During the World War, Denmark sold her cattle to Germany and reduced her meat ration to a very low minimum, with the result that her death rate was reduced one-third.
In Germany, where at the beginning of the war the cattle were killed to save food and a practically meatless ration was maintained for more than three years, diabetes, Bright's disease, and many other chronic maladies were reduced in frequency to an extraordinary degree. After the war, as I was informed by the medical director of one of the largest life insurance companies in this country, it was discovered that the death losses among the company's German policy holders, not excepting war casualties, were far below the prewar average.
The Chittenden standard now universally accepted, fixes the protein intake at 10 per cent of the total ration. This leaves little room for meat, and not a few authorities reduce the protein to a still lower level.
For some years, McCollum of Johns Hopkins has been calling attention to the evils of the "meat and bread" diet, which he declares to be about the worst diet one can adopt, and adds, "We could entirely dispense with meats without suffering any ill effects whatever."
Chalmers Watson of Edinburgh found that rats on a lean meat diet deteriorated so rapidly that after two or three generations they became deformed and dwarfed and ceased to reproduce.
The International Scientific Food Commission appointed by the Allies at the time of the Great War and charged with the duty of fixing the minimum ration of different food essentials, declared it to be unnecessary to fix a minimum meat ration, "in view of the fact that no absolute physiological need exists for meat, since the proteins of meat can be replaced by other proteins of animal origin, such as those contained in milk, cheese and eggs, as well as by proteins of vegetable origin."
It is evident from the above facts that an effort to induce the American people to eat less meat and more nuts would do no harm and should prove substantially beneficial.
A leading textbook on "Nutrition and Clinical Dietetics" by Carter, Howe and Mason of Columbia University, calls attention to the encouraging fact that "Of late there has been a distinct reaction in the meat-eating of the wealthier classes, and one sees less meat and more vegetable habits as they progress upward in the scale of civilization. Also, on account of their sedentary habits, people find that the ingestion of considerable quantities of animal protein, with the consequent increase in intestinal putrefaction, gives rise to symptoms of toxemia, which have assumed a very definite place in the pathology of disease."
That meat enormously increases intestinal putrefaction cannot be questioned. It is this fact which makes the difference between the excreta of a dog or lion and that of a cow or horse. All carnivorous animals suffer from autointoxication.
The eminent pathologist of the Philadelphia Zoo states that all dogs over three years of age have hardened arteries, while horses practically never show arterial changes even when very old.