18-year-old Helena Muffly wrote exactly 100 years ago today:
Tuesday, January 20, 1914: Ditto
Her middle-aged granddaughter’s comments 100 years later:
Since Grandma didn’t write much a hundred years ago today, I’ll share a few fun quotes about the dangers of over-eating from a hundred-year-old article:
A Greater Curse Than the Saloon
The saloon is a curse, we say. And it is. But when we speak of the saloon as the greatest curse in America we are beside the facts. Statistics plainly prove that overeating kills more people.
Kidney diseases and heart troubles are tremendously on the increase in America. Nor is the rush and strenuous life of America alone to blame. Nor is it alcohol. Both are contributing forces, but the greatest of all is the inability, particularly of men, to eat rightly.
The majority of men overeat. A man at forty cannot do the work of a man at thirty any more than he can at fifty do the work he did at forty. And he cannot and should not eat the same food in quantity. He does not need it.
Physicians agree that after a man or a woman has turned the corner at forty the system no longer needs the same quantity of food required in early manhood or womanhood. It actually does its work better on smaller amounts.
It is an old but true saying that “we dig our graves with our teeth.”
Ladies Home Journal (February, 1914)
You may also enjoy this previous post:
A Hundred Years Ago 