Medicine: All-Meat Controversy

Last August four physicians of the Russell Sage Institute at Bellevue Hospital, New York, announced after three months deliberation that Vilhjalmur Stefansson and Karsten Anderson, Arctic explorers, had not harmed themselves by living on an all-meat diet for one year and ten days. Said the physicians: “In general, white men, after they have become accustomed to the omission of other foods from their diet, may subsist on an exclusive meat diet in a temperate climate without damage to health or efficiency.” Said Meat-Eater Stefansson: “I am wide awake and am more aggressive in my work than I was before I started this test. . . . They [the vegetarians] are like religious fa natics. Eating vegetables and fruits is just like a form of religion.” Last week Dr. Louis Harry Newburgh of the University of Michigan’s Medical College, no fanatic, gave out a statement. He related an experiment he had conducted: a laboratory worker, fed a diet of 32% lean meat for a period of six months, developed nephritis (kidney in flammation). Concluded Dr. Newburgh: “The Stefansson test was not an all-meat diet, since only 20% was muscle fibre, or lean meat. The rest was animal fat. This Arctic diet had no more lean meat or protein than an ordinary diet. . . . Stefansson’s experiment cannot have any great significance.”