[Sidenote: What a dietary standard should contain]
A dietary standard should tell the quantity and the proportion of food required to keep the human body in its very best working state. The great error committed by the man who planned the above-named standards has been that he assumed that an average of what a man _does_ eat is a criterion of what he _should_ eat in order to maintain the best mental and physical condition. A greater error could not have been made. _Our feeding instincts have been lost in the chaos of civilization._ Both our appetite and our food have been perverted. We have been trained to want or to crave intoxicants, stimulants and sedatives; we have learned to relish things that have no food value, and we have grown to dislike the best food that nature produces, and to accept many of her worst. Dietary standards, therefore, made up from the conventional eating habits of the people, merely endorse their errors and pass them on to future generations. The work, therefore, of the true scientist is to point out these errors and to prescribe a remedy.
[Sidenote: We are creatures of many (bad) habits]
Man is a creature of habits, and civilized man is a creature of a great many bad habits. The argument that the average amount of food eaten is the amount that should be eaten falls under suspicion at once when we consider the fact that by a similar line of reasoning we could prove that the use of tobacco is necessary because the majority of men use it, or that slender waists are necessary to good social standing because a few million women so consider them.
[Sidenote: American prosperity not due to rich diet]
The idea has been spread far and wide that the diet of the American working man, which is the richest in proteid of any race in the world, is responsible for the greater economic thrift of the American people. It is a matter of history that rich diet is always associated with prosperity, but the theory that the diet is the cause of the prosperity is an egregious error. Meat and rich foods gain a hold upon the appetite as do alcohol and narcotics. When nations or cities become wealthy, intemperance in eating is the usual result, but this in nowise indicates that a heavy consumption of food is the cause of a nation's greatness. History recites many instances of the rise and growth of a people to power and prosperity, together with the consequent adoption of excessive and luxurious habits of eating and drinking, only to be followed by physical deterioration.