NEW ELIXIR OF LIFE.

Taranaki Daily News, 27 March 1916, Page 2

NEW ELIXIR OF LIFE.

SHORTAGE OF FOOD AND ONE BIG WORRY—THE WAR. Mr. Horace Fletcher, who won back health and youth by proper mastication of liia food, and who, ever since, has been teaching people how to eat, lias received striking confirmation of his theories as the outcome of 16 months' residence in Belgium, where ho worked us food expert of the Hoover Relief Commission. "In Belgium," says Mr. Fletcher in a New York World interview, "we have the most remarkable e.vample in history of the application of scientific principles and hygienic laws of the food problem of an entire people. The results have been marvellous. Undertakers are literally without work. They have been driven out as completely as malaria has been driven from the Isthmus of Panama. ■ The only cases of fatal sickness are cases of tuberculosis, cancer, and that sort of tiling, specific diseases contracted before the war. There is almost no influenza, no appendicitis, no auto-intoxi-cation. "That is what enforced temperance and short rations have done, aided also by'the serenity of the people, a serenity due to the fact that they have one big worry, participated in by all, which takes the place of the million minor worries cultivated individually m times of peace and prosperity. This has resulted in decreasing the" death-rate beyond belief,. "At the same time the birth-rate is high. "Perhaps more than any display of courage, the thing that- affected, me most," continued Mr. Fletcher, "was the way the people in Brussels consented to non-resistance. That is what impressed me more than anything else. Their docility was amazing; it was the .highest test of virtue and moral courage. I j never saw such obedience to authority in j my life."