by a change of attitude
towards the question, and in such reform women must have an important
part to play. To their kindly meant, but hygienically unwise,
aggressive hospitality, in begging friends to eat and drink more than
they want, just to satisfy their own generous impulses, is due much of
the milder gluttony that is prevalent.
Imposition upon the body of any excess of food or drink is one of
the most dangerous and far-reaching of self-abuses; because whatever
the body has no need of at the moment must be gotten rid of at the
expense of much valuable energy taken away from brain-service. Hence
it is that when there is intestinal constipation the energy-reserve is
lowered enormously, and even where there is no painful obstruction,
the mere passage of waste through some twenty to twenty-five feet of
convoluted intestinal canal is a great tax upon available mental and
physical power; and this disability is often imposed on innocent men by
well-meaning women in the exercise of a too aggressive hospitality.
Mention of constipation suggests another reference to one of the
specially new features of this discussion, insisted upon by a truly
economic and æsthetic nutrition, and herein lifted out of the depths of
a morbid prejudice to testify to the necessity of care in the manner
of taking food for the maintenance of a respectable self-respect.
So firmly rooted is the fallacy that a daily generous defecation is
necessary to health that less frequent periodicity is looked upon
with alarm, whereas a normally economic nutrition is _proven_ by
greater infrequency, accompanied by an entire absence of difficulty in
defecating and by escape from the usual putridity due to the necessity
of bacterial decomposition.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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