Reading Salisbury, Part 4: Two-Thirds Carnivorous

Designed to live upon

Thirteen pages in, Salisbury arrives at food, and he begins with a definition so plain it barely registers as an argument.

“Healthy Alimentation is the feeding upon that or those kinds of food which any given animal organism is designed to live upon, as indicated by the structure and functions of its digestive apparatus. Unhealthy Alimentation is the feeding upon food which the digestive organs cannot readily and perfectly digest.”

Then the examples a farmer would give. “We should not for a moment think of feeding our cattle, horses and sheep upon lean and fat meats, neither do we expect to feed cats and dogs upon hay, corn and oats. If we should attempt any such digression, we should very soon have all these animals diseased.” Nobody disputes this about a horse. The question is only whether anyone has looked at the human digestive apparatus with the same lack of sentiment they bring to a barn.

He then makes a point that reads like a footnote. Because the horse, the ox, and the rabbit are built to eat one thing and the cat and dog another, “experiments performed with food upon the horse, ox or rabbit, cannot in their result be applied either to the dog and cat, or to man. In experimenting in this direction, each class must stand alone.”

Twenty-five years after he wrote that, a Russian pathologist fed cholesterol to rabbits, watched their arteries clog, and launched the idea that dietary fat causes heart disease in humans. The rabbits were herbivores. They had never eaten cholesterol in the history of their species and had no machinery for handling it. The experiment that would eventually put a pyramid on the side of the cereal box and take the butter off the table was, by Salisbury’s standard, invalid before it started. He had warned against exactly this in 1888, and nobody was listening by 1913.

Two-thirds

Then the sentence the rest of the book stands on:

“By structure, man is about two-thirds carnivorous and one-third herbivorous. In his native, wild state he feeds mainly upon game and fish, with much less than one-third of vegetable products.”

Not entirely carnivorous. Salisbury was not what would now be called a carnivore; he was arguing for a ratio, roughly two parts meat to one part plant, and the plant third he had in mind was not bread. The chapters ahead will say precisely what he thought the third should be. For now the claim is about structure: look at the teeth, the stomach, the length of the gut, and a human being is built mostly, though not only, to eat animals.

That is a reading of anatomy, and anatomists have argued about it since.

The diseases that arrive with civilization

In the wild state, Salisbury says, man “is free from most of our fatal diseases, such as Consumption, Bright’s Disease, Diabetes, Locomotor Ataxy, Paralysis, Fatty diseases of vital organs, Tumors, and the various forms of Cancer.” These reach him only “when he comes in contact with our much lauded civilization, a civilization full of ‘shirking responsibility,’ of sin and of the causes of disease.”

Two different claims are in that paragraph.

The first is the claim about chronic disease, and it has held up remarkably well. For a century after Salisbury, physicians and explorers who spent time with peoples still eating their traditional diets kept reporting the same thing: no diabetes, no heart disease to speak of, almost no cancer, good teeth, and a swift decline in all of it within a generation of the arrival of flour and sugar. The literature on what came to be called the diseases of civilization is large, and it keeps saying what Salisbury said in a sentence. Bright’s disease is kidney failure; fatty diseases of vital organs are what a modern chart calls fatty liver and the rest; the names have changed and the list has not.

The second claim, in the same paragraph, is that wild man is also “exempt from most infectious complaints, such as Smallpox, Measles, Scarlet Fever, Diphtheria,” and that these too arrive with civilization. The observation is correct and the implied reason is wrong. Isolated peoples were free of smallpox because they had never met it, not because of what they ate, and when civilization brought it to them it killed them in numbers that had nothing to do with their diet and everything to do with never having been exposed. Salisbury, with his private theory of germs, folded the two kinds of disease together. The chronic ones follow the food. The infectious ones follow the people carrying them.

The people who made themselves herbivorous

He then turns to “individuals, as well as nations, who have made themselves herbivorous,” by which he means the long vegetarian traditions of parts of Asia, and here the physiology goes badly wrong. In such people, he says, “the pyloric valve is paralyzed and remains permanently open,” so that plant food passes straight through to be digested lower down. There is no such thing. The pylorus does not paralyze itself in response to lentils.

The evidence he offers for their lesser endurance is an anecdote: “Officers of the English army in India, for example, assure me that it is always necessary to start the native troops off on a march one day in advance of the British soldiers, that all may arrive at a given point on the same day.” That is an anecdote from the officers of an occupying army about the men they commanded, repeated by a man who had never been to India, and it is worth exactly that much. Whether a traditional vegetarian diet costs a person strength and stamina is a real question with a real literature. This paragraph is not part of it.

A hundred and ninety-three

Then Salisbury does what he does whenever he gets excited, which is to reach for a number he cannot support.

In the wild state, he says, “death is seldom brought about by disease, but is usually the resultant of accident or of old age.” He has known “many North American Indians of temperate habits, who were hale, hearty and straight as an arrow, when over one hundred years old.” In 1860 he was called to see the wife of a prominent chief, ill with pneumonia at a hundred and four; her husband, a hundred and six, was “erect and vigorous, appearing no older than a civilized man of sixty.” In Central America, he reports, a man “is known to be over one hundred and fifty, and is supposed to be nearly two hundred years old.” And in a footnote, with a straight face: “In Rio de Janeiro there is a Spanish physician, a meat-eater, who is now one hundred and ninety-three years of age, and who is yet quite strong and active, mentally and physically.”

No human being has ever been documented past a hundred and twenty-two. Claims of extreme age among peoples without birth records are one of the oldest errors in the study of health, and they are almost always wrong for the same reason: nobody knows when the old man was born, including the old man. Salisbury wanted it to be true, and so a chief who was perhaps eighty and looked sixty became a hundred and six, and a rumor from Rio became a footnote in a medical text.

Strip the numbers out and look at what he actually saw. He saw old people, among a people eating meat and fish, who were upright and vigorous and not dying of the things his own patients were dying of. That is a real observation, and later and more careful observers made the same one. The pattern that keeps recurring in this book recurs here: the thing he noticed was true, and the thing he said about it was not, and the second buried the first.

The book of Nature

Then he turns to the civilized reader.

“There is no reason why we of civilized communities should not live to an even greater age than man does in the wild state, if we would but avoid the causes of the fatal diseases previously enumerated. These causes are simple ones, and have their origin in our daily habits of living; in the cultivated tastes for unnatural nutriment, preparations and drinks.” And then: “All of these may be readily avoided if we will but read a few plain lessons from the book of Nature, ever open before us.”

Simple causes. Daily habits. Cultivated tastes. The book of Nature, open, unread. He is not asking anyone to go back to the wild state. He is saying that a civilized man can have the medicine and the roof and the library and still eat like the creature he is, and that if he does, he gets the best of both.

Dickinson, who read that book more closely than almost anyone, ended a poem on it with a confession:

Nature is what we know –
Yet have no art to say –
So impotent Our Wisdom is
To her Simplicity.

Thoreau, for the record, would have argued with Salisbury here, and it would have been a good argument. In the chapter of Walden called “Higher Laws” he admits that he found animal food unclean and expected humanity to outgrow it: “I have no doubt that it is a part of the destiny of the human race, in its gradual improvement, to leave off eating animals.” He also lived at the pond largely on rice, rye meal, and molasses, and he was dead of consumption at forty-four. Salisbury, who spent his career on consumption and thought it began at the table, lived to eighty-one. That proves nothing by itself. It is simply the record.

First foods

The second half of the chapter is about infants and mothers, and it begins with an indictment that could be reprinted in a pediatrics journal.

“An infant is not a week old, before it is ‘dosed’ almost perpetually with anise and ‘catnip’ teas for its acid stomach, its severe colic pains, and vomiting sour and curdled milk. The child is not a day old before it is over and unnaturally fed. It is fed too frequently, too much at a time, and often with food that no infant stomach could digest.”

The remedy is mother’s milk, in small amounts, at regular intervals of about three hours, and nothing else. No “panadas,” no cracker or sago preparations, no sweetened milk and water. Fed that way, “the child will be and continue free from pain and all dyspeptic trouble, and will thrive, sleep, eat and be happy.”

Then the rule for what comes next, read off the body. “This kind of feeding should be persevered in till Nature holds out the sign for the gradual introduction of lean meats into the dietetic list. This moment is indicated by the gradual development of the meat teeth. With the first appearance of the incisors, beef tea and the juice of beef may be introduced, and finally beefsteak and other lean meats may be partaken of with the milk. Starchy and other vegetable products and fruits should not enter the diet list until the vegetable teeth, or grinders, begin to show themselves.”

Meat first, when the front teeth come. Starch last, when the molars do. The teeth tell you.

For most of the twentieth century American babies were started on the opposite schedule: rice cereal first, as early as possible, with meat held back for months as too heavy for a small stomach. That was not ancient practice. It was a mid-century convention, and it has quietly reversed. Pediatric guidance in the United States now lists meat among the recommended first foods, specifically for the iron and zinc a breastfed infant runs short of around six months. Nobody announced that Salisbury had been right. The advice simply came back around to where he had left it, by way of a seventy-year detour through the cereal aisle.

Two parts to one

For the mother, during pregnancy, the ratio appears again. “The diet should be about two parts of lean meats, either broiled or roasted, to one part of vegetable food and fruits. The fruit should be used sparingly, and only after breakfast or dinner. Exercise should be taken freely and daily in the open air, and all excitements, sudden surprises, severe work, and over-exertion should be avoided.” Followed through pregnancy, he says, this makes labor easier and reduces the danger afterward. The same diet continues through nursing, which “should continue about twelve months.”

Two parts meat, one part plant, fruit sparingly and after a meal rather than instead of one, outside every day. The whole of his dietary advice for a healthy adult is in that paragraph, addressed to an expectant mother, two hundred pages before he gets around to stating it for everyone else.

Warm milk and cold

The chapter ends with the stockbreeders.

After weaning, cow’s milk replaces mother’s milk, and Salisbury wants it “taken so soon as milked, while it is still warm and full of animal life and heat.” He insists that “the difference between milk alive and warm from the cow, and cold, dead milk, is fully understood by breeders of fine stock,” who know that a calf allowed to suckle its mother “is more than three times the size, when a year old, than one of the same age and breed which has been fed on cold, dead milk.” The suckled calf is “large, robust, trim and elegant in shape”; the bucket calf is “pot-bellied, pointed at both ends, ungainly in shape, small.”

The phrase “animal life and heat” is vitalism, the same invisible fluid that was running through the magnetic palms two chapters ago, and it explains nothing. A calf at its mother’s side and a calf fed from a bucket differ in a dozen ways besides the temperature of the milk. And the milk of 1888 killed children; tuberculosis and other infections passed through it freely, and the pasteurization Salisbury never saw is one of the plainest reasons infant mortality fell in the century after him. Whatever the merits of fresh milk for a calf, nobody should read this page as instruction for a baby.

What survives is the last paragraph. “This fact should impart a valuable lesson to those interested in rearing children, and by taking advantage of the stockbreeder’s knowledge, show them how they may gradually develop a higher and more perfect physical and mental type of the human organism.”

The stockbreeder’s knowledge. A man who raised cattle for a living knew more about how to feed a young mammal than the physicians of the day did, because he had to; his calves were his income, and a pot-bellied calf was money lost. He did not have a theory. He had results, and he had been getting them for a thousand years. Salisbury, the chemist and microscopist with the letters after his name, is telling doctors to go ask the farmer. It is the same instruction as the book of Nature, ever open, in a plainer coat.

Read along

The book is in the public domain, and the Internet Archive has the complete scan free of charge, in PDF, EPUB, and plain text:

The Relation of Alimentation and Disease (Internet Archive)

Part 5 takes Chapters IV and V together, Healthy Alimentation and Unhealthy Alimentation, where Salisbury says what the plant third is allowed to be, what happens in the gut when it isn’t, and why he believed that eating well is not only prevention but cure.