"Heredity determines, to a very large extent, our cell structure, and consequently our body structure.
"Sanitary science regulates our external body environment as much as the artificial and noxious habits of so-called civilisation will allow. The mental and physical external body environments have also their effect on the organism.
"Your discovery of simple rules for an Economic Nutrition will control the internal cell environment. In doing this, the predisposition to disease is materially affected. The internal cell environment being free from toxic material, and the cell itself better nourished, the cell's resistance to disease is increased, the possible source of disease being limited to the external body environment.
"In concluding this endorsement I can promise, to each and all who may intelligently practise the principles of Thorough Buccal-Digestion, a complete knowledge of their body's food requirements, or, as a patient of mine tersely put it, they will learn the way to 'run their own machines.'
Dr. Van Someren and the author, assisted by Dr. Professor Leonardi, of Venice, as Consulting Physiological-Chemist, and several colleagues, pursued some experiments during the winter of 1900-1901; and Dr. Van Someren read a paper on our work, entitled, "Was Luigi Cornaro Right?", before the meeting of the British Medical Association the following August.
The paper is too long to reprint here but it will be found in full in another volume, entitled, "The A.B.-Z. of Our Own Nutrition."
The following "Note" by Dr. Professor, Sir Michael Foster, K.C.B., M.P., F.R.S. etc., is a further link in the chain of development of appreciation of the need of serious attention to the science of human nutrition excited by this initiative. (Dr. Foster is the Permanent Honorary President of the International Congress of Physiologists.)
NOTE BY SIR MICHAEL FOSTER, K.C.B., M.P., F.R.S.
"In 1901 Dr. Ernest Van Someren submitted to the British Medical Association, and afterwards to the Congress of Physiologists at Turin, an account of some experiments initiated by Mr. Horace Fletcher. These experiments went to show that the processes of bodily nutrition are very profoundly affected by the preliminary treatment of the food-stuffs in the mouth and indicated that great advantages follow from the adoption of certain methods in eating. The essentials of these special methods, stated briefly and without regard to certain important theoretical considerations discussed by Dr. Van Someren, consist of a specially prolonged mastication which is necessarily associated with an insalivation of the food-stuffs much more thorough than is obtained with ordinary habits.