Gulp: Adventures on the Alimentary Canal (9 page)

How did this unsightly and extreme practice come to be taken seriously? Fletcher, an assiduous networker and general gadabout, began by getting the scientists on his side. Though he had no background in medicine or physiology, he collected friends who did. While living in a hotel in Venice in 1900, Fletcher befriended the hotel doctor, Ernest van Someren. Originally more interested in Fletcher’s stepdaughter than in his theories, van Someren was eventually won over (or worn down—Fletcher’s letters, though gaily phrased,
^*
amount to lengthy harangues). Van Someren gussied up Fletcher’s theories with invented medical jargon like the “secondary reflex of deglutition.”

As only a hotel doctor has time for, van Someren set to work gathering the data both men knew Fletcher would need to gain approval in scientific circles. Fletcher had experimented on himself, but these efforts were unlikely to convince the research community. He had simply weighed and recorded each day’s bodily input and output for both himself and “my man Carl,” over the course of a bicycle trip through France. As Fletcher described the scenario, in a letter to one of his benefactors in 1900, Carl was “a young Tyrolean . . . in national costume” hired to carry the scale and “wheel my bicycle up the grades and be generally useful.”

Van Someren presented a paper at a meeting of the British Medical Association in 1901, and again at the International Congress of Physiology. Skeptical but intrigued, well-placed scientists at London’s Royal Society and at Cambridge University, and Yale’s Russell Chittenden
^*
undertook follow-up studies, with mixed conclusions. In 1904, thirteen lads of the Hospital Corps Detachment of the U.S. Army were taken away from their nursing duties for six months to serve as guinea pigs in a test of Fletcher and Chittenden’s low-calorie, low-protein, super-mastication regimen. Here there was no strapping lad in knickers and feathered felt hat to do the weighing and tidying up. The men’s work began at 6:45
A.M.
with an hour and a half of “duties about the quarters, such as . . . assisting in measurement of urine and faeces and transportation of the same to the laboratory; cleansing of faeces cans and urine bottles, etc.”

Chittenden claimed to have evidence that the Fletcher system enabled a man to get by on two-thirds the calories and half the protein recommended by the current nutrition guidelines. Though the claims were roughly critiqued and largely dismissed by other scientists, they struck a chord with victualers: military officers and others whose jobs entailed feeding hungry hordes on limited budgets. In the United States and Europe, administrators at workhouses, prisons, and schools flirted with Fletcherism. The U.S. Army Medical Department issued formal instructions for a “Method of Attaining Economic Assimilation of Nutriment”—aka the Fletcher system. (“Masticate all solid food until it is completely liquefied,” begins the familiar refrain.) In 1917, Chittenden became a scientific advisor to Herbert Hoover, then the head of the U.S. Food Administration. Fletcher, living in Belgium during World War I and already chummy with the U.S. ambassador there, parlayed these two connections into his gig as an “honorary alimentary expert” for Hoover’s relief commission. Together, he and Chittenden did their best to convince Hoover to make Fletcherism part of U.S. economic policy, thereby justifying a two-thirds reduction in the amount of civilian rations shipped overseas. Hoover sagely resisted.

Fletcher’s true colors could occasionally be seen through the seams of his cream-colored suits. After bragging, in a 1910 letter, that a family of five could save enough money to furnish a five-room flat in fifteen months by Fletcherizing, he adds, “Of course, the furnishings must be of the simplest sort.” This from a man who lived for years in a suite at the Waldorf Astoria. He summed up his policies at the end of the letter: “Expert economics coming to the assistance of ambitious unintelligence.” Let them chew cake.

The nineteenth and early twentieth centuries saw a cavalcade of possibly well-meaning but probably just greedy individuals attempting to feed the poor on a shoestring budget. In the case of Jean d’Arcet Sr. and Jr., actual leather laces would have provided more nourishment than what the two proposed. In 1817, d’Arcet Jr., a chemist by trade, came up with a method for extracting gelatin from bones (and money from Parisian welfare coffers). Public hospitals and poorhouses, having swallowed the preposterous claim that two ounces of d’Arcet’s gelatin was the nutritional equivalent of three-plus pounds of meat, began serving soup made with the gelatin.

So plentiful were the complaints that in 1831, physicians at an infamous Paris hospital for the poor, Hôtel-Dieu, ran an experiment comparing traditional bouillon with gelatin-based broth. The latter was “more distasteful, more putrescible, less digestible, less nutritious, and . . . moreover, it often brought on diarrhea.” The French Academy of Sciences sprang into inaction, appointing a committee to look into it. The Gelatin Commission would dither for ten years before finally issuing a thumbs-down. Gelatin fed to animals, the committee reported, was found to “excite an intolerable distaste to a degree which renders starvation preferable.”

Of relevant interest, an 1859 issue of
California Farmer and Journal of Useful Sciences
offers a recipe
^*
for a nutritional extract made from Peruvian seabird guano. While its inventor, a Mr. Win. Clark of England, recommended the elixir “for all classes of society,” he deemed it especially fit for “those who have much exertion and have not the means of buying meat.” Mr. Clark claimed two to three tablespoonfuls was equal to two pounds of meat, with the advantage that it lends to the laborers’ potatoes and peas “a very agreeable taste!”

I
N 1979, A
pair of Minneapolis researchers put Fletcherism to the test. They brought ten subjects to the local Veterans Administration hospital, and purchased some peanuts and jars of peanut butter. The subjects first ate a diet in which almost all the fat came from peanuts. The peanuts were then swapped out for the peanut butter—an aesthetically acceptable standin for excessively chewed peanuts. The subjects’ “digestion ash,” as Fletcher liked to call excrement, was then analyzed to see how much of the peanut fat was leaving the body unabsorbed.

“‘Nature will castigate those who don’t masticate’ may hold some truth,” concluded the paper, which appeared in the October 1980 issue of the
New England Journal of Medicine.
On the whole-peanut diet, the subjects excreted 18 percent of the fat they’d consumed. When they switched to peanut butter, only 7 percent escaped in their stool.

But peanuts are hardly representative of the average food. Everyone knows—via “visual observation of stool samples,” to use the
New England Journal of Medicine
’s way of saying “a glance before flushing”—that chunks of peanuts make their way through the alimentary canal undigested. Nuts are known for this. Peanuts (and corn kernels) are so uniquely and reliably hard to break down that they are used as “marker foods” in do-it-yourself tests of bowel transit time
^*
—the time elapsed between consumption and dismissal. Peanuts are the food singled out for this trait by Martin Stocks, business development manager for the Model Gut, a computerized tabletop digestive tract
^†
that can be hired out for absorption studies.

I had contacted Stocks to see if it might be possible to engage the Model Gut for a test of Fletcherism. It was, but would “likely run into the $10,000 to $20,000 range.” Stocks’s opinion was that with a few recalcitrant foods—here he singled out nuts and rare or raw meat—extensive mastication (chewing) might make a small difference in how much energy and nutrients are absorbed, but that it was “unlikely to have a dramatic effect on one’s overall nutritional intake.”

Stocks passed my e-mail along to Model Gut senior scientist Richard Faulks. Faulks was dismissive not only of extreme chewing, but also of the related fad for blenderizing to increase the accessibility of nutrients. It’s true saliva carries an enzyme that breaks down starch, but the pancreas makes this enzyme too. So any digestive slack caused by hasty chewing would be taken up in the small intestine. The human digestive tract has evolved to extract the maximum it can from the food ingested, Faulks said, and that is probably all it needs. “Nutritional science is dogged by the idea that if some is good, more is better,” he said, “and this has led to the belief that we should endeavor to extract as much as possible of whichever fashionable component is in vogue. This is to ignore evolutionary biology and the imperative of survival.” He pretty much ran Horace Fletcher through the Model Gut.

One thing to be said in favor of thorough chewing is that it slows an eater down. This is helpful if that particular eater is trying to shed some weight. By the time his brain registers that his stomach is full, the plodding thirty-two-chews-per-bite eater will have packed in far less food than the five-chews-per-bite wolfer. But there’s
thorough
and there’s
Fletcher.
Chewing each bite, say, a hundred times, Faulks said, could have the opposite effect. It would lengthen the meal so radically that the stomach could have time to empty the earliest mouthfuls into the small intestine, while the last mouthfuls are still on the table. Thereby making room for more. Fletcherizers’ meals could conceivably be so interminable that by the time they finally cleared their plate and set down their napkin, they’d already be feeling peckish again.

Not to mention, the morning’s half gone. “Who has time for this?” was the reaction of Jaime Aranda-Michel, a gastroenterologist with the Mayo Foundation, when I called to ask him about Fletcherizing. “You’re going to spend all day just having breakfast. You will lose your job!”

L
ONG BEFORE DIGESTION
researchers had veterans’ stool and Model Guts to play with, they had Alexis St. Martin. In the early 1800s, St. Martin worked as a trapper for the American Fur Company in what is now Michigan. At age eighteen, he was accidently shot in the side. The wound healed as an open fistulated passage, the hole in his stomach fusing with the overlying holes in the muscles and skin. St. Martin’s surgeon, William Beaumont, recognized the value of the unusual aperture as a literal window into the actions of the human stomach and its mysterious juices, about which, up until that point, nothing much was known.

Experiment 1 began at noon on August 1, 1825. “I introduced through the perforation, into the stomach, the following articles of diet, suspended by a silk string: . . . a piece of high seasoned à la mode beef; a piece of raw salted fat pork; a piece of raw salted lean beef; . . . a piece of stale bread; and a bunch of raw sliced cabbage; . . . the lad continuing his usual employment about the house.”

On the very first day of his research career, Beaumont’s work dealt a bruising blow to Fletcherism
^*
—seventy-five years before it was invented: “2 p.m. Found the cabbage, bread, pork, and boiled beef all cleanly digested and gone from the string.” No chewing necessary.
^*
Only the raw beef remained intact.

Beaumont carried out more than a hundred experiments on St. Martin and eventually published a book on the work, securing his place in the history of medicine. Textbooks today still make reference to Beaumont, often with hyperbolic phrasing: “the father of American physiology,” “the patron saint of American physiology.” From the perspective of Alexis St. Martin, there was nothing saintly or fatherly about him.

*
He did, however, leave the residue of his estate to Harvard, part of which went toward funding the Horace Fletcher Prize. This was to be awarded each year for “the best thesis on the subject ‘Special Uses of Circumvallate Papilli and the Saliva of the Mouth in Regulating Physiological Economy in Nutrition.’” Harvard’s Prize Office has no record of anyone applying for, much less winning, the prize.

*
The two parted ways over feces. Kellogg’s healthful ideal was four loose logs a day; Fletcher’s was a few dry balls once a week. It got personal. “His tongue was heavily coated and his breath was highly malodorous,” sniped Kellogg.

†
I managed to track down only one stanza. It was enough. “I choose to chew / because I wish to do / the sort of thing that Nature had in view / Before bad cooks invented sav’ry stew / When the only way to eat was to chew, chew, chew.”

*
“Vesuvius is puking lava at an alarming rate.”

*
A summary of Chittenden’s project appears in the June 1903 issue of
Popular Science Monthly
, on the same page as an account of the Havre Two-Legged Horse, a foal born without forelegs, resembling a kangaroo “but with less to console it, since the latter has legs in front, which, while small and short are better than none at all.” On a more upbeat note, the foal was “very healthy and obtains its food from a goat.”

*
“Put 2 and ½ pounds of guano with 3 qts of water in an enamel stew-pan, boil for 3 or 4 hours, then let it cool. Separate the clear liquid, and about a quart of this healthy extract is obtained.” Use sparingly, cautions the author, or it “will be as repugnant as pepper or vinegar.”

*
The human digestive tract is like the Amtrak line from Seattle to Los Angeles: transit time is about thirty hours, and the scenery on the last leg is pretty monotonous.

†
“It can even vomit,” boasts its designer. No reply arrived in response to an e-mail asking whether and into what the Model Gut excretes.