14. History

Dr. Shelton (Volume II, pp. 274-276) quotes numerous students of history as saying that the Greeks and the Romans, for more than a thousand years, ate one meal a day—and their armies marched for days "under loads of iron, clothes, and provisions that would stagger a modern porter."

During the zenith period of Grecian and Roman civilization, the firmly established rule was that a health-loving man should content himself with one meal a day, and never eat until he had leisure to digest, i.e., not till the day's work was wholly done.

Dr. Felix Oswald says, "The evening repast was a kind of domestic festival, the reward of the day's toil, an enjoyment which rich and poor refrained from marring by premature gratifications of their appetites."

After the Greeks and Romans acquired power and riches, their sensuous indulgence in food was followed by their physical, mental, and moral decline.

The Persians ate one meal daily. The Jews from Moses to Jesus ate but one meal a day. They sometimes added a lunch of fruit. For more than a thousand years, the one-meal-a-day plan was the established rule among the civilized nations inhabiting the coast lands of the Mediterranean.

Even today, primitive tribes eat their daily meal after the hunters return—if the hunt fails, they have no meal.

The two-meal-a-day plan survived in England at least until 1858. With its increasing prosperity, England adopted the three-meal-a-day program.

When Sylvester Graham (early Hygienic pioneer) began his career as a temperance lecturer in the United States, gormandizing was one of the favorite indoor sports. It was not unusual to serve as many as thirty or more kinds of meat and fish at a ceremonial banquet. Gentlemen sometimes sat at the table for as long as seven hours for one meal—followed by gout and other penalties of overrating.