Doing for themselves specifically meant permitting newly weaned infants to choose how much or how little to eat of 33 available foodstuffs. As she emphasized to her Quebec audience, no adult was allowed even to hint to the children what might be a proper choice or portion amount. “The nurses' orders were to sit quietly by, spoon in hand, and make no motion,” she said.
Accordingly, Davis devised the experiment to let children do for themselves because she suspected that children's bodies instinctively “knew best” what the individual child should eat. Her intellectual model, a view that would later be called “the wisdom of the body,” likened a child's instinctive appetite to the way various autonomic body systems effortlessly adjust themselves to compensate for external challenges — think of sweating on a hot day, and breathing faster when you start to run.
Initially, it seemed that this conceit didn't apply to Davis's test children and their food preferences. None of the eat-what-and-how-much-of-what-you-want infants had the same diet on any given day, week or month. “Every diet differed from every other diet, 15 different patterns of taste being presented, and not one diet was the predominantly cereal-and-milk diet, with smaller supplements of fruit, eggs and meat, that is commonly thought proper for this age,” she told her Montréal audience.
Yet, she and others later saw that the infants' fanatical heterodoxy turned into what appeared to be 15 uniformly well-nourished, healthy children.
How could eating drastically different diets achieve uniform health and nutritional balance? Body wisdom was the only likely explanation Davis concluded. “Such successful juggling and balancing of the more than 30 nutritional essentials that exist in mixed and different proportions in the foods from which they must be derived suggests at once the existence of some innate, automatic mechanism for its accomplishment.”
