Vegetable Diet: As Sanctioned by Medical Men, and by Experience in All Ages: Including a System of Vegetable CookeryAlcott, William A. (William Andrus)
Science
Vegetable Diet: As Sanctioned by Medical Men, and by Experience in All Ages: Including a System of Vegetable Cookery
Alcott, William A. (William Andrus)
Food; Vegetarianism
Now if this experiment proves what Dr. C. supposes in favor of the
lighter meats and vegetables taken together, how much more does it prove
for bread alone? For it cannot escape the eye of the least observing
that this article, though placed last in the list of Dr. Geoffroy, is by
far the highest in point of nutriment; nay, that it is about three times
as high as any of the rest. I am not disposed to lay so much stress on
these experiments as Dr. C. does; nevertheless, they prove something
Connected with the more recent experiments of Messrs. Percy and
Vauquelin and others, how strikingly do they establish one fact, at
least, viz., that bread and the other farinaceous vegetables cannot
possibly be wanting in nutriment; and how completely do they annihilate
the old-fashioned doctrine--one which is still abroad and very
extensively believed--that animal food is a great deal more nourishing
than vegetable! No careful inquirer can doubt that bread, peas, beans,
rice, etc., are twice as nutritious--to say the least--as flesh or fish.
MESSRS. PERCY AND VAUQUELIN.
As I have alluded, in the preceding article, to the experiments of
Messrs. Percy and Vauquelin, two distinguished French chemists, their
testimony in this place seems almost indispensable, even though we
should not regard it, in the most strict import of the term, as medical
testimony. The result of their experiments, as communicated by them to
the French minister of the interior, is as follows:
In bread, every one hundred pounds is found to contain eighty pounds of
nutritious matter; butcher's meat, averaging the different sorts,
contains only thirty-five pounds in one hundred; French beans (in the
grain), ninety-two pounds in one hundred; broad beans, eighty-nine
pounds; peas, ninety-three pounds; lentils (a species of half pea little
known with us), fifty-four pounds in one hundred; greens and turnips
only eight pounds of solid nutritious substance in one hundred; carrots,
fourteen pounds; and one hundred pounds of potatoes yield only
twenty-five pounds of nutriment.
I will just affix to the foregoing one more table. It is inserted in
several other works which I have published; but for the benefit of
those who may never yet have seen it, and to show how strikingly it
corresponds with the results of the experiments of Geoffroy, Percy, and
Vauquelin, I deem it proper to insert it.
Of the best wheat, one hundred pounds contain about eighty-five pounds
of nutritious matter; of rice, ninety pounds; of rye, eighty; of barley,
eighty-three; of beans, eighty-nine to ninety-two; peas, ninety-three;
lentils, ninety-four; meat (average), thirty-five; potatoes,
twenty-five; beets, fourteen; carrots, ten; cabbage, seven; greens, six;
and turnips, four.
DR. PEMBERTON.
Dr. Pemberton, after speaking of the general tendency, in our highly fed
communities, to scrofula and consumption, makes the following remarks,
which need no comment:
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