Amongst these latter, many would not dare to drug themselves with a
 centigramme of pharmaceutic caffeine, whereas they absorb each day gr.
 5 and more, of its homologous constituents.

Therefore, in the same way as chocolate, tea and coffee, meat has a stimulating effect on the system.  He who is accidentally deprived of it finds that he experiences a passing depression.  This obviously proves that by the exaggerated use of meat, one drugs and doctors oneself without discernment.  However this may be, the judicious part played by meat must apparently be reduced to that of a condiment food destined to produce in a measure the whipping-up which is useful, and sometimes indispensable to the system.  We cannot here discuss the expediency of action and the harmlessness of the dose of substances reputed stimulating.  But one can ask oneself whether, to attain this object of stimulation, carnivorous feeding is indispensable, and if vegetarianism could not supply the need.

The reply is easy:  the vegetable kingdom disposes of a variety of stimulating articles, such as tea, coffee, kola and cocoa.  Through their active substances these foods are nerve tonics of the first order, less dangerous in their use than meat, because more easily assimilated, of far more continuous effects, less mixed with other substances, sometimes noxious, and consequently more measurable.  Besides, in pulse food, quantities of purins are found as important as in meat.  If the part they play has not been systematically studied from the point of view of their effects on the nervous organism, they still give rise to the same terminal products, such as uric acid.  One can quite well argue that the pulse purins have physiological effects comparable to those of meat purins.  On the other hand, vegetable purins have the considerable advantage of being less easily precipitated in the urine, after the human interorganic metabolism, than those resulting from the metabolism of flesh material.

This explains why a frequent use of a vegetable diet offers appreciable advantages in the amelioration of arthritic diatheses so common amongst us.  Certain effects observed in these diatheses arise from the purins, from their localisation in the system, and their vitiated metabolism.  The use of a moderate vegetable diet is the best means of treatment in order to relieve, to ameliorate, even to cure, arthritic diathesis.

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