Major Paget tells us that the Spaniards were greatly impressed by the fine teeth of these English soldiers and especially of their wives who accompanied them. Of their diet the Major says:
"These men before they enlisted were nearly all agricultural laborers who were brought up on a hard, wholemeal bread, garden produce, and apparently very little meat, as the consumption of meat was then three pounds per head per annum."
It is to be remembered also that nuts form a substantial part of the diet of that large and interesting family of vertebrates, the primates, represented by the gorilla, the chimpanzee, the orang-utan and the gibbon, animals that do not eat meat, and that man is also a primate. No authority has ever offered any reason why man's diet should differ from that of other primates.
Man is not naturally a flesh-eater. Infants usually evince a dislike for flesh when it is first given them.
Adults who use flesh foods are attracted by their flavors rather than by the nutritive elements which they supply. As a matter of fact, more and better food material is supplied by plant foods and at a far less cost.
Meats are notably deficient in vitamins, while nuts are rich in vitamin B, some, as the hazel nut, containing one-fifth as much as dry yeast. The precious vitamin A, found in only very meager amounts in meats, is found in the almond, the pine nut, coconuts and peanuts.
The minerals, too, are found in better proportions and in larger amounts in nuts than in meats.
The deficiencies in essential elements in a lean meat diet are so pronounced that when Chalmers Watson fed rats on meat they became deformed and sterile, their mammary and other sex glands degenerated and in three generations they ran out completely. Watson attributes the steady and very pronounced lowering of the birth-rate in Great Britain to the increased consumption of meat in that country, which has risen in a little more than a century from 3 pounds to more than 100 pounds per capita, while the birth-rate has fallen until it closely approximates the mortality rate. The same thing has happened in the older sections of this country, especially the New England states.
According to Newburgh, of the University of Michigan, the large consumption of meat in this country may be responsible for the high death rate from Bright's disease, which is mounting higher every year. And the same is true of diseases of the heart and blood vessels, which now claim more lives annually than any other cause. He finds that when rabbits are fed meat meal mixed with flour in bread, they soon become diseased through changes in the bloodvessels and die of old age before they are a year old.
Hindhede, of Copenhagen, a physiologist of world-wide renown, and food commissioner for Denmark, in a notable paper read before the Race Betterment Conference at Battle Creek, January, 1928, remarked as follows: