Anything we desire to prove can be proved on the lower animals if we only use a sufficient number of kinds of animals. Rat-pen (or guinea pig) dietetics has simply led the dietitians astray in more ways than one. They have worked out their solutions to human problems in their test tubes, guinea pigs and rats, and not in the human body. As a consequence, they do not even know dietetics.

Dr. Pearl T. Swanson, of Iowa State College reported that "Experiments with rats indicate that 'complete reproductive failure' results when mother animals lack meat." She adds that the "deficiency" is "not made up by pork." Beef should be eaten. Her experiments "showed" that the diet must be made up of 30%, protein. To such a result, we answer: Rats! Tell it to the old gray mare and hear a real horselaugh. Tell her that her colt will be born dead, or that she will be unable to suckle her colt, or that her grandchildren will be sterile, unless she eats beef. Tell it to the wild ass and listen to his bray. Tell it to the old cow whose calf is busy extracting the lactic juice from her over-distended udder. Try to convince the dairyman whose prize cow gives seven gallons of milk each day that unless he feeds her on beef, she will not be able to supply sufficient milk for her calf. Tell the story to the ewe that without beef her lambs will be born dead. Tell the mountain goat that if she does not eat beef her kids will starve for lack of milk. Remind the doe that her fawns will be sterile in the third generation if she does not eat enough beef. Tell the story to the musk-ox, the elephant, the rhinoceros, the giraffe, camel, bison, buffalo, rabbit, the great apes, parrot, etc. Publish the story far and wide. Let all the earth know that a woman out in Iowa has "discovered" by "research" and "experiment," that she has proved by the "scientific method," that if female animals do not have an abundance of beef in their diet, their young are born dead, they are unable to supply sufficient milk for their young and in the third generation their offspring become sterile.

Go into crowded India and China and tell the vegetarian millions of these lands that in another three generations their countries will be depopulated unless the mothers of these lands eat beef. Tell the news to the many vegetarians of America, some of them fourth generation vegetarians, that they are headed for rapid extinction along with the horse and cow, if they do not eat beef. A rat-pen dietitian has proved it, and let no one doubt the findings of the infallible "scientific method."

It would be folly to say their animal experimentation has not provided some knowledge or that it has not supplied leads that have been useful, but the tendency is to rely too much on the results of the animal experiments in feeding men, women and children.

The laboratory man's problems are simple. He makes them himself and solves them quite readily. He deals with controlled experiments and knows all the elements of his experiment. Compared to this, the life of even the youngest child is a complex mosaic of interlacing influences that are not dreamed of in the laboratory man's philosophy. The experimenter has proved that a deficient diet will produce disease, but he has been too prone to overlook the significant fact that a perversion of nutrition, due to any other cause, will produce disease; so-called deficiency diseases, as well as other types, despite a theoretically perfect dietary.

Anything that increases the body's food needs, such as growth, hard work, extreme cold, wasting disease, and anything which tends to hinder absorption, such as gastro-intestinal disorders from whatever causes, predisposes to scurvy, beri beri, malnutritional edema, rickets, pellagra, tuberculosis, anemia, atrophy, polyneuritis and other nutritional diseases.

Decadence of functional power follows upon any artificial or vicarious interference which seeks to supplant the natural functions of the body. The best diet possible can be aborted in its health-building potentialities by the presence of excitants and artificial "aids" to the functions of life.

We are safe in saying that every case of leanness is due to undernourishment; but we would be far wrong if we asserted that the under-nourishment is due, in every case, to insufficient food. The majority of such cases are due to nervous depletion brought on by a hundred and one different causes. Grief, worry and excessive mental activity almost always leads to loss of weight. Sexual excesses and abuses lead to nervous depletion, digestive impairment and loss of weight. Indigestion, due to long continued over-eating, is a frequent cause of faulty nutrition. So, also, is a lack of sunshine. There are so many causes which are not considered in these laboratory experiments.

Trophology should consist of more than merely a consideration of foods, for a failure in any of the important nutritive factors will abort the health-building potentialities of the best of foods.

In the sick room, in the sanitarium, in all the departments of life, in every phase of health-disease, we do not deal in controlled experiments. Our subjects are not "controls." Our problems are not self-made. We have hundreds of factors and influences to consider that the laboratory man knows nothing of. The problems we are required to solve are as complex as his are simple. The problems increase in complexity as the age of our patient advances and his sphere of activity widens. We know, even if the cure-mongers and peddlers of diet-specifics do not, that the correction of the diet of a patient, however helpful this may prove, is almost never sufficient to restore sound, vigorous health.

Man is not what he eats any more than he is what the thinks. He is a complex product of heredity and environment and into his make-up there enter many different kinds and qualities of building stones. He is largely what he lives and what he fails to live. The man who said tell me what you eat and I'll tell you what you are did not know what he was talking about. He was as far wrong as was the man who declared that "as a man thinketh in his heart so is he." It is time we abandoned our one-sided views of our many sided lives. Life is too complex to be reduced to such simple formulae.

The search for diet-cures is part of man's age-long quest for a savior--something or some one to save him in his "sins" and not require him to give them up. Money grabbers who have piled up fortunes at the expense of those whom they have pillaged and impoverished, when their dissipations have wrecked their lives, imagine that money can buy health for them. Like the pair in the New Testament who tried to buy the "gift of the spirit," the truth is never pleasing to these men and women of the Croesus-complex, who think their money can command for them all that their hearts desire.

They exchange their loot for a "showy commercialized professionalism" which some graduate of a "class A" medical college palms off on them as knowledge and skill. From one dissapointment to another they turn until their sufferings are so great they can no longer bear them. Every savior having failed them, for every treatment they have received has made them worse; the yeast and diet cures have failed, the manipulations and elctrocutions have been all in vain, the serums and drugs have added to their miseries and the operations have increased their torments; they come, these scraps and derelicts, these wrecks and incurables, to the Hygienist and want to know "how long will it take you to cure me?" Imagine their surprise when they are informed that there are no cures, no saviors, and that they must forget their old faith in vicarious atonements and cease their "sinning."

"Doctor, if you can cure me you can name your own price." Yes indeed! But this calamity will never befall our race. The time will never come when cures will be produced; the discovery will never be made that will restore potency to the sensualist while permitting him to practice sensuality; that will sober up the inebriate while he continues to drink; that will save the gourmand while he continues to hog it. A body vitiated by indulgencies cannot possibly be restored to sound health so long as the indulgencies are continued.

A reasoned conception of law and order would save mankind from the pitfalls of false religion--theological or medical. There is too much of the Shaman in "modern religion;" too much of the medicine man in "modern medicine."

Beauty and ecstasy of life come from a clear mind and a healthy body. Plain, orderly, abstemious living and high thinking make life more beautiful and good and add to the joys of living. To abandon these for the flesh-pots of sensualism and then demand to be cured of the results while still in your "sins," while pleasing to 'the thoroughly commercialized professional healers, is a display of asinity rather than of wisdom and sound judgement.