p. 151 | Meat for Students

Pacific Seventh-day Adventist Publishing Association · Oakland, California · May 8, 1879

Meat for Students

"I AM about to utter a most heterodox sentiment, and one which I feel sure will shock and horrify the majority of my readers. But I utter it boldly, confident that it is correct. It is this: Meat should be eaten very sparingly, if at all, by all brain-workers, for the plain and simple reason that it is too stimulating to the brain. 'Prove it,' cries beef-eater. In the Lancet, Vol. I., page 186 (1869), we read: 'A bear kept at the Anatomical Museum of Glessen showed a quiet, gentle nature as long as he was fed exclusively on bread; but a few days' feeding on meat made him vicious, and even quite dangerous. That swine grow irascible by having flesh food given them is well known—so much so, indeed, that they will then attack men.' Those who have kept a watch-dog know that he is much more fierce and liable to attack burglars if he is fed exclusively upon meat than when fed upon vegetable food.

"Again, when a man is stricken by paralysis (one of the most formidable of brain diseases), what does the wise physician say? 'You must eat no meat; it is altogether too exciting to the brain.' It is the best, and sometimes almost the only thing, that can be done for the sick man now; but it is like 'locking the barn-door after the horse is stolen,' for very rarely, if ever, does he regain his former health and vigor.

"My experience and observations show that in many cases of insomnia, not dependent upon other diseases, there is so strong a probability that meat is causing all the mischief, that its relinquishment should be insisted upon by the attending physician before resorting to sedative or narcotic drugs.

"So greatly conducive to irritability of the nervous system is meat, especially beef, that among its minor evils may be reckoned the weeping over lessons, the fractiousness, the petulance, the hysterical laughing and crying, the low spirits, excessive homesickness, etc., etc., which appear to be the usual accompaniments of boarding-school life. This is lamentable. Whenever I see a school of young ladies afflicted with 'nervousness,' it reminds me of a beautiful garden of roses infested with mosquitoes. It always requires considerable moral courage on the part of the medical attendant to prohibit the free use of meat, except in cases of very grave nervous disease, like paralysis, etc.; for it seems to be the universal opinion, that the butcher's cart and the meat market are the only barriers between mankind and death. This is not so—provided food equally nutritious is substituted for it."—Sanitarian.