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Horace Fletcher - 'The Great Masticator' (1849–1919) | Fletcher guidelines
Horace Fletcher led a life of adventure, going to sea on a whaler at 15, training sharpshooters for the Japanese army, managing a New Orleans opera company, and sailing with a crew of Chinese pirates amongst other things. He made his fortune in San Francisco as a manufacturer of printing ink and an importer of Japanese art. By the age of 40, at 5ft 6in (165cm) he weighed 15st 7lb (98kg) and was being turned down for life insurance by companies who had begun to make the link between obesity and morbidity.Three inches of personal responsibility
With a belief that nature didn't make mistakes, and that proper nutrition was vital to well-being, Fletcher elaborated the idea that all bodily weakness resulted from the improper treatment of food while in the mouth, or the "three inches of personal responsibility" as he referred to it. Taste was the ultimate guide to 'Fletcherism'. Food should be retained in the mouth and chewed until all trace of flavour had been extracted. In most cases this would be 100 chews or fewer, but a shallot might require 700! Any food which could not be liquefied was to be spat out, as this evidenced the ability of the body to distinguish between nutritious and non-nutritious matter.
A 'physiological puzzle'
Fletcher also believed that lower mass and reduced frequency of defecation was evidence of the efficiency of the 'food filter'. He himself claimed to produce faeces only once every one to two weeks, and always in small quantities (2–4oz/57–113g). He declared them "no more offensive than moist clay" with "no more odour than a hot biscuit". To prove his point he carried a sample with him. He was also tested by the professor of physical education at Yale at the age of 54 and 58, where he reputedly performed with ease the exercises required of university athletes and undergraduates. One nutritionist described him as a "physiological puzzle". He himself put his condition down to the elimination of "putrid decomposition" from his alimentary tract.
The 'divine fletcher'
Fletcher's new diet was a success. He spoke and wrote to raise its profile and by 1910 Fletcherism had gained some high profile followers, including John D Rockerfeller, Franz Kafka and Henry James, who referred to him as 'the divine Fletcher'. The fad was also enthusiastically adopted in England, where 'munching parties' were run by the stopwatch to ensure that guests spent five minutes chewing each morsel. Unusually for a dietary fad, Fletcherism was well received by the British medical community, with the editors of The Lancet commenting: "a more generally beneficial doctrine could hardly be chosen for the medical idol of the moment".
Munching, manners and music – the Kindergarten of Vital Economics
As well as weight loss, Fletcher also made claims for the social and military applications of his techiques. He sponsored an experiment with Chicago tramps into disease prevention, and he also ran the Kindergarten of Vital Economics in a poor New York neighbourhood, where teaching of the 3Rs was supplemented by the 3Ms – Munching, Manners and Music. He even approached the British army during the Boer war and suggested that super-mastication should be tried in South Africa, where rations could be reduced by one third. The War Office declined for political reasons. Following experiments in the American and French army, in 1910 the Royal Army Medical Corps conducted a trial based on Fletcher's ideas, but found that troops required more calories than were provided by the reduced rations and reported that all the men on the trial lost weight.
