And even more excerpts from “Shall We Eat Flesh?” Rational Living Library, B. Liber 1934

What proofs have you personally of the harmlessness of a vegetarian diet for the health of large numbers of people?

Harmlessness? It would be more correct to say usefulness or superiority. I cannot help repeating that during thirty years of a busy medical practice in New York, with over a hundred and fifty thousand consultations, not to speak of previous years and of my experience outside my practice, I have come in contact with tens of thousands of cases of disease where the discontinuance of meat-eating has been undoubtedly directly responsible for a healing or an improvement of the condition. And that is no exaggeration, as I have studied my cases closely, taking notes and figures concerning them. Of the hundreds of vegetarian---mostly lacto-vegetarian---children who have passed through my hands, I have followed many almost from babyhood to adult age. Most of them were children of vegetarian parents. Some were vegetarians by themselves. All of these children have become young men and women, physically healthier than the average, mentally bright, happy, almost always taller, stronger, better built than their parents and than other members of their families. During their childhood they were almost free from the common diseases and, when ill, had but little trouble in getting rid of their ailments. They certainly are the flower of humanity.

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The large and successful vegetarian co-operative fruit and vegetable producing colony “Eden” near Oranienburg, Germany (not far from Berlin) was 36 years old at the advent of Nazism. It was one of the rare places in Germany where meat, alcoholic beverages and tobacco could not be obtained. There was no church and no policeman. They had co-operative stores and a co-operative fruit cannery. The land belonged to the colony. It could neither be bought nor sold by individual colonists. The worker on the land received the full product of his toil. The hundreds of children raised there were in good health and normal in every respect. The vegetarian community was particularly proud of its Kindergarten, “Vegetarische Kinderheim.” It differed from other places of this sort “in that the children had more freedom; that they were treated kindly and individually; that they were most of the time in the open, in contact with nature; that, while playing farmers, they grew up to be real farmers, that they ate vegetarian food which they helped their teacher-friend to prepare.”

"Shall We Eat Flesh?" Rational Living Library, B. Liber 1934
Benzion Liber, M.D., Professor Emeritus of Psychiatry at New York. Born in 1875, Liber was a Romanian Jewish Socialist, nicknamed "The People's Doctor" who worked at the Polyclinic Hospital and was a practicing physician in New York since 1904.