A very interesting experiment was done in South Africa by Prof. B. Meyer of the University of Pretoria, whose results were published in the South Africa Medical Journal of February 20, 1971.
Dr. Meyer set out to prove that humans could not live on a fruitarian diet of fruit and nuts alone.
The experiment lasted six months. The control group would continue on a "normal" diet. The experimental group, under controlled conditions, ate only fresh raw fruit and nuts (also botanically classified as fruit).
What happened? At the end of six months, the control group, who had various diseases, had gotten worse. Meanwhile, the experimental group, who were supposed to be wasting away, had become virtually disease-free!
Dr. Meyer made various tests of their health, and could find no deficiency of protein or vitamin B-12 or anything else. In fact, everyone was in superb health.
Then the professor was in for another surprise. The participants in the experimental group refused to give up the diet! He'd supposed that they'd be anxious to return to "normal" foods, but they said that they actually felt better and more vital and alive than they had in their youth and that nothing would tear them away from this diet.
A typical response is the following: "On the fruit diet one develops a totally different approach to life. One can throw away saucepans and the stove. I have done with them now. Fresh, ripe fruit is far too delicious."
Another: "You can count on it that I would not exchange my new eating habits for anything in the world."
What would prompt people to say such things?
As T. C. Fry and others have argued so eloquently, fruit is our natural diet. But the question is: How can we really know that?
T. C. said to imagine ourselves in a state of nature, which we lived in for some 60 or 70 million years or so while developing as primates. Imagine: We have no tools, no containers, no medicines, no books, no watch, no medical instruments, no pots and pans, no cooking, no fire. Just our natural state, as we are.
Would we want to take a rabbit into our hands and crush it to death, then bite into the fur to reach the raw meat, smear blood on our face and so on? Would we enjoy that? Does that sound like us?
Yet if we watch a film of true carnivores, such as lions or tigers or wolves, etc., we see that they love to eat their natural food. They're biting with their sharp teeth into their prey, fur and blood and all, and loving it. That's what nature designed them for. Perhaps that's why their hydrochloric acid is 10 times stronger than ours.
Would we try to get under cows or sheep or horses and so on and try to suckle from them? Hardly. No animal in nature suckles past the age of weaning, because then milk is no longer its natural food.
Are we root grubbers? Root grubbers have snouts, and claws for digging in the earth. Does that describe us? Without tools, we humans have a very hard time digging in the earth. And raw roots with dirt on them don't really appeal to us. Neither their color, texture nor smell really appeals to us.
What about herbiage? Are we herbivores? Is our natural food stalks and weeds and leaves and so forth?
Consider that true herbivores have four stomachs, so that they can break down cellulose and derive energy from it. We can't do that. So in our case, it costs us more energy to digest herbiage than we derive from it. Thus herbiage cannot be our natural food, because we wouldn't derive enough energy.
What about fruits? Are we natural frugivores? Consider in a state of nature how fruits would stand out. Their bright colors and wonderful smell would appeal to our senses. Their sweetness would satisfy the natural "sweet tooth" which nature gave us to seek out "sweets."
And look at our flexible hands with opposable thumbs. They seem built for reaching out and grasping fruit.
There's a reason for all this: Fruits were expressly designed by certain plants to appeal to the senses and tastes of certain animals—so that the new life of the plant, the seed or seeds of the fruit, would be discarded somewhere away from the mother plant.
Plants want us to eat their fruit; they designed it for that purpose. This is the only food of which that is true, making fruit the only truly "non-violent" food.
And our bodies, over some 60 or 70 million years, perfectly adapted to this diet. In fact, Alan Walker of John Hopkins, as reported in the New York Times of May 15, 1979, proved (using an electron microscope) that proto-humans were exclusively fruitarians until the advent of the Ice Ages some million or so years ago.
Thus fruit and nuts seem to be our natural food in nature. But what about now, in civilization?
This is Part 1 of a 2-part article. (Go to Part 2.)
—jim sloman, for 5/19/02
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