Part 15

We remember another instance; this time of a consumptive; a man who was so far gone that all the physicians gave up his case as hopeless. To all intents and purposes he was already a dead man, when there came to him the light of a new hope. He had spent a great deal of money in taking various “treatments” for tuberculosis, without deriving permanent benefit, and then had come to believe utterly that in only one way was there hope for the consumptive, namely, by living entirely in the open air. When seemingly at his last gasp he arrived at a branch of the Battle Creek Sanitarium at Boulder Creek, Colorado. In certain photographs of this establishment you may see on a bare hillside that stands back of the building, a narrow foot-path. This path has many turnings and windings in its lower course, but towards the top of the hill it aspires upward in a straight line. That trail was made by the consumptive who had determined that he would live, crawling on his hands and knees up the side of the hill. He positively refused to go under a roof for any consideration whatsoever. His meals were brought to him where he lay on the road side. At first he was so weak that he could only go a few feet in the course of a day, and had to drag himself along in a wavering line. But he began to improve—he went on improving—until, finally, along the track on which he had crawled he was running at top speed.

And a little while ago this man was one of the athletes who took part in Professor Irving Fisher’s endurance competition between flesh-eating athletes and vegetarians; and he proved to be best of them all! He doubled the best record made by any Yale man in the deep-knee bending contest. The most enduring Yale man was able to make the deep-knee bend—which is a very severe test of physical endurance—twelve hundred times. The consumptive who had cured himself went twenty-four hundred times. He thinks nothing of a ten or fifteen mile ran before breakfast in the morning.

It is important to apply these truths to the question of nutrition. It is positively harmful to eat food when one is gloomy or low spirited or worried or angry.

You may object to this that you cannot at will make an optimist of yourself at meal times, and turn on a flow of good humor as you draw water from a tap. But you can at least refrain from eating, and if you do you will discover that the real hunger which is bound to develop is a very strong emotion. It will drive away any ordinary attack of the blues very quickly; and will call up pleasant anticipations of the joy of food to assist the digestive processes.

THE CASE AS TO MEAT

“I wish there was a science of nutrition worthy of the name,” writes Bernard Shaw in a private letter. “The mass of special pleading on behalf of meat eating on the one side and vegetarianism on the other, which calls itself the science of metabolism to-day, seems to me to be so corrupt as to be worthless.” The fact that Shaw himself is a perfervid vegetarian lends additional significance to this statement. Until quite recently the advocacy of either dietary has been based upon considerations the opposite of physiologic. It has been the sentimental aspects of the controversy—vegetable versus animal foods—which have received most emphasis. The vegetarian supported his position on the ethical ground that the eating of animal food, involving as it does the taking of life, is wrong. On the other hand, the advocate of meat eating based his arguments on the support given to it by common custom, and a belief that a meat diet is that which supplies vigor and manly force. As Dr. Woods Hutchinson, the most prominent of the champions of meat eating, puts the case: “Vegetarianism is the diet of the enslaved, stagnant, and conquered races, and a diet rich in meat is that of the progressing, the dominant and the conquering strains. The rise of any nation in civilization is invariably accompanied by an increasing abundance in food supplies from all possible sources, both vegetable and animal.”

At the same time, even Dr. Hutchinson admits that human life can be maintained upon a vegetarian diet. “Nearly one-half of the human race,” he writes, “has been compelled from sheer necessity to prove that thesis in its actual experience; but we find absolutely no jot of evidence in support of the contention that there is any advantage or superiority in the vegetable diet as such—no more than that there is any inherent superiority in a pure animal diet as such.... There is no valid or necessary ground, so far as we have been able to discover, for the exclusion of any known article of food, whether vegetable or animal, from our diet list in health.”

Dr. Hutchinson’s views were printed in a popular magazine, and have been very widely quoted, but he seems to have written without paying attention to a number of scientific investigations which suggest ample grounds for the radical reduction of the meat portion of the ordinary diet. Among these are the experiments of Dr. Horter of New York, Professors Mendel, Chittenden and Fisher of Yale, Dr. Fenton B. Turck, and such world-known physiologists as Combe of Lausanne, and Metchnikoff, Gautier, and Tissier of Paris. The elaborate researches of Dr. Kellogg of Battle Creek are dismissed by Woods Hutchinson, because of the fact that Dr. Kellogg not only upholds the exclusion of meat from the diet for purely scientific reasons, but also on ethical grounds. The writers of this book, however, have discarded meat from their dietary for scientific reasons, paying as little attention to the ethical side of the question as Dr. Hutchinson could desire. They will give in this place a brief summary of these scientific reasons.

THE BELGIAN EXPERIMENTS

We have already told of the experiments whereby Professor Fisher of Yale proved the superior endurance of vegetarians over meat-eaters. It happens that experiments of the same nature were carried on at about the same time by two women scientists in Belgium, Dr. J. Ioteyko, head of the laboratory at the University of Brussels, and Mlle. Varia Kipiani. They studied the question of vegetarianism by several methods, and became convinced that the vegetarian régime is a more rational one.

Their experiments were for the most part comparisons of strength and endurance between men and women subsisting on the usual high proteid, or flesh diet, and men and women who for longer or shorter periods had abstained entirely from meat. The results tally remarkably with those obtained by Professor Fisher. So far as strength was concerned, very little difference was discovered between vegetarians and “carnivores.” In endurance, on the other hand (and it is endurance that most people need) a very remarkable difference was found, the vegetarians surpassing the carnivores from 50 to 200%. The Brussels investigators found also that the vegetarians recuperated from fatigue far more quickly than the meat eaters, a discovery which was one of the most remarkable features of the Yale experiments.

In commenting upon the Belgian experiments, Professor Fisher writes:

DR. TURCK’S INVESTIGATIONS

It is possible that flesh-eating, as ordinarily practiced, is injurious both because of excessive proteid and because meat, as such, contains poisonous elements. It is well known that Liebig came to repudiate the idea that the extractives of meat were nutritious, and that investigation has shown them to be poisonous. Professor Fisher also points out that Dr. F. B. Turck has found that dogs, mice, and rats fed on meat extractives exhibit symptoms of poisoning and often die. The poisonous effect is aggravated by intestinal bacteria, which find in these extractives an excellent culture medium. Dr. Turck concludes:

“(1) It is clearly evident from these experiments, which correspond to the investigations of others, that the injurious effects of meat are due not so much to the muscle proteid, myosin, as to the extractives.

“(2) That the injurious effects of the extractives are increased through the action of intestinal bacteria.”

Dr. Turck does not find any evidence that the extractives in small quantities are injurious.

Dr. Turck therefore concludes that the “high liver” who uses much flesh and also an excess of starch and sugar is a “bad risk” for life insurance companies. He recommends, if meat is to be used, that the extractives first be removed by special processes, which he explains.

These investigations, with those of Combe of Lausanne, Metchnikoff and Tissier, of Paris, as well as Herter and others in the United States, seem gradually to be demonstrating that the fancied strength from meat is, like the fancied strength from alcohol, an illusion. The “beef and ale of England” are largely sources of weakness, not strength.

THE DANGER OF INFECTION FROM MEAT

It has always been conceded that by eating raw or underdone beef or pork one may acquire tape worms; and that in eating raw or underdone pork one runs the same risk of contracting that uncurable malady, trichinosis. The danger from these sources, however, is comparatively slight, since most people eat their meat well cooked; but in the view of many modern scientists all meat eaters are open to a particular form of germ infection which involves all kinds of meat, fish, flesh and fowl, cooked as well as uncooked.

Everybody knows how readily meats of all kinds, and particularly seafood, such as fish, oysters and clams, undergo putrefaction. The processes of decay in fish and animals begin within an hour or two after death, under the influence of putrefactive bacteria, which are always present in the colon, or large intestine of animals, upon the skin and in the atmosphere about them. Ordinary cooking does not destroy them, for they are able to stand the ordinary cooking temperature. Salt and smoked fish, and other meats have these germs present in vast multitudes; and beef and game that is “hung” for a long time in order to become “tender,” are so far advanced in decay before they are brought to the table that every minute particle of them is alive with these germs.

These facts are granted by all; but the physiologist who favors the use of meat, says that unless excessive quantities are consumed, the healthy person undergoes little risk. The argument is, that when the germs are swallowed into the stomach they are there destroyed by the action of the gastric juice, which is germicidal; but experiments have lately proved that some of these germs escape destruction by the gastric juice, and find their way to the colon, where they continue to multiply in the mucous which covers the intestinal wall, and thus maintain constant and active putrefactive processes in that part of the body.

THE NUMBER OF GERMS WE EAT

Dr. Kellogg of Battle Creek has lately made public the results of a carefully conducted series of observations made by Dr. A. W. Nelson, bacteriologist of the clinical laboratory of the Battle Creek Sanitarium. Various specimens of meat were purchased in the ordinary way in the market, wrapped in clean paper, and immediately taken to the laboratory, where samples were removed for observation under the microscope. The meat was then taken to the diet kitchen and well cooked, after which cultures were again made.

The germs found in meat are classed as aerobes and anaerobes. The aerobes are for the most part acid-forming germs, and comparatively harmless. But the anaerobes are poison-forming germs, and are the agents of putrefaction and of various diseases. They are to-day considered as the most potent causes of many chronic maladies, and especially of that most common of diseases, intestinal autointoxication.

Dr. Nelson found that in one specimen of raw beef, there were present per moist gram of material 105,000 aerobes and 90,000 anaerobes. On the outside of the beef after it had been fried, there were no germs present, but on the inside of the fried beef, he found 3000 aerobes and 2000 anaerobes per gram. With three other specimens of beef, that were broiled, and boiled, and roasted, respectively, the results were generally similar. Of all modes of cooking, roasting seems to have least effect upon the bacteria, for in specimen No. 3, while there were fewer bacteria than in specimen No. 1 before cooking, there were found after it had been well roasted 150,000 aerobes and 160,000 anaerobes.

In fresh fish raw there were found 870,000 anaerobes per gram; in sardines in oil, 14,000,000; while in codfish that had been soaked to remove the salt, there were found 47,600,000. In another experiment specimens of meat were secured such as were served on the dining tables of one of the prominent city hotels, and taken at once to the laboratory, where without delay bacterial cultures were made. A specimen of sirloin steak was found to contain 378,000,000 anaerobes per gram of moist material.