How To Chew

Thorough mastication of food cannot be done with soft foods. For this reason hard foods must be used and for those whose teeth are not of the best, or who have tender gums or few teeth, the food may be allowed to lie with advantage a few seconds in the mouth before commencing to chew. Tough and dry foods are those which compel mastication.

Mastication promotes the flow of saliva - saliva digests starch and sugar and probably other compounds. Food thoroughly insalivated is half digested. Let it be understood clearly that with thorough in-salivation few, if any, foods are indigestible, even new potatoes succumbing.

Mastication acts reflexly upon the stomach, promoting the flow of gastric juice and thus preparing the stomach for the entrance of food into it. The excessive thirst of chronic dyspepsia will disappear, almost as if by magic where mastication be complete.

The instinct to masticate manifests itself all over the world. Babies suck their thumb, fingers, or even any hard substance they can lay hold of. Inefficient mastication is a result of the modern system of feeding children who are kept on a liquid, or semi-liquid diet - pappy foods - so that so little opportunity of exercising the masticatory instinct is given, that it soon dies out. This is the beginning of the "bolting" of food which usually remains through life. The masticatory habit should be acquired in childhood by giving children hard, coarse, and dry foods instead of the soft bread, butter, sugar, "sopped" and pultaceous foods. "If we masticate, or thoroughly chew, food with "vigorous jaw action - a grinding process - everything "that we take into the mouth, liquid as well as solid, "until the nutritive part of it disappears into the "stomach through compulsory or involuntary swal-"lowing, and remove from the mouth all fibrous, insoluble and tasteless residue, we will take into the "body only that which is good for it." Sip and taste milk and all other liquids that have taste, as the wine tasters do; a sip, a teaspoonful or two of water, thoroughly rinsed around in the mouth, and then spat out or swallowed as the dictates demand, will give one greater pleasure than a whole glassfull gulped down. Thorough insalivation of liquids becomes a pleasure, just as much as thorough mastication of solid food.

Insalivation

Sipping develops the sense of taste. Drinking or gulping down fluid eludes it, On the Continent coffee and tea are always sipped little by little. In America the majority of people drink or gulp down their tea, coffee or water in two or three gulps. An American gulps down the entire contents of a cup of coffee before the European would have sipped the first teaspoonful.

One result of the thorough mastication of food is that there is no necessity for taking medicine of any kind - the whole machinery of medicine disappears.

There is no occasion for fountain syringes, "internal baths," pile cures, nor the hundred and one other medical devices which are brought into use as a result of our improper living. In short, man is clean and wholesome, internally and externally.

No Necessity

Learn to chew. Learn to sip. Practise them. Once acquired nothing will induce' you to bolt food again, either liquid or solid. If your time for eating is limited, don't try to eat more than your time will allow you. You cannot masticate twenty minutes' food in five minutes' time. One will get more nourishment out of food properly eaten in three minutes, than out of five times that amount improperly eaten. Never pack your stomach like a steamer trunk. The tissues of the stomach are just as delicate as those of the eye. No one would think of putting pepper, vinegar, and spices in an eye without experiencing pain and plenty of it. The same applies to the stomach; in its way it rebels quite as much as the eye.

Insufficient mastication produces craving, a craving for drink, whether water or liquors. The thirst of chronic dyspeptics is for a simple' fluid, as tea. coffee, or water. The individual, however, who uses liquor, craves for a "bracer," the stomach being overloaded with food, made worse by improper mastication. The stomach aims to rid itself of the load, doing its best by writhing and twisting to tear the undigested morsels to pieces and pass them along.

For Medicine

Mastication will soon be reduced to an exact branch of the science of health.

Complete mastication prepares the food mechanc-ally and chemically in the mouth; increases the degree of pleasure in eating; prolongs that pleasure; limits the quantity of food without the necessity of practicing self-denial; educates the sense of taste to discriminate between wholesome and unwholesome-foods, and finally to select the proper foods.