There has always been a tendency for dietetic theorists to advocate the adoption of a fleshless diet. The proponents of this system have broken up into schools, the adherents of which differ in the fervor with which they espouse their cause. The most extreme of these are the enthusiasts of the fruit and nut diet (1), who experience esthetic pleasure in the thought that their foods grow and ripen away from contact with the soil and suggest, therefore, the purity and fragrance of orchard and forest, the poetic joy of summer and the inspiration of the rural landscape. Another group adopts the vegetarian diet because of an abhorrence of the idea of taking animal life for the sake of food. These two classes of vegetarians regard flesh as unwholesome as well as unethical, and defend with a number of arguments the view that meat eating tends to moral debasement and physical degeneration. The third group, the lacto-ovo-vegetarians, who permit the use of milk and eggs along with a diet otherwise vegetarian, is in general less extreme in its ardor for ethical considerations, and adheres to its tenets because of conviction that it makes for physical efficiency in a greater degree than does meat eating.