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
"Young persons invariably do best on simple but moderately nutritious
fare. Too large a proportion of animal food and fatty substances are
pernicious to the complexion. On the contrary, a diet which is
principally vegetable, with the luxuries of the dairy (not butter,
surely, for that is elsewhere prohibited), is most advantageous. Nowhere
are finer complexions to be found than in those parts of England,
Scotland, and Ireland, where the living is almost exclusively vegetable.
"Those who subsist entirely on vegetable food have seldom, if ever, a
constantly bad breath, or an offensive perspiration. It has been
ascertained that the teeth are uniformly best in those countries where
least animal food is used."
THE FEMALE'S CYCLOPEDIA.
From a fugitive volume, entitled "The Female's Cyclopedia," I have
concluded to make the following extract, because I have reason to
believe the writer to have been a physician:
"Animal food certainly gives most strength; but its stimulancy excites
fever, and produces plethora and its consequences. The system is sooner
worn out by a repetition of its stimuli, and those who indulge greatly
in such diet are more likely to be carried off early by inflammatory
diseases; or if, by judicious exercise, they qualify its effects, they
yet acquire such an accumulation of putrescent fluids as becomes the
foundation for the most inveterate chronic diseases in after age.
"The most valuable state of the mind, however, appears to be connected
with somewhat less of firmness and vigor of body. Vegetable aliment, as
never over-distending the vessels or loading the system, does not
interrupt the stronger emotions of the mind; while the heat, fullness,
and weight of animal food, are inimical to its vigorous exertion.
Temperance, therefore, does not so much consist in the quantity--since
the appetite will regulate that--as in the quality; namely, in a large
proportion of vegetable aliment."
DR. VAN COOTH.
Dr. Van Cooth, a learned European writer--I believe a Hollander--has
recently maintained, incidentally, in a learned medical dissertation,
that the great body of the ancient Egyptians and Persians "confined
themselves to a vegetable diet." To be sure, Dr. V. does not seem to be
a vegetable eater himself, but the friends of the latter system are not
the less indebted to him for the concession. The physical and moral
superiority of those vegetable eating nations, in the days of their
glory, are well known; and every intelligent reader of history, and
honest inquirer after truth, will make his own inferences from the facts
which I have mentioned.
DR. WILLIAM BEAUMONT.
The work of this gentleman, entitled "Experiments and Observations on
the Gastric Juice, and the Physiology of Digestion," is well known--at
least to the medical community. The following are some of the
conclusions to which his experiments conducted him:
"Solid aliment, thoroughly masticated, is far more salutary than soups,
broths, etc.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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