Claim 3
That beef and other flesh meats are muscle and strength builders par excellence.
This claim no longer has scientific support. Sugar is fuel of the body engine. When the butcher's daughter, Gertrude Ederle, failed in her first attempt to swim the English Channel, she very justly charged her collapse before reaching the English shore to the mutton stew her trainer gave her before starting. When in a second attempt, she adopted my suggestion through a mutual acquaintance, to eat sugar instead of meat, she made a world record. This practice is, I believe, now adopted by all successful channel swimmers.
Non-flesh eaters are far superior to meat-eaters in endurance under special strains.
When Dempsey defeated the Argentinean giant, he had trained on modest allowances of meat and his last meal had consisted of vitamin-rich fresh vegetables, while Firpo loaded himself up with steaks and chops.
When Battling Nelson lost his championship, he explained to a newspaper reporter, "'Twas the beefsteak that done it. I swiped an extra beefsteak when my trainer was not looking, and it made me tired."
De Lesseps, the famous French engineer, became a confirmed and enthusiastic flesh abstainer when he found his sturdy beef-fed Englishmen could not compete in work on the Suez Canal with the Arab laborers, who subsisted on wheat bread and onions, as did the builders of the pyramids, according to Herodotus, 5,000 years before. He declared, in fact, that without the hardy Arabs, he could not have done the work.
Theodore Roosevelt, in his story of his East Africa hunting expedition, said in Scribners Magazine that a horse with a heavy man on his back could always run down a lion fleeing for his life in a mile and a half.