Stories
The Bizarre Story of Fletcherism: Chewing Every Bite 722 Times and Sending Stool in a Parcel
- •Horace Fletcher, an American businessman born in the early 1900s, developed a weight-loss method called Fletcherism focused entirely on excessive chewing after being rejected for life insurance due to obesity.
- •Fletcherism required chewing every bite of food until it turned completely into a liquid state before swallowing, famously chewing a single green onion 722 times for 12 minutes.
- •Fletcher once mailed a first-class parcel containing his own dried stool to his friend Russell Chittenden at Yale University to prove that his digestion method left no nutritional waste.
- •His extreme chewing theory gained massive popularity, influencing prominent figures like John D. Rockefeller, Arthur Conan Doyle, and Upton Sinclair, and was even advocated during the First World War.
- •Although Fletcher passed away in 1919 and his unscientific claims were largely dismissed, his core idea highlighted the benefits of eating slowly and chewing food thoroughly to avoid overeating.
Key Questions Answered
Fletcherism was a popular early 1900s theory created by American businessman Horace Fletcher, which claimed that food should be chewed until completely liquid and any remainder spat out. Fletcher adopted this extreme diet after being rejected for life insurance due to weighing 217 pounds.
Horace Fletcher mailed his stool in a first-class parcel to his friend and Yale physiologist Russell Chittenden as proof that his new diet was working. He believed that thorough chewing meant digestion happened entirely in the mouth, producing very dry and hard stool he called ash.
During the First World War, Fletcher served as an official food economist on a committee for Herbert Hoover, advocating that thorough chewing could reduce food consumption and eliminate hunger. Prominent individuals like John D. Rockefeller and author Arthur Conan Doyle also followed his diet craze.
