The Dietetic Importance of Nuts
By Dr. John Harvey Kellogg, Michigan
Nuts, which supply the finest edible fats and proteins which science has discovered, occupy the smallest place in the nation's food budget of any of our substantial native foods. This is a remarkable situation well worthy of consideration in view of the fact that, according to Prof. Elliot of Oxford University and the eminent Prof. Ami of Montreal, and many other paleontologists, nuts were the chief diet of the earliest representatives of the race who appeared in the Eocene period of geologic time. At that time, according to Prof. Elliot, the regions inhabited by man bore great forests of walnut, hickory, and other nut trees, the fossil relics of which are found in great abundance in association with the remains of prehistoric man. It is significant, also, that man's nearest relatives, the gorilla, orangutan, and chimpanzee still stick to the original bill of fare. I once made an ape so angry by offering him a bit of meat that he threatened to attack me and finally, as I persisted in offering him the meat, seized it and flung it as far away as possible, then scrubbed his soiled hand with dust and wiped it on the grass to get rid of the taint of the meat. He gave every evidence of feeling deeply insulted. Biology classifies man as a primate along with the great apes and, according to the great Cuvier, assigns to him along with other primates, a diet consisting of nuts, fruits, soft grains, tender shoots and succulent roots.
The great ice sheet which crept down over the greater part of the northern hemisphere during the glacial period destroyed the nut forests. The greater part of the primate family, including man, moved South and survive today in Central Africa, where, along with their furry cousins, the gorilla and the chimpanzee, they still adhere to a dietary almost wholly of plant foods. Those who remained behind were compelled to resort to a flesh diet to avoid starvation. Flesh eating naturally led to cannibalism, and the historians tell us that only a few thousand years ago, the survivors of the glacial terrors who roamed the British Isles, from which the ancestors of most Americans emigrated, roamed the forests clad in the skins of animals and feasted upon their enemies.
When the grain-eating Romans conquered and civilized our barbarian ancestors and taught them agriculture, plant foods again became the chief sources of nutriment, but a meat appetite had been developed and is still characteristic of the Anglo-Saxon race, while most of the rest of the world are almost exclusively plant feeders. Four hundred millions of Chinese eat so little meat that it is, in the case of south China, not even mentioned in the national food budget. Sixty millions of Japanese eat an average of 4 pounds per capita. Two hundred millions of East Indians never taste meat. As a matter of fact, only Americans, English, Germans and Scandinavians are large meat eaters.
Evidently, the American meat appetite as well as the American sugar tooth is enormously exaggerated. It is somewhat encouraging, however, to note that the eating habits of the American people are changing. Within a generation, and especially since the World War, there has been a notable change in the national bill of fare.
More cereals are consumed than formerly, but the greatest per capita increase is shown in the consumption of fruits and vegetables, and especially greenstuffs, such as lettuce, spinach, kale, and other greens. This increase in the use of certain foods is not due to the fact that the American appetite is increasing or the American stomach enlarging, but to the spread among the people of scientific information concerning nutrition.
Through experiments upon rats and various other animals, including man himself, fundamental principles have been discovered and a real science of nutrition has been developed, the axioms, formulae, and basic ideas of which are as clearly established as are those of geometry and chemistry. We are no longer left to be led astray by guess-work or fancy in supplying our nutritive needs, and have verified the truth so aptly expressed by that shrewd old Roman philosopher, Seneca, who said, "There is nothing against which we ought to be more on our guard than, like a flock of sheep, following the crowd of those who preceded us."
This change in the eating habits of the American people has been brought about by disillusionment respecting the importance of meats. Fifty years ago, every physiologist taught that the liberal consumption of meat was essential. This idea was based, first, upon the supposition that protein, the chief constituent of lean meat, is the most important source of energy; and, second, the belief that food of animal origin is better adapted to human sustenance than plant foods, through having undergone a process of refinement and concentration in the transformation from plant to animal. Modern studies of nutrition have shown that both these ideas are without scientific basis.