THE WATER OF LIFE - Thought for Food

except vegetarians (unless they died before the age when cancer is
usually said to develop) would, without exception, succumb to its
ravages. Moreover some non meat‐eaters have and do die of cancer.
"Well, at any rate," rejoin the vegetarians, meat‐eatinig favours disease
in the human body, and as Sir Arbuthnot Lane maintained, cancer
cannot develop in a healthy organism. If a man who has been for a long
time a vegetarian suddenly starts to eat meat, disturbances ensue. The
case may be quoted of a vegetarian who averred that there must be
some animal fat in a certain brand of rather unusual‐tasting biscuits,
because whenever he had consumed one, he noticed that there
followed a slight attack of fever. Maybe; but as against that, I could
quote the case of a young man who, having over a long period lived on
a diet which included meat but excluded pastries and chocolates,
developed boils and a skin eruption as soon as he ate those aliments.
From this I might agree, if so minded, that as pastries and chocolates
produced these disturbances and favoured disease, they were the
cause of cancer! Just as at one time some people believed that
tomatoes were its cause.
The truth is that wishful thinking has played as much part in the
question of malignancy as it has in other vexed questions. Vegetarians
want to believe that meateating "is the root of all evil" and so pounce
upon it as the cause of malignancy and a host of other ailments. But if
we bring commonsense into the matter another explanation appears to
be far more reasonable. Sensible vegetarians live on a less de‐natured
diet than do the generality of meat‐eaters and hence are less likely to
develop cancer. On the other hand, those " unscientific " vegetarians
who live mostly on macaroni, starch‐foods boiled instead of steamed
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