rimate. No
authority has ever offered any reason why man's diet should differ from
that of other primates.
Man is not naturally a flesh-eater. Infants usually evince a dislike for
flesh when it is first given them.
Adults who use flesh foods are attracted by their flavors rather than by
the nutritive elements which they supply. As a matter of fact, more and
better food material is supplied by plant foods and at a far less cost.
Meats are notably deficient in vitamins, while nuts are rich in vitamin
B, some, as the hazel nut, containing one-fifth as much as dry yeast.
The precious vitamin A, found in only very meager amounts in meats, is
found in the almond, the pine nut, coconuts and peanuts.
The minerals, too, are found in better proportions and in larger amounts
in nuts than in meats.
The deficiencies in essential elements in a lean meat diet are so
pronounced that when Chalmers Watson fed rats on meat they became
deformed and sterile, their mammary and other sex glands degenerated and
in three generations they ran out completely. Watson attributes the
steady and very pronounced lowering of the birth-rate in Great Britain
to the increased consumption of meat in that country, which has risen in
a little more than a century from 3 pounds to more than 100 pounds per
capita, while the birth-rate has fallen until it closely approximates
the mortality rate. The same thing has happened in the older sections of
this country, especially the New England states.
According to Newburgh, of the University of Michigan, the large
consumption of meat in this country may be responsible for the high
death rate from Bright's disease, which is mounting higher every year.
And the same is true of diseases of the heart and blood vessels, which
now claim more lives annually than any other cause. He finds that when
rabbits are fed meat meal mixed with flour in bread, they soon become
diseased through changes in the bloodvessels and die of old age before
they are a year old.
Hindhede, of Copenhagen, a physiologist of world-wide renown, and food
commissioner for Denmark, in a notable paper read before the Race
Betterment Conference at Battle Creek, January, 1928, remarked as
follows:
"One notices the terrible death toll in America due to Bright's
disease. I can no longer doubt that the high meat diet ruins the
kidneys, especially in view of Dr. Newburgh's experiments, proving
as they do that we may, with mat
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