Metchnikoff has recently pointed out, with great emphasis, the immense influence upon health of intestinal putrefaction. He insists that it shortens life; is one of the chief causes of premature old age and death, and is the cause of many diseases and much misery during life—in all of which he is doubtless quite right. The method of checking this intestinal putrefaction, however, does not appeal to me as other than a palliative measure. Lactic acid is, for him, the great preventive of putrefaction of this type; but is it not obvious that such a treatment is merely one that aims at _results_, rather than at _causes_? one which attempts to patch up existing conditions, instead of trying to find out what gave rise to those conditions, and checking _them_? M. Metchnikoff has apparently failed to realise the fact that there is no need whatever for the human intestine being in any such diseased and disgusting condition as it is generally; that, in certain cases, it may be rendered absolutely sweet and clean—with virtually no putrefaction going on in the bowel at all. In the case of Mr Horace Fletcher, for instance (and in many of his disciples), no such conditions are present or possible. Mr Fletcher, writing in his “New Glutton or Epicure,” says (pp. 144-145):
“One of the most noticeable and significant results of economic nutrition, gained through careful attention to the mouth treatment of food, or buccal-digestion, is not only the small quantity of waste obtained but its inoffensiveness. Under best test conditions the ashes of economic digestion have been reduced to one-tenth of the average given as normal in the best text-books on physiology. The economic digestion ash forms in pillular shape, and, when released, these are massed together, having become so bunched by considerable retention in the rectum. There is no stench, no evidence of putrid bacterial decomposition, only the odour of warmth, like warm earth or ‘hot biscuit.’ Test samples of excreta, kept for more than five years, remain inoffensive, dry up, gradually disintegrate, and are lost.”
To my mind, it has always been so obvious that, if we supplied no food to decompose, there could be no decomposition, that I hardly thought the question was open to debate at all. It would appear to me to be axiomatic that if we only supplied the body with as much food as it really needed, and of the proper quality, there would be virtually no food left to decompose, or to offer pabulum for germs of any character whatever. Certainly this is the case outside the human intestine, and why not in it? One can quite easily see why it should be—why putrefaction should take place, if the amount of food ingested were excessive in quantity, or poisonous in quality; _but not otherwise_. The former of these two questions I have discussed at length in my former volume on fasting; the latter aspect of the problem is the one I propose to discuss in this book.