Plants utilize the carbon dioxid excreted by the animal, and the excrement of animals is in turn used to fertilize our fields. Although one form of life may utilize what is excreted by another form of life, the living thing that cannot get away from the excreted matter of its own activity is poisoned thereby.
Flesh food burdens the excretory organs
The flesh of animals whose physiological processes are almost identical with our own, containing as it does waste-products that have not yet been excreted, must, when taken into the human body, add extra burdens to our excretory organs which are usually burdened with all they can do. Carnivorous animals are especially provided with an excretory system capable of taking care of such matter, but it is unreasonable to expect the excretory organs of man, which are not adapted to such a purpose, to throw off, in addition to the regular body-poisons, similar decomposing products of other animals.
Flesh-eating will disappear as science advances
It is true that flesh will support, and has supported what is commonly regarded as a high form of anthropoid life (man), but not having the natural standard from which to measure, we do not know how much better the opposite course would have been, or just how much longer one would live under a perfectly natural regimen. The effects of flesh-eating have not been definitely known until recent years, but is now acknowledged by the most advanced authorities to be one of the greatest errors of civilized people, and will, within a few years, disappear from the catalog of human habits, when the great masses of people are made familiar with the chemistry of food, and how to secure vegetable instead of animal proteids and fats.
MEAT
Meat, in the sense the word is here used, includes beef, mutton, pork, and an occasional allowance of wild game. Chemically considered, meat may be divided into two classes, namely (1) flesh or lean meat, and (2) animal fats. The former will be first considered.
1 FLESH OR LEAN MEAT
Composition of lean meat