Excerpt from The Hundred Year Diet by Susan Yager
Book Excerpt
Introduction
Dinner is being served. Young women with beautiful, clear complexions, bright eyes, and abundant good health are waiting on "invalids" seated at long wooden tables. This scenario has the potential for communal dining at its best— convivial conversation and laughter turning casual acquaintances into friends — but if it weren't for the sounds of eating, the opulent dining hall would be silent. Talk is difficult because everyone is chewing profusely, at least 100 times before swallowing each mouthful, and then meticulously jotting down the portion size and weight for every food choice made. This eating is serious business, and joyless. What must be accomplished is explained clearly: "Cut calories to one-half of normal number until loss of flesh has been secured," and "Fletcherize," which means gnashing all food to a liquid pulp before swallowing it.
This part is essential — banners proclaiming FLETCHERIZE! hang at either end of the room. John D. Rockefeller Jr. might be carefully masticating and calculating at one of these tables, or Thomas Alva Edison, or Henry Ford— powerful men who are usually in complete control of everyone they come in contact with. Here, they are only in control of their own bodies and souls. A few women are dining as well, like the famous dancer Ruth St. Denis and the wife of author Upton Sinclair. There is no need to be concerned about any flirtation; the diners are far too busy worrying about what to choose from the menu. Will it be fruit soup or navy bean, nuttolene fricassee or roast of protose, lettuce salad or potato, graham crackers or Passover bread, sliced bananas or assorted nuts? The year is 1909, and it's dinnertime at the Battle Creek Sanitarium in Michigan, the largest and most luxurious facility of its kind in the world. The richest and most powerful American women — and men — are on a diet. Bodies and souls are the business of "the San," as its wealthy patrons affectionately call it. Its director, John Harvey Kellogg, MD, is a short, stocky, and charismatic man— surgeon, inventor, vegetarian, and devout Seventh-Day Adventist. He is a philanthropist, but also an astute capitalist who can spot a moneymaking trend when he sees one. He is certain that helping people get rid of a few extra pounds can be a profitable business, and if he can proselytize at the same time, well, that's even better.
Gained a Few Pounds? Bant!
Middle-and upper-class Americans became interested in losing weight in the 1880s, lured by a pamphlet self-published 20 years earlier by an obese Englishman named William Banting that first achieved great popularity in the United Kingdom. Recommended by physicians who thought the tactics it urged were a better choice than taking a little cocaine before meals to curb the appetite (a popular trick), Letter on Corpulence, Addressed to the Public was America's first diet book. It was a high-protein, low-calorie, low-fat, modified carbohydrate plan.
Banting, an affluent coffin maker in his sixties, was 5 feet 5 inches tall and weighed 202 pounds when he entered the Soho Square, London, office of aural surgeon Dr. William Harvey. It was a struggle for him to tie his shoes or walk up a flight of stairs, and his hearing was seriously impaired. Banting had already visited numerous physicians but had no luck. Harvey had been researching the effects of obesity on disease and believed that weight reduction would restore hearing and cure rheumatism and gout as well. He instructed his new patient, Mr. Banting, to follow his diet plan carefully.
Read the rest of the excerpt at Ms. Yager's website.