THE object of this book is to present in concise form and in language free from technicalities a popular summary of the information necessary for the practical application of the new principles of nutrition advanced by Mr. Horace Fletcher, Prof. Russell H. Chittenden, Prof. Irving Fisher and other investigators.

Although the subject has been most ably presented from the point of view of its foremost layman, from the point of view of one of the highest scientific authorities in America, and from the point of view of a famous political economist, it has not yet been treated by a private person who has tested the merits of the system in his own life and found it good.

It is this task that has been attempted here. In his fifty-fourth year, the originator of this book felt that he was ageing rapidly, going painfully down the wrong side of the hill of life and giving up one by one all the pleasures that had made living attractive to him. He had lost his power to work, his enjoyment of social pleasures and all his interest in intellectual pursuits. He suffered from intense pain which he took to be muscular rheumatism, and, at times, from a mild form of aphasia. His one object was to get done with his necessary work as rapidly as possible and go to bed. Sometimes he was so overcome with weakness, dizziness and fatigue in the middle of the day that he was forced to go to his club and lie down for an hour or so before he could go on with his work.

To-day he is in better health than he has enjoyed since he was a boy and feels that - barring accidents - he should. live to be a hundred. For this he has to thank the new system of diet described in the following pages.

The best part of the new plan is that it costs nothing to adopt it. It requires no expensive apparatus, no consultation of specialists, no change of climate, no release from daily work; it is a mere matter of getting and applying certain easily understood information.

However, as a busy professional man, he realizes how difficult it is for a man engaged in the exacting and complicated occupations of modern life to search out this information through the various books in which it is to be found and to devise a method for applying it. Therefore he has secured a digest .. of the points which he has found most valuable in working out his own problem with the idea of presenting a sort of lawyer's brief of the subject.

His hope is that the work will attract the attention, not only of men and women, who1 in the prime of life are suffering - as he was himself at one time - from all the symptoms of old age, but of the young men and women whose constitutions are subjected to the strain of commercial life; of the boys and girls in the schools and colleges whose bodily forces are taxed to the utmost by the exactions of modern education; and of the parents and educators who have the guidance of the lives of the coming generation. It is his sincere conviction that the application of the principles recommended will yield an immense increase of energy for daily work and will add many useful years to their lives.