Diet & Health

Every moving thing that liveth shall be meat for you; even as the green herb have I given you all things.--Genesis 9:3

Ever since the days described in Genesis, some men have liked meat and others have shunned it with loathing (besides uncounted millions who eat none because they can get none). The roll of prominent vegetarians includes such diverse figures as Gandhi and Shelley, George Bernard Shaw and Gloria Swanson. Though all vegetarians are sure they are healthier than carnivores, and hope to live longer, medical science has had few facts on which to base a comparison. Working toward a Harvard degree in public health, Dr. Mervyn G. Hardinge has now collected more facts.

Vegetarians, Dr. Hardinge found, have to be divided into two major classes: moderates (officially known as lacto-ovo-vegetarians), who will use milk and eggs but no flesh, fish or fowl, and purists, who exclude milk and eggs. He chose 86 moderates--some adults in the upper age brackets, some adolescents and some pregnant women. Pure vegetarians are so rare that Dr. Hardinge could find only 25 adults (none of them pregnant) and one adolescent for his study. Then he picked 88 normal, omnivorous neighbors for comparison, and went to work on weights and measurements, blood pressure, blood analyses and a detailed check for physical disorders connected with diet. His major findings:

P:Vegetarians, especially the "pure" kind, are so diet-conscious that they nearly always get the right amounts of all the food elements, including protein (which the moderates get from eggs, and the nuts from nuts). With milk and eggs, a vegetarian diet is fine for growing youths and expectant mothers.

P:Raised as such from the cradle, vegetarians grow as tall as anybody else.

P:The moderate adult vegetarians and meat-eaters averaged 12 to 15 lbs. overweight; the simon-pures ran about eight pounds underweight.

P:Blood pressure and most of the chemicals in the blood average almost the same in all three groups. However, moderate vegetarians have a little less cholesterol in their blood than meat-eaters, and pure vegetarians have strikingly less. (This might mean something if doctors can ever figure out the tie-up between cholesterol and heart-and-artery disease.)

Dr. Hardinge could come to no conclusion as to whether his vegetarian subjects are going to live longer than their fellows. He could not even tell whether they get as many colds. But the vegetarians are at least as healthy as their kin who spend a lot of money for steak. One likely reason appears in Dr. Hardinge's study: vegetable-eaters spend so much time working in their gardens.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.