y live. And, alas! I know only too well all the trouble
well-meaning but deluded people who sit at the table with a nervous
individual will make him when they discover how much time he is taking
to chew his food. At first, because of the length of time I spent at a
meal, such people thought I must be eating as much as a horse. But, here
and there, for I was in many places, when people found out what I was
doing, they would only courteously deride me for being so gullible about
what they termed fads.

We are all well aware that the vast majority of Americans do not chew
their food to a cream or anything like it. And there are those,
therefore, who advance as an argument that because the majority do not
there must be something wrong with the minority who do. Well, let us
follow this out a little: Not so many hundred years ago everybody
believed the world was _flat_. But their theory did not make it flat.
And so, even though thousands of people who crowd our eating houses do
bolt their food, that does not prove there is no danger in the practice.
And they who do it are digging their graves with their teeth.

_Chew your food!_

III. RIGHT AND WRONG DIET FOR NERVOUS PEOPLE

"He who leads a sober and regular life, and commits no excess in
his diet, can suffer but little from disorders of any kind."

--CORNARO

People who are the offspring of nervous parents and who have had a
nervous breakdown should not eat commercial sugar, eggs, or animal food
of any kind whatever. These statements may seem wholly unimportant to
some people, but I realize what a tremendous bomb I throw into the camps
of others when they read them. You see, for centuries people have
believed meat and eggs to be the best of all foods; so when I make a
statement like the foregoing, the effect is not unlike that which
followed Columbus' statement that no matter what people believed, the
fact was that the earth was round, not flat. From the very beginning it
has not made a single bit of difference as to what physicians or
anybody else thought; facts count. And no matter what we may think or
how long we have thought it, facts go right on being facts just the
same.

Sometimes, even after twenty years' experience, about once in two or
three months--because there is nothing else at hand--I find myself
eating a small bit of meat. This usually happens when I am on a lecture
tour. But if I eat only a small slice of bacon at the evening meal I
dr