A vegetarian is defined as one who abstains from any food which is obtained by the slaughter of animals - of course including birds and fish. The fact that man thinks that he cannot live without devouring dead flesh is founded upon ignorance or perversion of facts. It has been proved that those who have lived without the pollution of flesh food – without meat, fish or fowl – have survived all their lives from disease than those who partake of such things.
We Want the Best: Food, like anything else, is what people want what is best for their health and for the health of their families. But very often people do not really know or rather are not able to appreciate that which is good for them. Most often they are swayed by the greed and passion that arises from the lower self for that kind of foods that are virtually poisonous to their bodies, mind and souls. We should be glad to take what is really best; and if we do not yet know enough to be able to appreciate what is best, then we should be glad to learn to do so. If we think of it, we shall see that this is the case along other lines, as, for example, in music, art or literature. The taste of good things in life has to be cultivated slowly, gradually and with a lot of patience until something of its sweet beauty dawns upon his soul and a person begins to comprehend that which failed to awaken any response within his heart. It is the same with art and literature. You will not learn to appreciate the best if you continue to indulge in cheap trash that is readily available at every nook and corner of the town, which neither teach the ignorant, nor strengthen the weak, nor develop the immature. If we wish to unfold the mind in our children we do not leave them to their own uncultivated taste in all these things, but we try to help them to train that taste, whether it be in art, in music or in literature.
Surely then we may seek to find the best in physical as well as in mental food, and surely we must find this not by mere blind instinct, but by learning to think and to reason out the matter from the higher point of . There may be those in the world who have no desire for the best, who are willing to remain on the lower levels and consciously and intentionally to build into themselves that which is coarse and degrading; but surely there are many who wish to rise above this, who would gladly and eagerly take the best if they only knew what it was, or if their attention was directed to it. There are men and women who are morally of the highest class, who yet have been brought up to feed with the hyenas and the wolves of life, and have been taught that their necessary dietary was the corpse of a slaughtered animal. It needs but little thought to us that this horror cannot be the highest and the purest, and that if we ever wish to raise ourselves in the scale of nature, if we ever wish that our bodies shall be pure and clean as the temples of the Master should be, we must abandon this loathsome custom, and take our place among the princely hosts who are striving for the evolution of mankind - striving for the highest and the purest in everything, for themselves as well as for their fellow-men. Let us see in detail why a vegetarian diet is emphatically the purest and the best.
1. More Nutrient
Vegetables contain more nutriment than an equal amount of dead flesh. This will sound a surprising and incredible statement to many people, because they have been brought up to believe that they cannot exist unless they defile themselves with flesh, and this delusion is so widely spread that it is difficult to awaken the average man from it. It must be clearly understood that this is not a question of habit, or of sentiment, or of prejudice; it is simply a question of plain fact, and as to the facts there is not and there never has been the slightest question. There are four elements necessary in food, all of them essential to the repair and the upbuilding of the body, (a) Proteids or nitrogenous foods; (b) carbohydrates; (c) hydro-carbons or fats; (d) salts. This is the classification usually accepted among physiologists, although some recent investigations are tending to modify it to a certain extent.
Now there is no question that all of these elements exist to a greater extent in vegetables than they do in dead flesh. For instance, milk, cream, cheese, nuts, peas and beans contain a large percentage of proteids or nitrogenous matter. Wheat, oats, rice and other grains, fruits and most of the vegetables (except perhaps peas, beans, and lentils) consist mainly of the carbohydrates - that is, of starches and sugars. The hydro-carbons, or fats, are found in nearly all the proteid foods, and can also be taken in the form of butter or of oils. The salts are found practically in all food to a greater or less extent. They are of the utmost importance in the maintenance of the body tissues, and what is called saline starvation is the cause of many diseases.
The only sources of energy in dead flesh are the proteid matter contained therein, and the fat; and as the fat in it has certainly no more value than other fat, the only point to be considered is the proteids. Now. It must be remembered that proteids have only one origin; they are organized in plants and nowhere else. Nuts, peas, beans, and lentils are far richer than any kind of flesh in these elements, and they have this enormous advantage, that the proteids are pure, and therefore contain all the energy originally stored up in them during their organization. In the animal body these proteids, which the animal has absorbed from the vegetable kingdom during its life, are constantly passing down to disorganization, during which descent the energy originally stored in them is released. Consequently what has been used already by one animal cannot be utilised by another. The proteids are estimated in some of these tables by the amount of nitrogen contained therein, but in flesh-meat there are many products of tissue-change such as urea, uric acid, and creatine, all of which contain nitrogen and are therefore estimated as proteids, though they have no food value whatever.
Nor is this all the evil; for this tissue-change is necessarily accompanied by the formation of various poisons, which are always to be found in flesh of any kind; and in many cases the virulence of these poisons is very great. So you will observe that if you gain any nourishment from the eating of dead flesh, you obtain it because during its life the animal consumed vegetable matter. You get less of this nourishment than you ought to have, because the animal has already used up half of it, and you have along with it various undesirable substances, and even some active poisons, which are of course distinctly deleterious. I know that there are many doctors who will prescribe the loathsome flesh diet in, order to strengthen people, and that they will often meet with a certain amount of success... At any rate, the strengthening results can be obtained more easily from the vegetable kingdom when the science of diet is properly understood, and they can be obtained without the horrible pollution and without all the undesirable concomitants of the other system. Let me show you that I am not in all this making any unfounded assertions; let me quote to you the opinions of physicians, of men whose names are well-known in the medical world, so that you may see that I have abundant authority for all that I have said.
We find Sir Henry Thompson, F.K.C.S., saying: "It is a vulgar error to regard meat in any form as necessary to life. All that is necessary to the human body can be supplied by the vegetable kingdom ... The vegetarian can extract from his food all the principles necessary for the growth and support of the body, as well as for the production of heat and force. It must be admitted as a fact beyond all question that some persons are stronger and more healthy who live on that food. I know how much of the prevailing meat diet is not merely a wasteful extravagance, but a source of serious evil to the consumer." There is a definite statement by a well-known medical man.
Then we may turn to the words of a Fellow of the Royal Society, Sir Benjamin Ward Richardson, M.D.; he says: " It must be honestly admitted that weight by weight, vegetable substance, when carefully selected, possesses the most striking advantages over animal food in nutritious value. I should like to see a vegetarian and fruit-living plan put into general use, and I believe it will be."
The well-known physician, Dr. William S. Playfair, C. B., has said quite clearly: "Animal diet is not essential to man"; and we find Dr.F.J.Sykes, B.Sc., the medical official for St. Pancras, writing:"Chemistry is not antagonistic to vegetarianism, any more than biology is. Flesh food is certainly not necessary to supply the nitrogenous products required for the repair of tissues; therefore a well-selected diet from the vegetable kingdom is perfectly right, from the chemical point of view, for the nutrition of men."
Dr. Francis Vacher, F.R.C.S., F.C.S., remarks: "I have no belief that a man is better physically or mentally for taking flesh-food."
Dr. Alexander Haig, F.E.C.P., the leading physician of one of the great London hospitals, has written : " That it is easily possible to sustain life on the products of the vegetable kingdom needs no demonstration for physiologists, even if the majority of the human race were not constantly engaged in demonstrating it; and my researches show, not only that it is possible, but that it is infinitely preferable in every way, and produces superior powers, both of mind and body."
Dr. M. F. Coomes, in The American Practitioner and News of July, 1902, concluded a scientific article as follows: "Let me state first that the flesh of warm blooded animals is not essential as a diet for the purpose of maintaining the human body in perfect health." He goes on to make some further remarks which we shall quote under our next head.
The Dean of the Faculty of Jefferson Medical College (of Philadelphia) said: "It is a well-known fact that cereals as articles of daily food hold a high place in the human economy; they contain constituents amply sufficient to sustain life in its highest form. If the value of cereal food products were better known it would be a good thing for the race. Nations live and thrive upon them alone, and it has been fully demonstrated that meat is not a necessity."
There you have a number of plain statements, and all of them are taken from the writings of well-known men who have made a considerable study of the chemistry of foods. It is impossible to deny that man can exist without this horrible flesh-diet, and furthermore that there is more nutriment in an equal amount of vegetable than of dead flesh. I could give you many other quotations, but those above mentioned are sufficient, and they are fair samples of the rest.
2. LESS DISEASE
Second: Because many serious diseases come from this loathsome habit of devouring dead bodies. Here again I could easily give you a long list of quotations, but as before I will be satisfied with a few. Dr. Josiah Oldfield, M.E.C.S., L.R.C.P., writes: "Flesh is an unnatural food, and therefore tends to create functional disturbances. As it is taken in modern civilisations, it is infected with such terrible diseases (readily communicable to man) as cancer, consumption, fever, intestinal worms, etc., to an enormous extent. There is little need to wonder that flesh-eating is one of the most serious causes of the diseases that carry off ninety-nine out of every hundred people that are born."
Sir Edward Saunders tells us: "Any attempt to teach mankind that beef and beer are not necessary for health and efficiency must be good, and must tend to thrift and happiness; and, as this goes on I believe we shall hear less of gout, Bright's disease, and trouble with the liver and the kidneys in the former, and less of brutality and wife-beating and murder in the latter. I believe that the tendency is towards vegetarian diet, that it will be recognised as fit and proper, and that the time is not far distant when the idea of animal food will be found revolting to civilized man."
Sir Robert Christison, M.D., asserts positively that "the flesh and secretions of animals affected with carbuncular diseases analogous to anthrax are so poisonous that those who eat the product of them are apt to suffer severely - the disease taking the form either of inflammation of the digestive canal, or of an eruption of one or more carbuncles."
Dr. A. Kingsford, of the University of Paris, says: "Animal meat may directly engender many painful and loathsome diseases. Scrofula itself, that fecund source of suffering and death, not improbably owes its origin to flesh-eating habits. It is a curious fact that the word scrofula is derived from scrofa, a sow. To say that one has scrofula is to say that he has swine's evil."
In his fifth report to the Privy Council in England we find Professor Gamgee stating that "one-fifth of the total amount of meat consumed is derived from animals killed in a state of malignant disease"; while Professor A. Winter Blyth, F.R.C.S., writes:
"Economically speaking, flesh food is not necessary - and meat seriously diseased may be so prepared as to look like fairly good meat. Many an animal with advanced diseases of the lung yet shows to the naked eye no appearance in the flesh which differs from the normal."
Dr M. P. Coornes, in the article above quoted, remarks : We have many substitutes for meat which are free from the deleterious effects of that food upon the animal economy - namely, in the production of rheumatism, gout and all other kindred diseases to say nothing of cerebral congestion, which frequently terminates in apoplexy and venal diseases of one kind and another, migraine and many other such forms of headache, resulting from the excessive use of meat and often produced when meat is not eaten to excess. Dr J. H. Kellogg remarks: "It is interesting to note that scientific men all over the world are awakening to the fact that the flesh of animals as food is not a pure nutriment, but is mixed with poisonous substances, excrementitious in character, which are the natural results of animal life. The vegetable stores up energy. It is from the vegetable world - the coal and the wood - that the energy is derived which runs our steam engine pulls our trains, drives our steamships and does the work of civilisation. It is from vegetable world that all animals, directly or indirectly, derive the energy which is manifested by animal life through muscular and mental work. The vegetable builds up; the animal tears down. The vegetable stores up energy; the animal expends energy. Various waste and poisonous products result from the manifestation of energy, whether by the locomotive or the animal. The working tissues of the animal are enabled to continue their activity only by the fact that they are continually washed clean by the blood, a never-ceasing stream flowing through and about them, carrying away the poisonous products resulting from their work as rapidly as they are formed. The venous blood owes its character to these poisons, which are removed by the kidneys, lungs, skin and bowels. The flesh of a dead animal contains a great quantity of these poisons, the elimination of which ceases at the instant of death, although their formation continues for some time after death. An eminent French surgeon recently remarked that 'beef-tea is a veritable solution of poisons'. Intelligent physicians everywhere are coming to recognise these facts, and to make a practical application of them."
Here again you see we have no lack of evidence; and many of the quotations with regard to the introduction of poisons into the system through flesh-food are not from the vegetarian doctors, but from those who still hold it right to eat sparingly of corpses, but yet have studied to some extent the science of the matter. It should be remembered that dead flesh can never be in a condition of perfect health, because decay commences at the moment when the creature is killed. All sorts of products are being formed in this process of retrograde change; all of these are useless, and many of them are positively dangerous and poisonous. In the ancient scriptures of the Hindus we find a very remarkable passage, which refers to the fact that even in India some of the lower castes at that early period commenced to feed on flesh. The statement made is that in ancient times only three diseases existed, one of which was old age; but that now, since people had commenced to eat flesh, seventy-eight new diseases had arisen. This shows us that the idea that disease might come from the devouring of corpses has been recognised for thousands of years.
Taken from "Vegetarianism and Occultism" by C. W. Leadbeater.
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