p. 190 | Proper Diet for Man

Pacific Seventh-day Adventist Publishing Association · Oakland, California · Jun 27, 1878

Proper Diet for Man

PHYSIOLOGICAL EVIDENCES.

UNDER this head we shall consider as briefly as possible the comparative effects upon the human system of flesh and vegetable productions when used as food. While we think we have fully established that the best diet for man is of a vegetable character, we would by no means argue that life cannot be sustained by the use of animal food, either in connection with vegetables or when used exclusively. Indeed, we are willing to admit that by force of long habit man may become so accustomed to its use that he will feel a serious loss when deprived of it. This is sometimes urged as an argument in favor of its use; but it is plainly without logical force, for the same result follows the discontinuance

of tobacco, whisky, opium, arsenic, or any other substance to which the system has long been accustomed.

APPETITE.

Neither does the fact that many people have an appetite for meat prove anything in favor of such a diet. We claim, and history abundantly supports the statement, as we shall hereafter show, that whatever appetite man has for meat is acquired. And his capability to acquire such an appetite certainly does not establish his carnivorous nature, but only indicates that he is created with the capability of adapting himself to a great variety of circumstances when necessity requires. The same is equally true of other animals as well. The cat and dog have been trained to eat only vegetable food, and become so fond of this diet that they could scarcely be induced to partake of meat. On the other hand, horses, cows, sheep, and other herbivorous animals, have been known to become so fond of animal food as to greatly prefer beefsteak to the best corn or grass. The cattle of Nantucket have frequently been known when pressed by hunger during the winter season, to come down to the sea coast and dig up the frozen fish skins buried beneath the ice and snow, and devour them greedily. But this proves neither that the cat and dog are herbivorous or graminivorous, nor that the horse, cow, and sheep, are carnivorous.

But it may be said that many people are not obliged to learn to relish flesh food, being born with an appetite for it; and hence, that the appetite must be natural. It would be equally just to claim that the appetite for alcohol and tobacco is natural, and hence the articles themselves harmless, because it is a well known fact that many boys inherit from their tobacco-using or drunken fathers so strong an appetite for those poisons that they are almost powerless to abstain from gratification. But no one will claim that in the latter case the inherited desire for rum and tobacco will protect the system from their baneful influence, or convert them into healthful, nutritious substances. So it is with animal food. Its use has been so prevalent for a long series of years that each individual born inherits an appetite for it along with other peculiarities and tendencies which are the well known results of heredity.

It has also been urged that man, by reason of his superior intellect, is enabled to adapt himself to a flesh diet, while the lower animals are left wholly to the leadings of what is termed natural instinct, and so cannot change their dietetic habits at will. The same argument would make alcohol a good beverage for man, but poisonous to the horse, because the latter lacks the ingenuity to prepare the poison by the arts of fermentation and distillation. The absurdity of this method of reasoning is too apparent to need refutation. The evident truth is that the value of an article as food depends upon its adaptation to the wants of the being to be sustained, and not upon the imagination of the individual with reference to it. It is quite possible that the imagination may so affect the system as to interfere with the natural effects of a nutritious substance; but the most powerful effort of the imagination can never render wholesome an article in itself injurious.