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Animal Foods

A DISTINCTION is to be made between animal foods, and flesh foods, which latter do not include milk, cheese, butter, or eggs, (each of which will be considered here under its proper heading). As to animal foods, when compared with those of a vegetable nature, it is to be noticed that while plants build up their contained nutriment by increase of growth, and by materials constantly added, animal flesh is always on the downward grade, by wear and tear of consumed tissue, and muscle, etc. Thus it happens that the flesh of animal bodies, when taken by us as food, still contains broken-down products such as were being perpetually excreted through the animal's skin, kidneys, intestines, lungs, and other emunctory outlets of its body. Therefore it cannot but happen that we eat some of these waste products, modified though they become by proper cooking, otherwise they are liable to provoke poisonous toxication of the blood, and to cause the retention therein of fermentative noxious elements. "Flesh foods," says Kellog, "of the animals we consume contain poisonous substances resulting from force-expending processes, such as brain, and nerve activity, and muscle activity, including that of the heart, and glands. In fact, every vital process carried on in the animal's body produces poisonous material, to be thrown off by this or that extricatory channel. In the flesh of the healthiest animal there is always present a large, or small amount of broken-down products, which are on their way out of its body, to be removed by the liver, the kidneys, the skin, and other organs." But the plant, as far as we know, has no such waste products; neither does milk comprehend them. 66 The principal nutritive constituent of flesh meat is "proteid," this being characterised by the rapidity with which it can become disintegrated as to its cells, with the liberation of heat; in other words it is a quick fuel. "It is to such proteid that meat owes its heating qualities, as commonly ascribed; for which reason its use should be restricted in summer-time." " ' Again," says Clouston, "the presence of much meat in the diet seems to act as an excitant of the animal passions, such 'flesh' being the incarnation of rampant, uncontrollable force." Moreover, we have to remember that the fundamental principle of our daily urine is urea, a waste product of the muscles and other bodily structures, which we are constantly expending in our daily life, whilst exactly the same conditions obtain with the animals whose flesh we eat. It will therefore be anxiously asked, Is the uric acid still in the meat when it comes to table? Yes, certainly! These waste "extractives of meat," as Dr. Hutchison calls them, "have no nutritive 66 value, but they are the chief cause of the characteristic taste of meat. Whether or not they exercise bad effects, or the same effects which the like poisons cause when becoming formed in our own bodies, science does not say." Together with the uric acid are found other poisons, e.g., creatin, creatinin, etc.; so that the flesh diet makes the excretions twice as poisonous from animals, as are the excretions of a person who lives on fleshless diet." "It is admitted." writes Dr. Haig, "that disease germs will grow with the greatest rapidity in beef-tea, and other preparations of animal tissue; whereas fruit juices will often actually destroy these germs. دو When an animal is slaughtered for food, its tissues and cells before they are all completely dead still go on consuming the soluble food-elements which surround them, and they yet produce various chemical combinations just as during life; that is to say, they go on working, and giving off waste matters for a time after death. But no longer can the body remove these corrupt waste products through its several outlets; they accumulate as poisons after the animals' death, and tend to spoil the flesh, being no more washed away by a circulating stream of pure blood; and we can readily imagine how much worse the effect is when the carcase of the animal has been kept for several days before reaching the kitchen. "Concerning the eating of animals," says the Buddhist Ray, a Hindoo journal, "In the mechanical arts the meat-eating nations of the West surpass, as to skill and ingenuity, the vegetarian nations of the East. Still, this does not make them healthier or happier. The vices, and diseases of the Western carnivorous nations have, within the century recently ended, been the means of the extinction of whole races. the diet of animal flesh they will never realise the 'peace and goodwill among men' spoken of in the Christian Scriptures. The dream of a pearly-gated, peaceful, New Jerusalem on a carnivorous diet, is the delusory chimera of a fool, or a visionary." On Of animal foods, the most rapidly digested are those of soft consistence, such as sweetbread, and the like. The white meats, chicken, etc., are more digestible than the dark meats, for instance, the duck, or pigeon, or even the red meats; but their method of cooking greatly influences the result. Fresh fish is more rapidly digested than meat. Cauliflower is the most speedily digested of all vegetables.

It is remarkable with respect to the infirmity of stammering in speech, that several leading German physicians now maintain the opinion that a diminution in the amount of meat that is eaten should be insisted on with a view to lessening these difficulties of utterance; three weeks of abstinence from meat are said to marvellously improve a stammering sufferer. Again, in the strange case of Dr. Jekyll, and Mr. Hyde, as told by Robert Louis Stevenson, 1896, it is related how the former personage discovered by researches in the laboratory that man's nature is not truly that of a unit, but dual, -animal, and intellectual, and that by a certain compound drug, or tincture, containing various salts corresponding to meat extractives, the two natures could be separated, the animal Hyde being set free to follow his unrestrained brutal indulgences. Other drugs could restore the former double nature in one, but the oftener the separation was practised the greater ascendancy did the low vicious animal nature acquire, until at length it got to possess the man altogether, body and soul. And in this way the moral, and intellectual redeeming moiety was utterly extinguished, so that the monster Edward Hyde completely overpowered the good, benevolent Dr. Jekyll, and presently came to a miserable end by suicide, that he might escape from the Nemesis of the law for the heinous crimes perpetrated through his flesh-eating propensities. The people who consume the greatest quantity of meat are the Americans, their average individual amount being one hundred and seventy-five pounds per annum. The English come next with an average of rather more than one hundred and ten pounds. The French people eat only half as much meat as the English; and the people of Germany, Italy, and Austria still less. Long experience by English, Scotch, and Irish labourers has proved cheese to be a capital substitute for meat in affording satisfactory nourishment. A small quantity of sound cheese with them takes the place of a large allowance of meat, and enables them to endure such hard labour as the American thinks he can only perform upon a generous meat diet. In Germany farm labourers depend largely upon the curd of milk, after skimming this milk for butter. Such curd is often used in a fresh state, and makes an important part of the labourers diet. Cheese is less liable to putrefactive change than flesh, and thus much less likely to develop in the human system those scrofulous diseases which are attributable to animal food, more or less diseased, if the truth were known.

The person who eats in excess, especially of animal food, is always too easily fatigued; even a single meal may produce fatigue, if it is unusually large, or rich. Workmen are sooner tired on a Monday compared with any other day of the week, owing to their having more (animal) food, and less work on the Sunday preceding. The said fatigue is then due to self-poisoning, or auto-intoxication by corrupt products from a surfeited digestion. And on this principle it happens that the staying power of vegetarian eaters is so much greater than that of those who consume meat, when competing, for instance, in walking matches over long distances.

Nevertheless a generous diet in the respect of animal food is generally essential towards the cure of hysteria, where the nervous system is always impoverished. As regards the making, and repair of bodily tissues, these effects can be accomplished only by proteids, with mineral matters, and water. Besides the lean of flesh these proteids include white of egg, the casein of milk, the gluten of grains, and gelatin, with fibrin, as parts of meat. They as proteids are alone able to fulfil both functions as a food, viz., tissue-making, and the maintenance of bodily warmth. Hence is given to them the pre-eminent name, proteids. "We may go without fats, but unless we have proteids we die." Vegetable proteid is not so readily assimilable as that of flesh meat. "Many of the failures of haphazard vegetarianism are due to a lack of sufficient proteids in the diet." Nitrogen enters the body in proteid, and leaves it in urea, the product of expended muscular force. Carbon enters the body in fat, and leaves it in carbonic dioxide, the product of combustion within the body.

Sir Thomas Browne, in his Religio Medici, 1635, has discoursed after the following manner about our eating of meat. “Now for these walls of flesh wherein the soul doth seem to be immured before the Resurrection, it is nothing but an elemental composition, and a fabric that must fall to ashes. All flesh is grass is not only metaphorically, but literally true; for all those creatures we behold are but the herbs of the field, digested into flesh in them, or more remotely carnified in ourselves. Nay, further, we are what we all abhor, anthropophagi, and cannibals, devourers not only of men, but of ourselves; and that not in an allegory, but a positive truth, for all this mass of flesh which 66 come we behold came in at our mouths, this frame we look upon hath been upon our trenchers; in brief we have devoured ourselves!" Within quite recent times the medical practice has deservedly into vogue, of curing diseased states due to faulty function of some particular organ (glandular for the most part) in the human subject, by giving as food, or as an extract, portions of the same organ whilst in sound health, taken from a freshlyslaughtered animal. Thus goitre of the throat, and the depraved state of system induced thereby, are corrected, and the patient restored to full health, by administering the neck gland (or its extract) -" thyroid"-of a healthy sheep. Similarly for the urinary difficulties of old men, because of the gland (prostate) at the neck of the bladder having become thickened with senile deposits, the chopped prostate gland of a newly-slaughtered bull is given from day to day in small quantities with the most marked benefit. Likewise other such cures are being effected by giving for their allied diseases the glands, or their prepared extracts, of kidney, liver, breast, ovary, etc. Again, an animal extract is being got from the (blind) gland which caps the kidney of sheep or ox, and which corresponds to the same gland in the human body. This extract (adrenalin) has the power to stay bleeding by making the blood-vessels concerned therein contract, and close themselves up, even when cut by the surgeon's knife. But it is of difficult production, seeing that each animal gland of this nature (suprarenal) can only furnish a quarter of a grain. Also the gastric juice secreted by a healthy animal's stomach, as of the pig, or calf, will by its pepsin externally, when dried, cleanse, and serve to heal wounds, and sores complicated by sloughing, the pepsin, which acts only on dead tissues, faithfully seeking out, and breaking up the débris of disorganised cellular structure. The sores must be washed thoroughly from time to time, and a fresh solution of pepsin again applied. Similarly, for chronic urethral soreness, with bladder complications, and disorganized products given off within the urinary passages, the injection of pepsin, or bougies made therefrom, and passed along, have been found eminently successful.

Curative preparations of healthy animal organs exercise this remedial action within the human body under disease, in one of two ways, intrinsic, or extrinsic; the former when they replace some necessary secretion which is wanting in the patient; the latter when not glandular, but identical in structure with the part at fault, so as in some remarkable manner to influence such part for good; as for example by giving animal heart-substance for failure of power in the human heart, or spinal marrow from the ox for weakness of the human spine. Cardin is the medicinal principle of the bullock's heart, and is contained therein when this is sent to table as food, being found to increase the force, and fulness of the pulse subsequently to eating it. Dr. Hutchison speaks of the animal heart as an excellent, and economical food, to be highly commended for healthy persons, and of which a larger use than at present may be well made. It resembles ordinary meat very closely as far as chemical composition is concerned, (whilst plus the cardin,) but differs from it in being of a denser structure. Likewise with respect to the human brain when disordered in function, it is found that sheeps' brains, by the "cerebrin" of their grey matter, when administered as food act beneficially. Again, the discovery recently made that a local application within the human nostrils of the said animal organ attached to the sheep's kidney (supra-renal), when dried and powdered, will straightway relieve the distress of hay fever, is remarkable and to the point. This animal substance if blown into, and up the nose exercises a positive remedial effect on the severe nasal trouble. Whether or not the same animal organ if given as food would answer equally well, remains to be tried. Furthermore, proof positive has been obtained that if an animal serum, which can dissolve the red corpuscles of the human blood, is injected by small doses into the human body under the skin, it will positively increase the number of sound healthy red corpuscles possessed by the individual. Likewise other serums, or soups, prepared from healthy animals (as of the liver, kidney, or spermatic fluid) and employed in small quantities, will actually strengthen the specific tissue elements of this, or that same human organ, when weakened by illness, or disease.