WHEREVER one may look over the civilized world to-day, he will find in progress a systematic movement for the improvement of the race. In every country the greatest scientists are giving their best efforts to the study of the human organism, while sociologists, economists, reformers and philanthropists are laboring by means of popular health movements to build up a people with strong and vigorous bodies. One of the typical expressions of this great race movement is the establishment in America of the Committee of One Hundred - a body of leading scientists, social workers and financiers appointed by the American Association for the Advancement of Science, to work for the creation of a national department of public health. These numerous and varied activities have one point in common - a vigorous insistence upon the importance of more intelligent ways of feeding. In the face of the perhaps not wholly unwarranted prejudice against any attempt at a scientific regulation of diet, laboratory investigators and social workers are urging the members of the human race to learn to feed themselves with at least as much wisdom as they have used for years in the feeding of their domestic animals - the physicians and physiologists declaring that practically all functional disorders have their rise in faulty nutrition, and the sociologists, political economists and social workers asserting just as emphatically that much of the poverty, vice and crime of the world is directly traceable to errors in diet.

"We eat or drink for health or ill health," says Dr. Daniel S. Sager. "Explain it as you will, this is the only way in which disease can occur in the human body. . . . Aside from surgery and midwifery, the practice of medicine for the most part revolves about the stomach. . . . While medical science has thousands of names for diseases, at bottom all diseases are alike. Poisonous principles are thrown into the blood and the result is disease. There are several hundred organs and tissues in the body, each one of which, when affected, gives a name to a disease; but while the names of diseases are different, yet the cause which produces them is generally the same - overeating, which produces auto-intoxication, self-poisoning, malassimilation, premature old age or disease, - call it what you will. The conditions which produce Bright's disease will also produce gout, rheumatism, cancer, or appendicitis."1

This is the view of the modern physician. Professor Irving Fisher of Yale, speaking as a political economist, says:

"Much attention is now being paid to the physiological condition of the laboring classes, their housing, the sanitation of factories, hours of labor, child labor, etc. Equally important is the problem of the nutrition of these classes. Industrial inefficiency is the price of malnutrition. Increased labor power will be the practical outcome of diet reform."2

1Sager: "The Art of Living in Good Health," pp. 8, 168, 179.

Out of this agitation there has at last emerged a complete new conception of dietetics, the chief recommendation of which is that it gives all the best results of a scientifically regulated dietary in combination with all the advantages of a reliance upon instinctive promptings of taste and appetite.

The new conception has been fittingly named "economic nutrition" because its fundamental purpose is to save the body from unnecessary labor through a reduction of food to exact physiological needs.

This, the originators of the new conception point out, is an unqualified advantage to anyone, as every ounce of food over and above the amount necessary to furnish building materials during growth, to repair tissue that has been broken down by muscular exercise, and to supply fuel to keep the body warm and energy to keep it running, places upon every organ the thankless task of working over this excess of food for the sole and exclusive purpose of getting it out of the way.

2 Irving Fisher. Ph. D.: The Independent, August, 1907.

The new theory attacks the deep-rooted idea in the mind of man that everything he can get down will do him good and that he will surely receive a return for it, if not in increased energy for work, then in a reserve which he can call upon some day when he needs it. On the contrary, it declares that food in excess of physiological requirements does not yield increased energy for work, but actually takes energy that might be given to work; furthermore, that food cannot be stored by the body in any considerable quantity, and that the residue which is left floating about in the blood is the chief source of disease to the human organism.

This principle applies with particular force to the class of foods which forms the great staple of the diet of most of the civilized peoples of the world: the tissue-building or "proteid" foods, consumed chiefly in the form of meat, fish, eggs, and in a lesser degree in peas, beans, lentils, nuts and cheese. The reason for this is that these foods - unlike the fuel-producing foods found in grains, fruits, vegetables, butter and oil - cannot be completely burned up by the body, but leave behind them a solid "ash," which, as Dr. Edward Curtis has expressed it, "must be raked down by the liver and thrown out by the kidneys."3

If you think of the body in the light of an engine, the theory at once becomes clear. After you have your engine built you do not feed it on brass and iron and copper: you feed it on coal. It is true that you have to put iron and steel and copper into it now and then when repairs become necessary, but in nothing like the quantities of coal that you have to use to keep it running. It is obvious that if you dumped iron and steel and copper into the furnace in amounts equal to or exceeding the coal, it would soon wear out or break down.

This is exactly what the originators of the new theories of dietetics sav happens to the human body when it is fed upon building material in excess of fuel. To the common practice of eating more meat than vegetables they attribute most of our ills. Furthermore, they declare that it is our excessive eating of "high-proteid" foods like meats that cuts us off in our prime at seventy or eighty or so, when, according to the biological law that the lifetime of an animal should be from five to seven times the growing period, he should live to be a hundred at the very least.

3Edward Curtis, M. D.: "Nature and Health," p. 70. Henry Holt & Company, New York.