Principles of Good Digestion

cannot be wrong; but they suffer just the same. What needless suffering, when the cause can be pinpointed and solved!

Therefore, I repeat the key principle: Starches should be chewed dry and not washed down with liquids, such as milk, coffee, tea, soups or water and other beverages. Chewing and insalivation is a must for the enzyme's action in all herbivorous creatures and starch eaters.

Many sick persons got well when they started Fletcherizing their food (the process of lengthy and thorough mastication and insalivation of food in the mouth) and eating less. Dr. Fletcher^[1] discovered this simple fact many years ago when he was very ill, and the proof was a healthy life after that. Hence, the name of "Fletcherizing" was given to this process of thorough and lengthy mastication and insalivation. His book on "Fletcherizing" is well known.^[2]

Rice is a starch and when cooked properly, as it is in the Orient, so that every kernel is whole and dry, it is a well-established diet of millions. Poor people enjoy it and chew it well when they have so little of it, and they stay well. Some author in Japan even recommended rice as a cure-all, without stating the real fact behind it; namely, a mono diet^* and thorough mastication. This, of course, applied to the natural, unpolished rice from which the valuable rice bran has not been removed.

Plain potatoes, boiled with the skins on them, served a similar need in early Pomeranian Germany. This was the main diet of the peasantry. They ate these potatoes only with soured skim milk (curd), and they did not know what illness was, due to this simple mono diet, which included whole-grain dark bread without butter. They performed hard physical labor and so this diet was suited to their circumstances; but for sedentary workers potatoes may be a bit too heavy. Here I

^* Mono diet: A diet which consists of a single kind of food.

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¹ Horace Fletcher (1849-1919), an American lecturer and health food advocate who popularized the practice. "Nature will castigate those who don't masticate."
² Fletcherism : What It Is or How I Became Young at Sixty, 1923.