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.
Claim 4
That a man can live on a flesh or muscle meat diet such as chops and steaks.
The famous pedestrian, Weston, informed me that on his long walks, he never ate meat and on his walk across the continent lived on corn flakes and milk.
Carl Mann, a grocer's clerk not professionally trained, competing in a government supervised walking race from Dresden to Berlin, 123 miles, against the picked pedestrians of the German army and several professionals, won easily on a fleshless diet consisting of nuts and fresh vegetables which he pulled out of the vegetable gardens as he hurried by. The only protein he ate was derived from nuts.
The Tarahumari Indians of Mexico are the most tireless runners in the world. Their ancestors were the dispatch runners of Montezuma in pre-Colombian days, and they still adhere to the simple plant regimen of their forbears.
At the time of the Boxer uprising in China some years ago, the rice-fed Japanese were the first to arrive of the military representatives of numerous nations who raced to the rescue of the foreign embassies besieged by the fanatical and bloodthirsty Boxers.
Claim 5
That a man can live and enjoy good health for a year or many years on a purely flesh or muscle-meat diet.