HEALTH NOTES

Otago Daily Times, Issue 21411, 12 August 1931, Page 13

HEALTH NOTES

Written for the Otago Daily Times. By R. J. Terry. A correspondent has written asking me to reply to what he evidently thinks is a poser. He says, Why is it that meateating animals remain in health, if an excess of meat means ill-health to humans? This is a question which is often put, and in most cases the person who puts it naturally thinks it is unanswerable. Well, we will just look at facts. Thousands ot people visit the zoos each year and see the lions fed. They are fed with joints of meat, and the people naturally go away believing that this is the animal’s daily ration year in and year out. But it is not so. It has been found that where lions and similar animals in zoos, circuses, ■ etc., are fed continually on joints of meat they soon deteriorate in health and that their progeny are not normal, often having cleft mouths, and showing signs of rickets, malnutrition, and a lack of boneforming material. If the parents of these progeny are fed whole carcasses of smaller animals or are allowed to consume the blood, skin, entrails, and internal. organs of the animals they consume, they rapidly improve in health, and their progeny is normally developed at birth. v Now, let us think a little more ana it will be found that meat-eating animals consume a vegetation-eating animal, in a state of nature lions, tigers, and similar animals prey chiefly on grazing animals. You will not find a lion, tiger, leopard, or puma eating the carcass of its own species. It may kill it, but will not devour it. If you have the opportunity to watch lions after a kill, you will see that, no matter how hungry they are, they rip their prey open, take out the paunch or stomach, tear it open, roughly shake it—remember they don’t take it to a creclc and wash it —consume the stomach, intestines, blood, etc., then finish their meal off the shoulder or rump of the animal. In the intestines and stomach won If. ba semi-digested greenstuff, and stored up mineral salts. But it is not necessary to watch a lion or tiger to prove to any of mv readers that animals have a greater instinct than humans as regards their food. We did have it. but civilisation has robbed us of it. With correct diet, therefore, and a return to natural health, this instinct is restored. Watch vour domestic cat, and learn a lesson in this direction. If she catcnes a sparrow, goldfinch, chaffinch in tac , any of the finch family, or even your canary—she will eat them. If. however, she catches a starling or a thrush she will not eat it.. Both of these birds are plumper, and would supply her with a larger meal, but she has an instinct which teaches her to understand food to a tar greater degree than does the human. Lae starling or the thrush is not a vegetarian. It may be said that the birds are too large for the cat to eat. Well, try her with a pigeon. Pigeon may be described as vegetarian. Have you ever noticed that sometimes a cat will eat a rat or part of a rat, when at other times she will not touch it? You will find that the reason for this depends upon whether the rat had been living on grams or vegetable life or not. Take a rat which has been caught round the slaughter bouse and put it m front of a reallv hungry eat, and you will find that she will kill it if she Js a good ratter, but she will not eat it. Then try her with a rat which has been caught round the buildings of a farm and has been subsisting on gram and roots. You will find that, if she is hungry, she will completely consume it. Dogs do not care for the flesh of the pig, but some years ago when 1 was experimenting and researching I had minim dogs that ate pork which was gTam-ted and root-fed, but I never could get a dog to eat offal-fed pigs. At that time Tasmanian butchers were allowed to keep a certain number of pigs to the offal, and yet dogs will eat offal itself. Man, including a medical man in those days, used to claim that the offal-fed pig made the best pork, and certainly the best bacon Man would eat which a dog refused, so that it will be seen that animals in their natural state eat meat, as we term it. and also eat the intestines of the animals, containing . semi-digested food (vegetable). They drink or lap the blood of the animal which is charged with vitamines and mineral salts of the vegetable world. ibey eat thej* 1 '? 1 ’ snfeen. kidneys, etc., which, together with the ductless glands, have been filtering ami storing constituents from the vegetable world, and not from the animal world. It is not often that I receive two letters from correspondents in one day putting posers, but to-day I have received two. My second correspondent, cannot understand the bpdy storing certain parts of the food, because he reads that food is completely digested in so many hours in most cases five or six hours. In reply, I would say the food is not digested in five or six hours. It undergoes its first, or even second, stage ot digestion during that period, and leaves the stomach, but the digestion or assimilation of portions of the food continues for some holirs afterwards. In tact, in most cases the assimilation of food takes 30 hours or more. You do not get your energy from the food you eat to-day, but from that which you ate yesterday, i am now speaking of a healthy person. It is not necessary for us to eat tne correct food every day, or even e\ ei} week, because your body has the power to store the mineral salts necessary and you call upon them, as required. Let me give vou a simple illustration in plant life. If you take a hyacinth bulb, it is really a store house of plant food required for the perfect development of the plant which you grow from the bulb until-the plant has reached the stane of development when it absorbs a farge amount of its nutriment from sunlight. You do not feed the bulb with manures. You may place it in a window on the top of a glass bottle containing ordinary water, and by and by roots will develop and enter the water. When the bulb can draw up water, circulation then commences, and the stored-up plant food is carried to that portion of the bulb which is developing the plant. Yon know that the bulb, which is only on the top of a glass bottle, will develop leaves and eventually send up a column ot flowers practically as perfect as if it were in the ground. You know that the plant has not been fed from outside sources. It has been calling on the toon stored up within itself. Water has acted as a solvent and a carrier to distribute this stored-np food. Sun and light in conjunction with the water have grouped and arranged that food supply, but it has not added one iota to the mineral salts which the bulb contained. When the flowers and leaves have died clown, you could not repeat the process again the following spring. If it did send out leaves they would be small, stumpy, undeveloped, and the flower spike an abortion, because you have used up the supply of mineral salts and given no opportunity to replace them. But ii you take that same bulb and place it in the ground you would find that you would in time get full development, because, owing to its being in direct sunlight and its roots in contact with the mineral salts in the soil, the depleted supply of plant food would again become normal. Your body has the same power. Therefore you may eat the wrong food for some time, or even go without food because you live on the stored mineral salts. But the time is limited, and you are only half a man or half a woman when the mineral salts are not in proper proportions.