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A Longer, Stronger LifeHENRY C. SHERMANColumbia University Better nutrition can add a 10 percent dividend of health, strength, and happiness to the prime of life. There has not yet been time to study entire human life-cycles directly. But the nutritional improvement of health has been studied both in children and grown people; and large numbers of controlled experiments covering entire lives, and of successive generations, have been made with laboratory animals. There is already definite evidence, for example, that the nutritional improvements shown in experiments with rats are well within the scientific probabilities of the benefits which nutrition can bring to man. The finding which has, perhaps, attracted most attention because it was least expected, is the increase in the average length of normal adult life—the life expectation of the adult. A nutritional improvement which consisted simply in changing the quantitative proportions of the natural foods, increased the life-cycle by 10 percent! This is what the same nutritional knowledge may be expected to do for human lives. And the extra years are not added to old age. They are best conceived as inserted at the apex of the prime of life. This promise of increased efficiency through nutrition is as valid for mental as for muscular work. Nutrition affects the level of health and stamina largely by its influence upon the body's internal environment. Here the blood is the great mediator; and the same blood circulates through all the organs of the body, carrying the fluctuations which dietary differences induce, for better or worse, to the brain, and the nerves, and the muscles, and the liver alike. There is much reason to believe, and no reason to doubt, that the same changes which so clearly improve the biological value of the ordinary American dietary will make for increased psychological efficiency as well. Undoubtedly the new concept of a more flexible internal environment than science has hitherto visualized, with our new techniques for elucidating human experience by means of laboratory experimentation, will from now on make much more objectively convincing the relationships of general stamina to mental efficiency. Of course there is a difference between brain and brawn. Yet in everything in which the human spirit must use the brain as its tool, the expression of the spiritual forces and of the mentality is necessarily conditioned by the internal environment of the body of which that brain is a part. That internal environment which we now know to be influenced by even everyday differences of food habit is in all probability fully as important to mental work and sound decisions as it is to muscular work and physical contest. Well established physico-chemical principles together with the new evidence obtained from laboratory feeding experiments extending throughout entire lives of successive generations make us scientifically certain of the reality the influence of dietary differences upon the body's internal environment, even though in some cases present diagnostic methods may not yet be able to detect through direct analytical chemistry the difference which nutritional chemistry demonstrates clearly in the longer run. Thus recent and current developments in the concepts and methods of research are enabling nutrition to make more helpful contact with psychology in the study of mental efficiency; as also with genetics in the study of constitutional stamina.
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