Good Health and How We Won It, With an Account of the New Hygiene

by Upton Sinclair; Michael Williams

You may object to this that you cannot at will make an optimist of yourself at meal times, and turn on a flow of good humor as you draw water from a tap. But you can at least refrain from eating, and if you do you will discover that the real hunger which is bound to develop is a very strong emotion. It will drive away any ordinary attack of the blues very quickly; and will call up pleasant anticipations of the joy of food to assist the digestive processes.

IX
THE CASE AS TO MEAT

“I wish there was a science of nutrition worthy of the name,” writes Bernard Shaw in a private letter. “The mass of special pleading on behalf of meat eating on the one side and vegetarianism on the other, which calls itself the science of metabolism to-day, seems to me to be so corrupt as to be worthless.” The fact that Shaw himself is a perfervid vegetarian lends additional significance to this statement. Until quite recently the advocacy of either dietary has been based upon considerations the opposite of physiologic. It has been the sentimental aspects of the controversy—vegetable versus animal foods—which have received most emphasis. The vegetarian supported his position on the ethical ground that the eating of animal food, involving as it does the taking of life, is wrong. On the other hand, the advocate of meat eating based his arguments on the support given to it by common custom, and a belief that a meat diet is that which supplies vigor and manly force. As Dr. Woods Hutchinson, the most prominent of the champions of meat eating, puts the case: “Vegetarianism is the diet of the enslaved, stagnant, and conquered races, and a diet rich in meat is that of the progressing, the dominant and the conquering strains. The rise of any nation in civilization is invariably accompanied by an increasing abundance in food supplies from all possible sources, both vegetable and animal.”

At the same time, even Dr. Hutchinson admits that human life can be maintained upon a vegetarian diet. “Nearly one-half of the human race,” he writes, “has been compelled from sheer necessity to prove that thesis in its actual experience; but we find absolutely no jot of evidence in support of the contention that there is any advantage or superiority in the vegetable diet as such—no more than that there is any inherent superiority in a pure animal diet as such.... There is no valid or necessary ground, so far as we have been able to discover, for the exclusion of any known article of food, whether vegetable or animal, from our diet list in health.”

Dr. Hutchinson’s views were printed in a popular magazine, and have been very widely quoted, but he seems to have written without paying attention to a number of scientific investigations which suggest ample grounds for the radical reduction of the meat portion of the ordinary diet. Among these are the experiments of Dr. Horter of New York, Professors Mendel, Chittenden and Fisher of Yale, Dr. Fenton B. Turck, and such world-known physiologists as Combe of Lausanne, and Metchnikoff, Gautier, and Tissier of Paris. The elaborate researches of Dr. Kellogg of Battle Creek are dismissed by Woods Hutchinson, because of the fact that Dr. Kellogg not only upholds the exclusion of meat from the diet for purely scientific reasons, but also on ethical grounds. The writers of this book, however, have discarded meat from their dietary for scientific reasons, paying as little attention to the ethical side of the question as Dr. Hutchinson could desire. They will give in this place a brief summary of these scientific reasons.

THE BELGIAN EXPERIMENTS

We have already told of the experiments whereby Professor Fisher of Yale proved the superior endurance of vegetarians over meat-eaters. It happens that experiments of the same nature were carried on at about the same time by two women scientists in Belgium, Dr. J. Ioteyko, head of the laboratory at the University of Brussels, and Mlle. Varia Kipiani. They studied the question of vegetarianism by several methods, and became convinced that the vegetarian régime is a more rational one.

Their experiments were for the most part comparisons of strength and endurance between men and women subsisting on the usual high proteid, or flesh diet, and men and women who for longer or shorter periods had abstained entirely from meat. The results tally remarkably with those obtained by Professor Fisher. So far as strength was concerned, very little difference was discovered between vegetarians and “carnivores.” In endurance, on the other hand (and it is endurance that most people need) a very remarkable difference was found, the vegetarians surpassing the carnivores from 50 to 200%. The Brussels investigators found also that the vegetarians recuperated from fatigue far more quickly than the meat eaters, a discovery which was one of the most remarkable features of the Yale experiments.