Best Foods for Body Building and Work
By G. B. Starr
FORTUNATELY for the bulk of mankind, the foods most essential to sustain life at its best and most efficient working point, are the most abundant and consequently the cheapest in the world's market everywhere. The Creator has evidently arranged matters just this way so as to provide for the table of His great family of common folk, who form the bulk of the world's population and who do the bulk of the world's work. Wheat, oats, corn, rye, barley, rice, peas, beans, lentils, potatoes, eggs, and milk, together with apples, prunes, peaches, pears, grapes, and bananas, with an abundance of pure water, are among the staples for keeping the human machine supplied daily at the working point of good health. Fortunate also is it that roast beef, rich pastry, tea and coffee, and ice-cream and cake, are no more essential to man than they are to his faithful horse, his companion in work, which builds up such fine muscle, blood, and nerve power on oats, hay, and water, and keeps so well on them. Wheat, oats, and corn, and the other grains mentioned above, contain over 80 parts of nourishment to the 100 parts, with no clinkers and ash in the waste; while the best lean beef and mutton contain only 28 parts to the 100 parts, and contain 72 parts of clinker and ash, in the form of uric acid, carbon, broken-down tissue, etc., which overtax the kidneys and the liver. The human family mistakes stimulation for strength. Flesh foods and tea and coffee are stimulating because of the body irritants they contain. The true food supply for man and bird and beast grows standing still in the earth. Its function is to store energy. The function of man and beast is to consume this stored energy. The best-natured and most useful of animals live upon the products of the earth. So the most robust and best-disposed among men are practically vegetarians. The peasantry of all nations — English, Scotch, Irish, Norwegian, Russian, Turk, Indian, Japanese, and Chinese — all of whom eat very little flesh food, are doing the world's hard work. Lord Playfair says, "Animal diet is not essential to man." Dr. Alex Haig, in his famous work on "Uric Acid," writes: "That it is easily possible to sustain life on the products of the vegetable kingdom needs no demonstration for physiologists, even if a 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. Oldfield writes: "To-day there is the scientific fact assured that man belongs not to the flesh eaters but to the fruit eaters. To-day there is the fact in the hands of all, which none can gainsay, that the products of the vegetable kingdom contain all that is necessary for the fullest sustenance of human life."