An Athlete's Testimony

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Seventh-day Adventist Publishing Association · Battle Creek, Mich. · Aug 4, 1903

FromReview and Herald, Vol. 80, No. 31.

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An Athlete's Testimony

Eustace Miles, the world's champion tennis-player of Cambridge, England, speaking of his own experience, states that the question of brain freshness and brain fatigue are matters of the greatest importance to the athlete, and that the thing that affects this the most is food. There is no other influence a quarter so powerful as the diet. The waste product from animal's flesh is probably waste product when it reaches the human brain; the effect will be almost the same as if it had been formed there by hours and hours of hard work by the individual. It is the waste products that bring on the feeling of fatigue. In eating the flesh of animals we introduce a large quantity of this, and that is one reason why one becomes worn out sooner on a flesh diet than on a non-flesh dietary. Mr. Miles says, “Once I obtained proteids chiefly from flesh foods, and I began to suffer from depression, headache, constipation, albuminuria, and increased weariness after hard exercise, all of which made it necessary for me to give up alcohol; but I felt a strong liking for it, and the struggle was a hard one. I was fond of what was called ‘good living,’ but I tried the fleshless foods, and before long away went my depression, my headache, constipation, the symptoms of albuminuria, and weariness after hard exercise, and my desire for alcohol, too. For years I have lived almost without flesh. When I have returned to it, back would come all my old symptoms, and also the desire for alcohol. On my side stand many of the old Greeks, the Spartans, the Athenians, also the sturdy Romans and the English Commons when at their best.”—Australasian Good Health.