K.V. Iyer on Diet and Health

Kolar Venkatesh Iyer, or K. V. Iyer (1897-1980), is one of the most fascinating Indian physical culturists of the twentieth century. Someone I have studied quite a bit in my own career, Iyer was a well-known figure in India, the United States, and Europe. Often submitting images of himself to physical culture magazines, Iyer struck up a series of friendships with well-known individuals like John Grimek and Mark Berry.

Iyer’s system, as he well documented, was a mixture of traditional yoga practices alongside systems from European figures like Eugen Sandow. I’ve included Iyer’s thoughts on diet here predominantly because he was a vegetarian bodybuilder during the 1930s and 1940s so we can get a sense of what avoiding meat as a lifter meant during that period.

Enjoy!

Once again, cringing under your eye, non-human engine alongside the human worker, my assertion that the working, cleaning up, cooling-down, and fueling of an engine correspond to exercising, the bath, the repose, and the feeding of the human body, recalls my statement that ‘Whilst the engine is at best itself in efficiency after its work, the human is bigger and stronger for his. This difference in the after-work-cleaning-rest-fueling condition in size and efficiency between man and engine lies in that, whilst fueling but just supplies material to the engine to refit it to turn out its limited amount of work, the feeding of the exercised human helps not only to make good broken down tissue but also builds up more tissue assuring greater turn-out of future work by the now bigger-built muscles. Hence it is obvious that the dieting of the Physical Culturist which spells but the supply of material to replenish tissue lost through exercise and tissue to be built for development must be based on the selection of such and only such food-stuff as by its ingredients contains all the elements identical with those that made up the human muscle-tissue before exercise broke it down.

Average man feeds and drinks but to appease a gnawing stomach and allay a burning throat and tongue, little caring for the nature of the solid and the liquid he consumes so long as these are as palatable and non-injurious as he can command for the moment. But in muscle-building, an identity of food and drink ingested, with the human muscle to be built, in point of chemical constitution is imperative, and it behooves the Culturist to inform himself of the chemical components that make up the human muscle in general to help him select such food-stuff as, on absorption, will make up for the tissue he lost through exercise and also effect a growth of the muscle, at a rate, I estimate, at a sixteenth of an inch for every twenty-four hours passed in exercise, bath, and repose, provided the pupil is not past his prime.

The human muscle, physiologist will have us know, is three-quarters of it just water; the solid quarter, seventy-five percent of itself containing Protein, seventeen percent Fat and insoluble Sugar, and eight percent of Phosphatic Salts. In selecting food as identical in constitution with the above as practicable, the fifteen percent of Protein in meat, whilst qualifying as food for our Culturist gives us over twice too much of Fat besides burdening the human alimentary system with thirty-two percent of Refuse-and ashy-matter to be ingested and excreted with no profit to the body and wasteful indent on body and wasteful indent on bodily energy. Thus, “GIVES US THIS DAY OUR DAILY BREAD” when answered only with bread will find the absorbed bread crediting the Culturist’s muscle directly with no more than a modicum of the five percent that Fat and Carbo-hydrate find place in the human muscle, the soupçon of the Gluten in the bread hardly coping with the fifteen percent Protein-demand of the muscle. Pitching vegetables against meat, we find beans, ‘Kidney’, Single’, or ‘Double’, laden with half as much again of protein contents as the muscle wants, meager of water which a draught can amend and Carbohydrates enough to supply the muscle adequately can yet spare enough sugar to generously contribute to the human granary of sugar-supply. Glycogenising Liver, and no refuse-matter to prey upon alimentary energy.

I am mentioning this at the risk of drawing around my head a veritable nest of hornets in the shape of vegetarian and non-vegetarian faddists stinging me to land myself within a maze of dietetic controversies; and my having in all my life never partaken of flesh, fish, fowl, or egg, might stigmatize me as an insufferable dogmatizer forcing my fad down the throats of my pupils. With Tolerance the keynote of outlook on life and the living world around me, it is late you have to concede in the day of my life to force any personal fad or penchant of mine on my fellow-creatures. When I have told you what the muscle you want to grow is made up of and hence wants as diet to grow bigger, I have told enough. It is up to you and you alone to make your free choice from the list of diets, vegetable or animal, my course will open to you, to suit your own taste and sentiment without weakening in the least the only bond that will link you and me: MUSCLE CULT. Seriousness apart, any burning curiosity of your regarding my weakness for spinach and spud, I can only allay at the risk of rousing your risible. I have always wondered why meat-eaters slaughter for their food only animals which themselves are vegetarians. Arguing, flippantly I know, Panther-soup, Filleted-Shark Roast-Lion, Tiger-Cutlets, Coyote-Curry, and Wolf-Pudding should, one would think, rationally make up the menu of the would-be strong man. But carnivore-man, except the cannibal, has ever been marking down herbivorous animals for his food, for the reason I take it of the guarantee of the wholesomeness that a grass-and-greens-fed animal’s meat holds out, as against carnivore-meat, built of flesh, fresh or foul, healthy or putrefying, wholesome or diseased and vermin-sodden. My personal adherence to vegetable food with the single exception of milk, cow’s milk well boiled, I attribute to my whimsical avidity to satisfy to myself, that of my muscles I have worked up and weaned from their erstwhile stringiness to their present lissome litheness and bulging bulk, not one fibre of them was at an time, part of the rump of an ox, the shoulder of a sheep, the breast of a fowl or the middle piece of a fish!

Source: KV Iyer, Muscle Cult (1930)