Water and blood 77 40 Myosin or gluten 19 7 Fat 3 1 Starch 0 50 Salt and other mineral mat. 1 2
“From which is deduced the fact, that ordinary flesh is about three times as rich in myosin or gluten as ordinary wheaten bread, or, in other words, a pound of beefsteak is as nutritious as three pounds of wheaten bread. In a second edition of Dr. Page’s book, we hope he will correct this great error.”
It should be stated that bread made from whole, _i.e._, unbolted and _unsifted_, meal, is much richer in gluten and certain invaluable salts, than shown in the figures here given.
Because the most careful observation on the part of intelligent and conscientious men who have had the best opportunities for ascertaining the relative merits of these two classes of foods, viz.: nutrients proper, and the stimulo-nutrients, or, in other words, foods which are naturally adapted to the human organism, and those substances (as, for example, the flesh of animals) which, along with a great deal of nourishment, contain elements which, being of an excretory and noxious character, _excite_ or _stimulate_ the organism, and are, consequently, to that degree injurious——because, I would repeat, the proof is, in my estimation, overwhelmingly in favor of vegetable food, more particularly the cereals and fruits, so far from contemplating the “correction of this great error,” I desire to reassert, most emphatically, as a fundamental truth in dietetics, and in no sense an error, that, pound for pound, the cereal grains are not only more nutritious (speaking of their effects upon the human organism) than flesh, but, physiologically speaking, they are free from the impurities which abound in the latter, and which are often rendered still more noxious by the presence of actual disease among animals _fattened_ for human food.