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The unfitness of certain substances for assimilative purposes is manifest by the anaphylactic symptoms that so frequently follow their use. Alimentary anaphylactic phenomena are confined almost exclusively to substances of animal origin. The more closely these animal substances resemble the human body in composition, the more frequently do they give rise to these phenomena. Thus flesh is the worst offender, eggs come second and milk is last.
Little can be said in defense of the use of animal foods except in instances of dire necessity. Let us consider them briefly.
Honey is popularly considered a legitimate sweet for promiscuous and perfectly safe use, where other sweets are considered to be dangerous. This is a delusion. Its sugar does not combine with other foods any better than do other sugars, while the manite acid it contains renders its combination with other foods undesirable.
The presence of manite acid in honey renders its combination with other foodstuffs more injurious than ordinary cane sugar. Its combination with starchy or protein foods is sure to produce indigestion. Those with impaired digestions will be sure to have gas following its use.
Honey made from certain flowers is positively poisonous. In many parts of the world poisonous honeys are produced. I have eaten honey that was as bitter as quinine. Its color, its flavor and its poisonous or non-poisonous qualities depend on the flowers from which the bees extract the pollen.
From time immemorial honey has been used as a stimulant. It has played a prominent role in the materia medicas of a number of different peoples. Herodotus tells that the Egyptians employed it in mummyfying the dead, because of its preservative qualities.
In spite of my warning against the use of honey many are going to continue to use it, declaring it to be a "natural sweet." Most honeys are delicious and the appeal to the gustatory sense is often irresistible. Those who cannot resist its lure and those who refuse to listen to any advise must find out the hard way as many others have had to do.
I cannot and do not recommend its use. But I know that there are those who are going to continue to use it. These should know that people who are engaged in active outdoor work, using their muscles rather than their brains, can use honey to best advantage. It should not be mixed with fruit, milk, cereals, mushes, meat or bread. Thoroughly charcoalized (toasted) bread may be used with honey.
No person with gastric or intestinal ulcer, or any marked catarrhal condition should ever use honey. Highly organized, nervous and sensitive people should also avoid this food.
Eggs at best are poor foods while modern methods of egg production, involving great overstimulation of laying strains, produces eggs of a very poor quality. Egg eating usually involves over consumption of protein.
Raw egg white, so often urged as food for invalids, is poorly digested and assimilated. From thirty to fifty per cent of the amount consumed passes through the digestive canal without being digested and absorbed. Raw egg white may produce diarrhea and sometimes vomiting.
Egg whites are acid forming, and produce in some stomachs almost deadly acids. It is asserted that "practically all constipated people are sensitive to white-of-egg poisoning."
Invalids, inactive people and those inclined to constipation should especially avoid egg whites. They are bad food for children. Eggs should certainly never be eaten by one whose liver or kidneys are not in perfect condition.
Because Beaumont, in his experiment upon Alexis St. Martin, noticed that raw egg whites left the stomach very quickly, in less time in fact than the other foodstuffs he investigated, the idea grew that raw egg white is the most easily digested of all food substances.
Pavlov showed that egg white, unlike other proteins, does not stimulate the flow of gastric juice. Abderhalden discovered that pepsin does not act readily upon egg white. Okada showed that pancreatic juice and bile are both indifferent to egg white. Very little bile is poured out and trypsin has no effect whatever upon raw egg white. Other investigators have confirmed these findings.
Vernon, Hetin and others have shown that raw egg white hinders the digestion of other substances. Bayliss, Prof. of Physiology, University of London, (The Physiology of Food and Economy in Diet), says that raw egg white contains some substance which even in small amounts, hinders the action of the digestive fluids. Lemoine, a French authority, after careful study, says raw egg white contains a poison which damages the kidneys.
The yolk of the egg seems to be less objectionable and is an alkaline-ash food, whereas the white is an acid-ash food. Egg yolks are easily digested and, if taken raw are not the source of any trouble. I can, however, see no reason for using egg yolks, a practice that is rather expensive.
Milk is nature's food for the new-born mammal. It is highly diluted and well adapted to the delicate and undeveloped stomach of the young for which it is prepared. Cow's milk is prepared to meet the nutritive needs of the calf; goat's milk is prepared to meet the nutritive needs of the kid; the milk of the bitch is designed to meet the nutritive needs of her puppies. The same with the milk of other animals. Each animal produces milk for its own young.
The young of all mammalian species naturally subsist for a certain period exclusively on milk--the milk of their own mothers which is especially prepared for them. But there comes a time when they begin instinctively to add other foods to their diets. Finally, they abandon milk completely and the fountains of supply dry up.
The lactating period of all mammals is brief. The same is true in human mothers. From this fact, it is evident that nature has not designed us for a milk diet. She has made no provision to supply us with milk beyond a certain stage of our development. The nursing period of various mammalian young varies according to the rapidity of their growth, those animals that grow slowest having the longest nursing periods. The length of the nursing period is in direct ratio to the time required to reach maturity. It is but natural that in man whose growth is slowest and who requires longest to reach maturity, the nursing period should be longest.
The digestive organs of babies are in a condition requiring liquid food and milk, particularly their mother's milk, is peculiarly adapted to their physiological needs and powers. As they grow, new organs and new powers are developed. The new functions adapt the child to new kinds of food. Simultaneously with the development of the teeth, corresponding developments in the physiological powers of the digestive system take place so that they are fitted to digest solid foods and are ready to discontinue the use of milk. As in the case of the lower animals, there is a transition period, during which the child eats both milk and other articles of diet, but there should also come a time when milk is no longer needed and should no longer be taken. Man should be weaned.
Milk has grown to be the basis of one of the country's staple businesses. New York city alone pays more than half a million dollars a day for milk. The profits of milk distributing are very high, consequently, the business has attracted some of the nation's wealthiest and most influential citizens. The result has been the creation of a milk trust that is ever expanding and more and more monopolizing the milk industry. Laws requiring pasteurization of all milk sold in commerce is one of their weapons against the small dairymen and the individual farmers who seek to sell their milk.
This milk trust, assisted by certain members of the medical profession, medical organizations and even by Boards of Health, has fostered the idea that man should remain a suckling all his life. He should never be weaned. By this they do not mean that he should continue to nurse at his mother's breasts all of his life (this would net them no profits) but that he should suck the teats of the cow throughout life, even if he lives to be ninety or a hundred years old. This fallacy is promoted for purely commercial reasons.
In Japan male children are nursed at the breast during childhood and sometimes to the age of nine years. Viewing the physique and the mentality of the Japanese one can see no evidence of any advantage to be gained from such prolonged use of milk.
There can be no doubt that the present practice of forcing children to consume a quart of milk (sometimes more) a day is a vicious practice. The children are certainly getting too much milk. There are better foods that the children should be given and the forced feeding program should be abandoned.
For adults milk is both an inefficient and uneconomical food. It is certainly not an essential element of the adult diet. No mammal in a state of nature ever receives milk after it is weaned. This is also true of those peoples who have no herds or flocks that produce milk. Before man domesticated the cow, goat, camel, ass, horse, reindeer, etc., he received no milk after weaning. In various parts of the earth today, he consumes the milk of a variety of different animals, but there are still large portions of the human race that do not drink milk.
It is important to note that milk is totally absent from the diet of adults in many virile peoples and certainly cannot be regarded as an indispensable item of adult diet. Indeed, there are important, reasons to think that it is not a good article of diet for children after they have passed the normal nursing period. It is not employed by any other mammal after the period of infancy has passed and, with a few exceptions, has not been an article of diet in the human family after weaning, until compartively modern times. The dairy industry is very new.
When the Americas were discovered they were inhabited by millions of "red" men who possessed no milk animals. After an Indian child was weaned, usually at the age of four years, he never again had milk to drink. In 1624 the first cattle were introduced into New England and by 1632 no farmer was satisfied without a cow. The cow was raised for both domestic and export purposes. But, "the market was soon over-stocked, and the price of cattle went down from fifteen and twenty pounds to five pounds; and milk was a penny a quart." "This latter statement about the price of milk means very little, as cows were seldom milked at this time, being raised principally for their hides, and secondarily for meat, and only incidentally for milk."--Social Forces in American History, A. M. Simons.
In the earlier editions of his The Newer Knowledge of Nutrition, before he became a highly paid consultant on nutrition to the National Dairy Products Co., Prof. E. V. McCollum stressed the fact that milk is not an essential in the diet of man. He pointed out that the inhabitants of southern Asia have no herds and do not drink milk. Their diet is made up of rice, soy beans, sweet potatoes, bamboo sprouts, and other vegetables. According to Prof. McCollum these people are exceptional for the development of their physique and endurance, while their capacity for work is exceptional. They escape skeletal defects in childhood and have the finest teeth of any people in the world. This is a sharp and favorable contrast with milk-drinking peoples. The professor found it expedient to delete these facts from all editions of his work published subsequent to his becoming Consultant to National Dairy. Truth must be suppressed when and if it threatens profits and salaries.
For a time Graham favored the use of milk by adults, but he tells us: "eight years of very extensive experiment and careful observation, have shaken many of my preconceived opinions concerning milk as an article of human food." Hundreds of Graham's followers who tried the experiment of using milk and of doing without it all stated that they did better with milk and vegetables than with flesh and vegetables, but that they did better when they confined themselves to a purely vegetable regimen and drank only water. Physical workers of various kinds--farmers, mechanics, etc.,--found they were more vigorous and active and had more endurance when they left milk out of their diets. They stated that they experienced less exhaustion and fatigue at the end of the day if they ate only vegetable fare and no milk. "I have found," says Graham, "that dyspeptics and invalids of every description, do better when they abstain from the use of milk than when they use it, and in many cases it is indispensably necessary to prohibit milk." He adds: "Dyspeptics almost invariably find it oppressive to their stomachs, causing a sense of distention and heaviness."
Graham conceded that there may be conditions of life, outside of infancy, when milk may be used to advantage, but gave it as a general rule for adults, that they should abstain from milk entirely.
It is now quite generally admitted that milk is not as valuable as a "protective" food as it was thought to be a few years ago. That the free use of milk will prevent tooth decay is a fallacy that can be seen on every hand. There is no evidence of its superiority in providing for bone development.
Dr. Victor Lindlahr says "close to one-half of the daily protective food intake should be composed of fresh raw foods. This will include milk." Yet all over the country, almost all the milk the people can get is pasteurized milk and this is no longer a "protective food." Too many dietitians, doctors and physicians are feeding pasteurized milk under the delusion that it possesses all the virtues of raw milk.
Milk is held to be the "carrier" of a number of serious diseases such as tuberculosis, colds, septic sore throat, rheumatic fever, heart disease, undulant fever, typhoid fever, scarlet fever, measles, dysentery, and other infections which are said to be frequently "traceable to contaminated milk." Epidemics of ulcers of the stomach and intestinal tracts of children have also been said to have been traced to drinking milk from cows with inflamed udders. Hygienists consider all this to be sheer nonsense that will be outgrown in time. Robert Koch first "discovered" that tuberculosis may be transmitted from cow to man by drinking milk from tubercular cows. The so-called scientific world accepted his alleged discovery. Koch continued his investigations of the matter and came to the conclusion that he had been wrong. He repudiated his "discovery" and said that tuberculosis is not transmitted in this manner. The so-called "scientific" world refused to accept his repudiation. They had found the "discovery" profitable and useful--they refused to give it up.
Intensive and high-priced propaganda has been employed to make the people believe that pasteurizing makes milk "safe," and that no milk save pasteurized milk is "safe." Millions of people are literally afraid of unpasteurized milk. They are convinced that they take their lives in their hands when they drink a glass of unpasteurized milk. The big dairies and certain medical organizations, helped in some states, by the Boards of Health, have fostered this deliberate fraud upon the people for commercial reasons. The first and, so far as is conceivable, the only reason for the existence of laws and regulations requiring the pasteurization of milk is the protection of the interests of the big milk distributors.
The milk trust has also fostered the belief that bottled milk is "safer" than loose milk. There is not a shred of evidence for the truth of this idea, but its acceptance by the public has led to the outlawing of the sale of loose milk, hence has helped the milk trust in securing its monopoly of the industry.
Despite the law, milk is regularly adulterated and the adulteration is never put on the label. Although this is a violation of the Pure Food and Drug Act, the dairying industry has never been prosecuted for its adulteration of milk. One of the most common adulterations put into milk is the so-called "alkalinizers." These are used most during the summer months to mask the taste of milk produced by the growth of bacilli in it. This enables the milk industry to sell old milk as "fresh milk."
Modern methods of milk production--overfeeding of cows on rich fare and forced long periods of milking, ever-production of milk with its inevitable drain on the organism of the cow, tuberculin testing and vaccination of cows, etc.--are not designed to produce the best quality of milk. Certified milk, produced by cows kept in sunless barns and fed on dry foods, is an especially inadequate food.
Although the majority of vegetarians and drugless practitioners recommend and prescribe cod-liver oil to children and adults, I have consistently rejected this grease. About twelve years ago there came out of England, from thoroughly orthodox medical sources, evidences that I am no longer to stand alone in this matter. The British Medical Journal (Aug. 1929) declares that "there is some difference of opinion as to the effects of cod-liver oil in ordinary doses, and the present evidence is suggestive enough to warrant a definite answer to the question: "Can cod-liver oil do harm?"
Agduhr testing the oil on rabbits and Malmberg using children for his tests, both came to the conclusion that oil is harmful to the heart, and is often responsible for cases of death in children. Agduhr working with Dr. N. Stenstron, proved definitely, by animal experimentation, that cod-liver oil produces pathological changes in the heart muscle. P. Hendricksen concludes, from his tests, that large doses may produce general cell degeneration throughout the body. C. W. Herlitz, I. Jundell and F. Wahlgre, after conducting an extensive and elaborate series of experiments, showed that doses quite comparable with those given to children in ordinary practice can produce considerable degeneration in the heart muscle. These men feel that the public should be warned of these dangers as well as of the dangers from radiated milk.
In an article in the British Medical Journal, Dr. A. A. Osman shows that many of the cases of marked debility of children are cases of ketosis--a form of disturbed sugar metabolism. He says that the treatment of such conditions with cod-liver oil increases the ketosis, yet many hundreds of children so suffering have been treated with this oil. Cod-liver oil increases rather than relieves the symptoms of ketosis.
The use of meat, particularly its use in the usual quantities, is detrimental to man's health and strength of mind and body; due chiefly to four factors:
First: Meat is very rich in protein and its use in the usual quantities means the intake of considerably more protein than is required, with harmful consequences. The average digestion can care for not more than four ounces of meat at a time without some putrefaction.
Second: Meat contains considerable quantities of the end-products of metabolism which are held up in the tissues at the time of death. These wastes are poisonous and irritating and lend to meat a stimulating property that is usually mistaken for added strength.
Third: No matter how carefully handled, meat very readily undergoes putrefaction and it is impossible to get it so fresh that more or less putrefaction has not already taken place. It also putrefies as readily in the digestive tract and the putrefactive poisons it forms in the stomach and intestine are the same as those it forms when allowed to putrify in the ice box.
Fourth: The conditions under which animals that are intended for use as food are kept, and the manner in which they are fed to fatten them, are not conducive to health. It is very seldom, if ever, that a fattened animal is killed that is free of disease and the eating of diseased meat is not a healthful practice.
Discussing carnivorous animals, Berg says: "a diet of meat (flesh) exclusively is per se an unsuitable diet for a growing animal." They require the blood, internal organs, bones, bone marrow, etc., of the animal (or of different animals) and frequently supplement this diet with fruits, berries and vegetables. Muscle meat, so popular among human carnivores, is poor food.
Meat, egg and milk production is a great economic loss. It is one of our most wasteful follies. As the earth's population continues to increase man will be forced to be contented with a proportionately smaller area in which to produce his food. The land now used for hunting purposes and cattle-raising purposes can be (and will be) more economically utilized in raising fruits, nuts and vegetables.
Scientists estimate that about 40 square miles of land are required to maintain one man in a primitive hunting community. It requires ten times as much acreage to grow cattle as it does to grow corresponding food values of wheat. Many more acres are required to grow game than to grow cattle. A tract of well-cultivated land will sustain at least twenty times more people by its crops than can be nourished on the meat of cattle supported by the same tract. Reinheimer says: "A pair of ravens or peregrines require a square mile of territory for a hunting ground, but twenty linnets will nest in one hedge.
It is roughly estimated that "about 24 per cent of the energy of grain is recovered for consumption in pork, about 18 per cent in milk, and only about 3.5 per cent in beef and mutton." The farmer who feeds wheat, oats or corn to pigs and cows "is burning up 75 to 97 per cent of them in order to provide us a small residue of roast pork or beefsteak."
The American farmer, in what Milo Hastings calls, "The Official Method of Making Human Food Abundant by Feeding It to a Pig," gives "to his 100,000,000 fellow human consumers only one-twelfth as much of the vegetable food he produces as he does to the country's 529,000,000 cattle, hogs, sheep and poultry." Our livestock consume sufficient food to support a population of 500,000,000 men, women and children.
Mr. Hastings says that "for each unit of human food produced in the beef industry there is consumed about sixteen units of vegetable food substances. In the production of milk the ratio is about one to twelve; in pork production the ratio is about one to eight.
"Refiguring these proportions on the basis of our present livestock industries, we find that enough food is derived from the animal products to food units required to support forty million humans.
"Meat food sufficient to support but two-fifths of the human population is the return we get for the loss of vegetable food supply sufficient for five times our population."
Hindhede calculated that if people lived on vegetable foods Europe could sustain a population 5.4 times and the United States 15.1 times their present populations and "everybody be well-fed." He pointed out that the starving Central Powers, during World War I, "in converting grains and vegetables into pork and milk," lost "a food value of 80 per cent and into beef of 95 per cent."
In a paper read before the Association of American Geographers, April, 1922, Prof. O. E. Baker, of the U. S. Dept. of Agriculture, said: "Fully three-fifths of the crop acreage in the United States is used to provide feed for farm animals; and in addition our livestock consume the product of about seventy-five million acres of unimproved grass land and pasture in farms and national forests, besides that of perhaps five hundred million acres of arid and semi-open range land in the west. It seems safe to say that the livestock consume two-thirds of the product of unimproved pasture, or fully eight per cent of the total food and feed produced by tame and wild vegetation in the United States."
The folly of this immense economic waste should be immediately apparent to every intelligent person. And yet, in the greater part of the North American continent the chief work of agriculture is the raising of cereals, grasses and vegetables as food for animals for meat production. Instead of raising wholesome vegetables, fruits and nuts for man, agriculture gives most of its attention to first feeding the animal and then we prey upon the animal.
For each 100 pounds of digestive organic matter eaten, the cow gives back 18 pounds of digestible milk solids. The cow must be fed 100 pounds of nutritious matter in order to produce 18 pounds of nutriment. It would seem that it is a great economic waste to first feed the cow and then let her feed us.
Egg production is as much of a waste and expense as milk production. It involves feeding enormous quantities of food to poultry and receiving back from them, in the form of eggs, a small percentage of the food material fed to the poultry.
A thousand acres of wheat will feed ten times as many people as a thousand acres of cattle. A thousand acres in many other foods will feed more people, and feed them better, than a thousand acres in wheat. Minerals are drawn from greater depths by fruit and nut trees than by cereals, as the strong roots of the trees are capable of reaching the deeper and richer strata of soil, permitting, therefore, a more intensive utilization of an area of land. Fruit and nuts are not only man's best food, but his most fruitful and least wasteful crop. Besides this, the trees themselves serve many other very useful offices, such as the purification of the air, protection against sudden changes in atmosphere, etc. The garden and the orchard should soon supplant the ranch, the dairy and the grain fields.
Agriculture has always been the backbone of civilization. The more advanced civilizations have depended more on the farmer and less on the herdsman and the huntsman. Hunting is a sport, not a livelihood among the civilized--a cruel sport, but a sport and nothing more. The herdsman is passing. There is no longer room for his great herds. Economic necessity will force vegetarianism and fruitarianism upon our grandchildren. The tremendous waste of feeding grain to cows and getting back just one-tenth its food value in meat will not be tolerated.
Meat eating, or, perhaps, more properly, meat getting, involves a certain moral impairment of man. Butchering animals is a brutalizing and demoralizing occupation; because brutality brutalizes. The taking of life is highly revolting to the higher nature of man and, as our feelings are as much a part of our better natures as our teeth are parts of our bodies, this instinctive revolt against butchery and preying must always bear great weight in any decision respecting the dietetic character of man.
George Bernard Shaw, writing on the wastefulness and stupidity of those who find pleasure in destroying animal life, says: "Wanton slaughter of birds is caused by indifference to the beauty and interest of bird and song, and callousness to glazed eyes and blood-bedabbled corpses, combined with a boyish love of shooting." Who can say that this indifference and callousness and love of shooting never results in the killing of men? Or, even if it never goes this far is it not probable that it results in much other of "man's inhumanity to man?" Who can confine the callousness of a man to one channel? Who can prevent the hunter or the butcher, or the fisherman from being cruel to his children or to his wife?
While comparatively few meat eaters today kill their own flesh-food, and are therefore saved from the brutalizing influence of this brutality, they are not absolved from the brutalization of those proxies who kill for them. I have seen many women who delighted in eating chicken but who could not be induced to kill a chicken under any circumstances. Which is the ideal: the tenderness of such women or the callousness of the butcher or the hunter or the fisherman.
Tenderness and mercy and gentility, and all the spiritual qualities that set man off so greatly from beasts of prey, are lacking in the lion, tiger, wolf and other carnivores.
The claim that man has evolved to such a high mental and spiritual plane that he must have meat is exactly the opposite of the facts. He must crush and harden his higher nature in order to hunt and fish and prey. If he relishes the carion feast, or the jackal's or the vulture's meal, it is either because he is debased, or because someone else is debased. If we eat meat miles from the shambles, after the butcher has done the bloody work, we must not think that we are not responsible for the debasement of the butcher.
The hunter and the butcher are not symbols of spirituality. They are not embodiments of the higher mental, moral and social powers of man's nature.
Meat, egg and milk production involves man's slavery to animals. G. B. Shaw truly says: "My own objection to being carnivorous, in so far as it is not instinctive, is that it involves an enormous slavery of men to beasts as their valets, nurses, mid-wives, and slaughterers."
Man's slavery to meat-animals is appalling. He lives with them in the most unhygienic conditions, in order that he may eat dead carcasses. He little dreams of the gigantic waste of human energy and of food that this practice involves.