Horace Fletcher - Fletcherism

"Money, leisure and easily-accessible cafés" are the menace of right nutrition, unless one is proof against temptation to kill time in this dangerous manner.

Steady work to earn a true appetite, small means to spend on food, the necessity of going to seek it, with the appreciation which comes from rarity, are the very best safeguards to right nutrition.

I am an epicure. Yet I have never seen a boarding-house, nor a restaurant, nor a camp where I could not find something to satisfy a true (earned) appetite. During more than a year in the Far East – Ceylon, Java, the Philippines, China, Burma, India, Kashmir – and at many steamer and railway lunch tables, I always found something good to satisfy a keen appetite. If you are all right inside, and will only conquer your habit-hungers, I believe you can live sumptuously, anywhere, on less than two shillings a day. I can, and often do; and do it, too, at one hundred and seventy pounds weight and "awfully busy" all the time. It may be difficult, and perhaps painful, at first, to get the best of bad habit-cravings, but it is worth while. A week should accomplish the reformation.

A number of men ask me: "Do you honestly believe that in your theories lies the secret of long life?" I do, and I may give one example of a "lived model" of longevity as the result of Fletcherism in all its ramifications of temperance of eating, careful mastication, radiant optimism, practical altruism, superabundant activity, etc. The Honourable Albert Gallatin Dow, of Randolph, New York, passed away in May, 1908, lacking less than three months of a hundred years of age. Up to the last moment of his century of life there was no encroachment of senility, and he fell, ripe fruit, into the lap of Mother Nature, without a blemish of decay. Shortly before he passed away, Mr. Dow invited me to see him, and told me that he had received a shock of warning early in life as I had done late in life, and had made the same discovery that had reformed me. He believed that he owed his health and vigour to following the simple requirements of Nature, as I was teaching; but he had his career to make at the time, and had not had the leisure and means to preach dietetic righteousness as I was doing. He wished me Godspeed on my mission. All inquiry in all directions, wherever longevity has been accomplished, reveals the same simplicity of habits of living, which are the natural points of Fletcherizing.

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Note: – Some of these same friends, fifteen years later, when I was sixty-four years of age, as positively declared: "You never looked so well: Fletcherizing has certainly done well for Fletcher!"

Professor W. A. Atwater, of Connecticut, U.S.A., was, in his time, a respected authority in the field of human nutrition, and, as such, was selected by the editors of the Encyclopædia Britannica to write the chapters on Nutrition for the Encyclopædia .

Dr. Van Someren's testimony is given as an Appendix to this volume; taken from The A.B. – Z. of Our Own Nutrition .

Now Chief of Staff.

The full report of this famous experiment may be found in Professor Chittenden's book Physiological Economy in Nutrition ; but such small mention of indebtedness to Fletcherism was made, that Professor Irving Fisher, in the interest of practical Political Economy, organised a supplemental experiment, more normal than the first, to test the economic effects of Fletcherism, pure and simple.

A brief account of this investigation is given on page 98.

Professor Chittenden made amends, later on, by composing a physiological prose poem on the benefits and delights resulting from careful chewing and tasting of nutriment, which I quote in full in Chapter VII.

Detailed account of this test is given in The New Glutton or Epicure , New York: Frederick A. Stokes Company.