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WISE EATING AND GOOD HEALTH
WISE EATING AND GOOD
HEALTH: BY R. L. KAHN, M. S.
JOHN D. ROCKEFELLER gave this
      helpful formula for proper eating, not
      long ago. "Don't gobble your food.
      'Fletcherize' or chew  very slowly
 while you eat. Talk on pleasant topics.
 Don't be in a hurry. Take time to masti-
 cate and cultivate a cheerful appetite. So
 will the demon Indigestion be encompassed
 round about and his slaughter completed."
   I quote this because it embodies three
 essentials for good digestion: a cheerful
 appetite, pleasant thinking, and slow chew-
 ing.
   A large portion of humanity, according
 to the student of dietetics, is blessed with
 the bitter-sweet sensation of hunger, enjoys
 each morsel of food, and has a calm, satis-
 fied feeling after every meal. The rest of
 mankind   has dyspepsia, reads all the
 patent medicine advertisements, tries out
 the new cures and insists on keeping its
 friends and neighbors informed of the
 latest doings of its stomachs and livers.
 Science has, in recent years, thrown suffi-
 cient light on this field to enable any one of
 the latter to walk back to Nature and to
 Health without any outside aid. Let him
 go half-way and he will find Mother
 Nature waiting for him, ready to return
 him his health, happiness and efficiency.
 All he has to do at first is to modify his
 manner of eating. Science will show him
 how.
   Thanks to the labors of Professors
Cannon and Carlson, of Harvard and Chi-
cago Universities, respectively, we know
now that the feeling of hunger is due to the
contractions of the empty stomach. After
digesting all the food and taking a proper
rest, this muscular organ begins to contract
to inform its owner that it is again ready
for work.
   If we don't experience hunger, it is evi-
dent that the stomach is still at work on the
last meal. And if one continues to eat with-
out being hungry, he overburdens the stom-
ach with work, robs it of its proper rest,
and will ultimately weaken it. And a weak
stomach may not impart the sensation of
hunger even when empty, because its con-
tractions may be too feeble to be percep-
tible. It takes vigorous contractions of a
healthy stomach to make us feel hungry.
  And hunger, although painful at times, is
not at all like the pain imparted by a sore
toe or toothache. It is only when we don't
obey the hunger impulse, by eating, that we
begin to feel uncomfortable. But aside
from the pleasant sensation it gives us,
hunger is, also, a stimulant to the glands
which manufacture the digestive juices.
Every time you feel hungry, the slightest
suggestion of food will start the salivary
glands working, and your mouth will begin
to water. And when your mouth waters,
your stomach also waters; it is producing
gastric juice.
   The "fictitious feeding" experiments of
 the Russian physiologist, Pawlow, have
 thrown a great deal of light on the psy-
 chical r6le in digestion. By careful surgi-
 cal manipulations, he was able to separate
 the cesophagus from the stomach of a dog
 and cause this tube to open to the outside.
 The result was that when the animal
 chewed or swallowed, the morsel of food-
 instead of going to the stomach-went to
 the exterior. The animal was in good
 health and was fed through an opening
 (fistula) which led directly to the stomach.
 When hungry, the animal enjoyed chewing,
 even though the food did not go to the
 stomach. And the stomach, in response to
 the psychical stimulus brought about by
 chewing, manufactured gastric juice as
 though it received the food. In one par-
 ticular case of fictitious feeding, the stom-
 ach produced as much as a pint and a half
 of gastric juice, which illustrates to what
 extent this organ is affected by psychical
 stimulation.
 That the mind will unconsciously help or
 hinder the workings of the stomach has
 been proved again and again in the labora-
 tory. We know it from experience, of
 course, but we are not quite happy until the
 scientist "discovers" it by experimenting
 on lower animals. And it is to the credit
 of the scientist, indeed, to be able to prove
 in the laboratory what humanity has
 learned ages back, from instinct.
 The discovery of X-rays made it possible
 to observe the movements of the stomach
 on the fluorescent screen. This is brought
 about usually by mixing the food with
 bismuth subnitrate. The rays not being
 able to pass through this mixture, are re-
 flected on the screen. The movements of
 the entire stomach contents and, therefore,
the surrounding stomach wall, are thus ren-
dered visible. In this manner, the move-
ments of a cat were at one time under
observation. The stomach was seen to con-
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