"Nature will castigate those who don't masticate."

Horace Fletcher (1849–1919) was an American health food enthusiast of the Victorian era who earned the nickname "The Great Masticator," by arguing that food should be chewed thirty two times – or, about 100 times per minute – before being swallowed: "Nature will castigate those who don't masticate." He invented elaborate justifications for his claim.

Although many people believed Fletcher’s laboratory reports, the more important eye-opener to doctors and laymen was his series of experiments in the Payne Whitney Gymnasium at Yale University. It was here that he participated, at the age of fifty-eight, in vigorous tests of strength and endurance versus the college athletes. The tests included: “deep-knee bending,” holding out arms horizontally for a length of time, and calf raises on an intricate machine. Fletcher claimed to lift “three hundred pounds dead weight three hundred and fifty times with his right calf.” The tests claim that Fletcher outperformed these Yale athletes in all events and that they were very impressed with his athletic ability at his old age. Fletcher attributed this to following his eating practices, and ultimately these tests, whether true or not, helped further endorse “Fletcherism” publicly.