Page:Linda Hazzard - Fasting for the cure of disease.djvu/194

 no loop-hole through which to escape from the facts.

No adequate explanation is as yet available of the evident superiority of a vegetarian diet over one of flesh as regards endurance, save, perhaps, in the theory that a diet composed in greater part of proteid produces uric acid and other crystalline substances, which in turn cause muscular fatigue in exercise. The facts are patent in these instances as related, as well as in the experiments made by the author of the text along similar lines during the past twelve years. The results obtained demonstrate that a non-flesh diet builds a consistently strong and enduring physical structure, while the reverse is true in great part when meat figures in the list of food ingested. In the past, facts such as these have been obscured and the truth has suffered because the idea contained in the term, "vegetarian," suggested what was popularly regarded as fanaticism carried beyond all bounds. In the history of the world no doctrine advanced with polemical warmth and coupled with enthusiasm and dogma almost religious, has ever had influence upon scientific thought, and, for this reason, the matter needs to be approached deliberately and