No Animal Food | Page 4

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, Linn?us, Professor Lawrence, Charles Bell, Gassendi, Flourens, and a great number of other eminent writers.' (see The Perfect Way in Diet.)
Linn?us 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, in the face of all the available evidence, that the natural constitution of man closely resembles that of fruit-eating animals, and widely differs from that of flesh-eating animals, and that from analogy it is only reasonable to suppose that the fruitarian, or vegetarian, as it is commonly called, is the diet best suited to man. This conclusion has been arrived at by many distinguished men of science, among whom are the above mentioned. But the proof of the