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Show The Instinct to Eat. (From the Independent.) A few years ago a physician bought a monkey in order to study his methods meth-ods ol eating. He' fed .iim cherries, which the monkey seemed greedily to swallow whole. But after the stock of cherries was exhausted it was found that the monkey had merely stored them in his cheeks. He had taken them as rapidly as possible, for fear, apparently, he should loose his chance of getting them all. As soon as he perceived that no more were forthcoming he began, from the "little storehouse on each side of his mouth, to press with his finger one chyrry after another into his mouth. He then chewed it thoroughly, put out the pit. skin and stem and swallowed. Among the consequences of food-bolting food-bolting we must probably count the excessive use of flesh foods. Meat is one of the few foods which can be eaten rapidly with impunity. It requires re-quires less subdivision and less mixture mix-ture with saliva than other foods. It is significant that the flesh-eating animals, ani-mals, such as the dog. lion and tiger, are rapid eaters, whereas the grain-eating grain-eating animals, such as the horse, are slow eaters. Those who, like Mr. Fletcher, have overcome the common hurry habit and have reverted to thorough thor-ough mastication have found themselves them-selves unconsciously diminishing their consumption of foods like meat, which are proper to fast-eating animals, and substituting foods like cereals, which are proper to slow-eating animals. A man who eats as fast '-as a dog or a lion will want to eat the foods which dogs and lions use. A man who eats slowly will find it. cereal, fruit and nut diet more satisfactory. The practice of slower eating Is spreading rapidly, and is even reacn- j ing intc the athletic world. Were the movement merely a lad. it would soon die a. natural death, but there is too much sound physiology behind it to make such a result likel Never before be-fore has there been so much interest in human nutrition and never before have so many scientists been at work on diet tic problems. As yet the study ha only begun. As Professor Chittenden Chitten-den stated recently: "We are only just beginning to learn a little in the science of dietetics." It will doubtless take years before that science is thoroughly thor-oughly established. In the meantime the a-verage man, without needing to study dietetics in any technical way, can getthe advantage of a scientific-diet scientific-diet by following his annetite, if only he will give up the hurry habit by which that appetite has become perverted. per-verted. It is not necessary to make a bore of eatin?. On the contrary, he who counts his chews or makes hard work of mastication by attending only to ;he mechani'-al act of chewing will receive more harm than good from the practice. Pawlow has shown that the "appetite juice" in the stomach will not flew unless we attend to the taste and enjoyment of our food. The food should be chewed and relished with no thought of swallowing. There should be no more effort to prevent than to force swallowing. It will be found that that if we attend only to the agreeable task of extracting the flavors from our food, nature will take car e of the swallowing, which will become, like breathing, involulary. H will also be found that taste will grow more discriminating dis-criminating and can be depended upon to rjuide us. both in respect to the kind of food and also in respect to the amount. The men who took part in the Yale experiment remarked with surprise on the keen sense of taste they developed and the number of flavors fla-vors formerly unsuspected which they had grown to appreciate in foods like bread, which formerlyl had been almost al-most tasteless. |