Plutarch's Natural Questions by Plutarch

Whether (as many think) to nourish them the more, and fatten them the better? For salt by its acrimony sharpens the appetite, and by opening the passages brings meat more easily to digestion.

Therefore Apollonius, Herophilus's scholar, would not have lean persons, and such as did not thrive, be fed with sweet things and gruel, but ordered them to use pickles and salt things for their food, whose tenuity, serving instead of frication or sifting, might apply the aliment through the passages of the body.