SHOULD WE BE VEGETARIAN?

Dominion, Volume 14, Issue 160, 2 April 1921, Page 8

SHOULD WE BE VEGETARIAN?

The aged controversy whether man ought to- te a jcarnivorous or a herbivosous animal will probably prove immorta*, for whatever evidence is produced is always open to argument (observes “Everyday Science”). But the vegetarians have recently suffered a' blow' to one. of their theories—that man cou® not live and be healthy on a diet of meat alone. The fact that'the Eskimos of Alaska are dying out was claimed by them as partly due to their diet of meat and fish, but their opponents declare that they are decreasing partly because then* diet is no longer exclusively meat, they having learned to eat bread and vegetables and fruit, which do not suit them so And Stefansson’s test expedition, which lived for several years in the Arctic regions, goes to show that not only Eskimos but whites can live and thrive with no other food than meat and fish. Di. Jenness, of Oxlord, the anthropologist of the expedition, declares that the Eskimos of the Arctic are tlie healthiest primitive people to te found anywhere, free of the white man’s diseases, and living, in spite of the climate, to the age of 75 and over. Another member of the expedition, who was a vegetarian when lie set out. changed his views as well as lis diet It was Stefansson s theory that he could ‘‘live on the country without burdening his sledges with supplies of tinned foods.” Tlmy did so successfully, and what is more, they liked it, and did not’welcome the change back to a ‘ civilised” diet when the expedition returned. Thev met white men who had lived in the North for 12 or 15 years on moat and fish only, and had never had a serious fact that emerged was the necessity of fat. The Eskimos cat much blubber and seal oil with their meat Stefansson Ims found that 151 b. of lean meat a dav are barely enough to satisfy hung-r in'the Arctic, but that half a pound of fat with 21b. or 31b. of lean is plenty.