No Animal Food | Page 4

deeper into the unstable
organisms in which it grows.]

II
PHYSICAL CONSIDERATIONS
There are many eminent scientists who have given it as their opinion
that anatomically and physiologically man is to be classed as a
frugivorous animal. There are lacking in man all the characteristics that
distinguish the prominent organs of the carnivora, while he possesses a
most striking resemblance to the fruit-eating apes. Dr. Kingsford writes:

'M. Pouchet observes that all the details of the digestive apparatus in
man, as well as his dentition, constitute "so many proofs of his
frugivorous origin"--an opinion shared by Professor Owen, who
remarks that the anthropoids and all the quadrumana derive their
alimentation from fruits, grains, and other succulent and nutritive
vegetable substances, and that the strict analogy which exists between
the structure of these animals and that of man clearly demonstrates his
frugivorous nature. This view is also taken by Cuvier, Linnæus,
Professor Lawrence, Charles Bell, Gassendi, Flourens, and a great
number of other eminent writers.' (see The Perfect Way in Diet.)
Linnæus is quoted by John Smith in Fruits and Farinacea as speaking
of fruit as follows: 'This species of food is that which is most suitable to
man: which is evidenced by the series of quadrupeds, analogy, wild
men, apes, the structure of the mouth, of the stomach, and the hands.'
Sir Ray Lancaster, K.C.B., F.R.S., in an article in The Daily Telegraph,
December, 1909, wrote: 'It is very generally asserted by those who
advocate a purely vegetable diet that man's teeth are of the shape and
pattern which we find in the fruit-eating, or in the root-eating, animals
allied to him. This is true.... It is quite clear that man's cheek teeth do
not enable him to cut lumps of meat and bone from raw carcasses and
swallow them whole. They are broad, square-surfaced teeth with four
or fewer low rounded tubercles to crush soft food, as are those of
monkeys. And there can be no doubt that man fed originally like
monkeys, on easily crushed fruits, nuts, and roots.'
With regard to man's original non-carnivorous nature and omnivorism,
it is sometimes said that though man's system may not thrive on a raw
flesh diet, yet he can assimilate cooked flesh and his system is well
adapted to digest it. The answer to this is that were it demonstrable, and
it is not, that cooked flesh is as easily digested and contains as much
nutriment as grains and nuts, this does not prove it to be suitable for
human food; for man (leaving out of consideration the fact that the
eating of diseased animal flesh can communicate disease), since he was
originally formed by Nature to subsist exclusively on the products of
the vegetable kingdom, cannot depart from Nature's plan without

incurring penalty of some sort--unless, indeed, his natural original
constitution has changed; but it has not changed. The most learned and
world-renowned scientists affirm man's present anatomical and
physiological structure to be that of a frugivore. Disguising an
unnatural food by cooking it may make that food more assimilable, but
it by no means follows that such a food is suitable, let alone harmless,
as human food. That it is harmful, not only to man's physical health, but
to his mental and moral health, this book endeavours to demonstrate.
With regard to the fact that man has not changed constitutionally from
his original frugivorous nature Dr. Haig writes as follows: 'If man
imagines that a few centuries, or even a few hundred centuries, of
meat-eating in defiance of Nature have endowed him with any new
powers, except perhaps, that of bearing the resulting disease and
degradation with an ignorance and apathy which are appalling, he
deceives himself; for the record of the teeth shows that human structure
has remained unaltered over vast periods of time.'
According to Dr. Haig, human metabolism (the process by which food
is converted into living tissue) differs widely from that of the carnivora.
The carnivore is provided with the means to dispose of such poisonous
salts as are contained in and are produced by the ingestion of animal
flesh, while the human system is not so provided. In the human body
these poisons are not held in solution, but tend to form deposits and
consequently are the cause of diseases of the arthritic group,
conspicuously rheumatism.
There is sometimes some misconception as regards the distinction
between a frugivorous and herbivorous diet. The natural diet of man
consists of fruits, farinacea, perhaps certain roots, and the more
esculent vegetables, and is commonly known as vegetarian, or
fruitarian (frugivorous), but man's digestive organs by no means allow
him to eat grass as the herbivora--the horse, ox, sheep, etc.--although he
is much more nearly allied to these animals than to the carnivora.
We are forced to conclude,