When men lived on their natural food, quantities settled themselves. When a healthy natural appetite had been sated the correct quantity of natural food had been taken.
To-day all this is upside down, there is no natural food and only too often no natural healthy appetite either. Thus the question of quantity is often asked and many go wrong over it. The all-sufficient answer to this question is: “Go back to the foods natural to the human animal and this, as well as a countless number of other problems, will settle themselves.”
But supposing that this cannot be done, suppose, as is often the case, that the animal fed for years on unnatural food has become so pathological that it can no longer take or digest its natural food?
Those who take foods which are stimulants are very likely to overeat, and when they leave off their stimulants they are equally likely to underfeed themselves. Flesh foods are such stimulants, for it is possible to intoxicate those quite unaccustomed to them with a large ration of meat just as well as with a large ration of alcohol. The one leads to the other, meat leads to alcohol, alcohol to meat. Taking any stimulant eventually leads to a call for other stimulants.
How are we to tell when a given person is getting enough food, either natural or partly natural? Medically speaking, there is no difficulty; there are plenty of guides to the required knowledge, some of them of great delicacy and extreme accuracy. The trouble generally is that these guides are not made use of, as the cause of the disaster is not suspected. A physiologist is not consulted till too late, perhaps till the disorder in the machinery of life is beyond repair.
Diminishing energy and power, decreasing endurance, slowing circulation, lessening blood colour, falling temperature, altered blood pressure, enlarging heart and liver, are some of the most obvious signs with which the physician is brought into contact in such cases. But every one of these may, and very often does, pass unnoticed for quite a long time by those who have had no scientific training. The public are extremely ignorant on such matters because the natural sciences have been more neglected in this country in the last fifty years than anywhere else in Europe, and that is saying a good deal. Hence diet quacks and all those who trade on the ignorance and prejudices of the public are having a good time and often employ it in writing the most appalling rubbish in reference to the important subject of nutrition.
Being themselves ignorant and without having studied physiology, even in its rudiments, they do not appear to consider that they should at least abstain from teaching others till they have got something certain for themselves.
If the public were less ignorant they would soon see through their pretensions; but, as it is, things go from bad to worse, and it is not too much to say that hundreds of lives have been lost down this sordid by-path of human avarice.
On one single day a few weeks ago the writer heard of three men, two of whom had been so seriously ill that their lives were in danger, and one of whom had died. The certified cause of death in this case might not have led the uninitiated to suspect chronic starvation, but those who were behind the scenes knew that this was its real cause. A further extraordinary fact was that two out of these three men were members of the medical profession, whose training in physiology ought, one would have thought, to have saved them from such errors.
The conclusion seems to be that they did not use their knowledge because at first they had no suspicion of the real cause of their illness. In other words, chronic starvation is insidious and, if no accurate scientific measurements are made, its results, being attributed to other causes, are often allowed to become serious before they are properly treated.
These three men went wrong by following a layman quite destitute of physiological training, who appeared to have produced some wonderful results in himself and others on extraordinarily small quantities of food.
If the above tests had been made at once by a trained hand the error involved in such results could not have escaped detection, and none of these men would have endangered their lives. I myself examined the layman in question and finding him not up to standard refused to follow him. The writer has no difficulty in recalling at least a dozen cases similar to those above mentioned which have been under his care in the last twelve months, and the three above mentioned were none of them under his care at the time of their danger.
What, then, must be our conclusions in reference to these and similar facts of which it is only possible to give a mere outline here? I suggest that they are:
1. Food quantities are of extreme importance.
2. These quantities were settled by physiologists many years ago, and no good reasons have since been
adduced for altering them.
3. The required quantity is approximately nine or ten grains of proteid per day for each pound of bone and
muscle in the body weight.
4. Any considerable departure from this quantity continued over months and years leads to disaster.
5. The nature of this disaster may appear to be very various and its real cause is thus frequently overlooked.
I will say a few words about each of these except the first, which is already obvious. The layman above mentioned asserted that he could live on but little more than half this quantity, but the food quantity really required is that which will keep up normal strength, normal circulation, normal colour, normal temperature and normal mental power. As we have got perfectly definite standards of all these normal conditions, serious danger can only be run into by neglecting to measure them.
It is also possible to tell fairly accurately the quantity of food a man is taking in a day, and then, by collecting and estimating his excreta, the quantity also out of this food which he is utilising completely and burning up in his body.
You would say that no danger should be possible with all these safeguards, and yet the above case history shows that of two trained physiologists, members of the medical profession, one died at least twenty years before his time, and the other was in great danger and only recovered slowly and with difficulty. Another similar case came to the writer suffering from increasing debility and what appeared to be some form of dyspepsia. He was quite unable to pass any of the above-named tests as to physiological standards, and an investigation of his excreta showed that his food was at least one-fifth or one-sixth below its proper quantity and had probably been so for many months past. Some of his doctors had been giving his “disease” a more or less long list of names and yet had not noted the one essential fact of chronic defective nutrition and its cause—underfeeding. Naturally their treatment was of no avail, but when he had been sent to a nursing home and had put back the 20 lbs. of weight he had lost he came slowly back to more normal standards and is now out of danger. In this case there was marked loss of weight, and few people, one would think, would overlook such a sign of under nutrition. But loss of weight is not always present in these cases, at least not at first. Some people tend to grow stout on deficient proteid, and then the fact that some of the essential tissues of the body (the muscles, the heart and the blood) are being dangerously impoverished is very likely to be overlooked. In the case last mentioned the loss of weight was put down to the dyspepsia, whereas the real fact was that the “dyspepsia” and loss of weight were both results of a chronic deficiency in food.
It is evident that some care about food quantities must be taken by all those who do not live on natural foods. For physiologists there is no difficulty in settling the question of quantity in accordance with the signs of the physiology of a normal body. That all, even physiologists, may run into danger if, while living on unnatural or partly unnatural foods, or while making any change of food, they do not consider the question of quantity with sufficient care.
That the question of nutrition should be considered in relation to every illness even though it may appear on the surface to have no direct connection with foods or quantities. As a matter of fact, the nature of the food and its quantity controls all the phenomena of life. Some twenty years ago most people lived fairly close to the old physiological quantities, now they have been cut adrift from these and completely unsettled and are floundering out of their depth. A most unsatisfactory, even dangerous, condition of affairs.
For the public it will now probably suffice if they insist on raising the question of quantity whenever they suffer in any way. If they are unable to answer the question themselves let them go to a trained physiologist who can do so, and not to a diet quack. But muscular strength, endurance, mental and bodily energy, skin circulation, temperature and blood colour are all things which the public can see for themselves and from which they should in all cases be able to get sufficient warning to save them from the worst forms of disaster.
Some people imagine that they eat very little, when as a matter of fact they have good healthy appetites. Others again think they are eating a great deal, when as a matter of fact they take very little. In both cases a physiological test of the excreta will give accurate information. I once had a medical patient who imagined that he produced great amounts of force and performed feats of endurance on wonderfully small quantities of food. His excreta showed, however, that he was merely under-estimating the food he took. A fat man may seem to be living on very little, but fat does not require to be fed, and his real bone and muscle weight is not large. A thin man may seem to require a large quantity of food, but he is really very heavy in bone and muscle, the tissues that have to be nourished. In all these ways appearances are apt to be deceptive for those who are ignorant of science and who do not go down to the root of the matter.
It is not necessary to follow the given quantity of grains per pound slavishly and without regard to consequences. It is necessary to see that the required physiological results are obtained.
If a patient says he can live on less than I ordered for him and if he can pass the physiological tests satisfactorily I know that his bone and muscle weight has been over-estimated. On the other hand, if a patient falls below the physiological tests, though taking and digesting the quantities ordered for him, I conclude that his bone and muscle weight has been under-estimated.
In all cases it is possible to obtain the best physiological results and to say when quantities are just right, neither too much nor too little.
The evil effects of too much are not serious; they entail perhaps a little “gout” or some temporary loss of freedom from waste products.
The evil effects of too little, if persevered in and continued, especially if some of these effects are attributed to causes which have no real existence, are deadly and dangerous, for they bring on an insidious deterioration both of function and structure which leads by several avenues, often miscalled “diseases,” to death itself.
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