The practice of efficient mastication is undoubtedly the best means of enforcing reduction in the total amount of food, as well as of the protein, and is probably its chief value. For where moderation is practised it is perhaps of less importance that such meticulous attention should be paid to the comminution of every particle of food. It is impossible that mastication, however effective, can increase the caloric or building value of flesh protein, and even if it be conceded that Fletcher could live on less than 60 grams, it is always a blunder to argue from the special to the general. It is quite a pertinent question to inquire whether excessive mastication, i.e., the conversion of a meal into a mere mechanical exercise instead of a social and gustatory pleasure, may not in the end threaten the human family with great dangers of insufficient nutrition.

Mastication is of prime importance in assisting in the conservation of the teeth. Dentists are agreed that an excess of soft foods, such as starchy and saccharine materials encourages caries, and, however skilful they may be, their mechanical attention can never supply the place of coarse food. Another important function of slow mastication is the opportunity afforded of well mixing the food with a sufficiency of air and so encouraging the growth of aerobic and discouraging that of anaerobic bacteria, thus aiding in the limitation of putrefactive toxins.

Whatever value there be in the fashionable curdled milk treatment is chiefly bound up with the diminution in the consumption of animal food, and the necessary restriction of other less innocent fluids, such as tea, coffee, etc.

The purity of yeast-free bread and other similarly prepared eatables is hardly compensated for by their unattractiveness, and it is scarcely a form of diet which would encourage an excessive consumption, because of the careful mastication necessary, whilst one of the tenets of the raw-food advocates is to avoid the "vast bulk" of devitalised stuff contained in cooked foods and depend for nutrition upon the attenuated proportions demanded by uncooked foods.

The no-breakfast plan is ostensibly a method for the deliberate enforcement of a restricted diet, although there is always a possibility that it may defeat its averred purpose by the rigorous mode by which it proposes to achieve its object.

Fasting is the principle of moderation carried to absurd lengths. No doubt it is of great temporary value in the treatment of acute disease where, by reason of the importunity of over-anxious relatives, the unfortunate patient is frequently subjected to deliberate overfeeding. As I have already shown, it is usually a most dangerous procedure in chronic disease and almost always attended by serious risk. The fact that professional starving men - "hungerkunstlers" - sustain so little damage from their severe ordeal is a great tribute to their physical powers, and should not serve as a model for the encouragement of neurotics to attempt a similar procedure, even although they may occasionally escape scathless.

Forced feeding is only apparently an abrogation of the principle of moderation, because its adoption as a therapeutic measure in severe cases ensures the certainty of a more thorough utilisation of the items of nutrition and hence greater economy in their use.

It will thus be manifest that apart from their suitability in individual cases the only apparent virtue common to all these systems is that of moderation, which we have seen is the principle underlying the major dietary systems previously considered.

But the average man will be very much surprised if he will sit down and carefully estimate the caloric value of his day's food. He will most likely find that it is very much below the 40 calories per kilo, amounting to over 2,500 calories per day, allowed by von Noorden, to say nothing of the 3,000, 4,000, and even 5,000 calories mentioned by some other authorities. I have frequently estimated the caloric value of my own diet, and have sometimes been depressed because I could not get it to exceed 1,800 calories. I have been much comforted, however, to discover in a little book by Max Einhorn on diet and nutrition that his own average was 1,650, or 32 heat units per kilo, and this was on a mixed diet, which, he informed me, he was profoundly convinced was the only rational dietary for a healthy man. Probably most men conform more closely to the low-protein diet than they are willing to admit. All old men attribute their longevity to great moderation in diet, and especially to a minimum allowance of meat, the great stimulating properties of which are not sufficiently recognised.