Alcohol has no food worth and is exceedingly limited in its action as a remedial agent. Dr. Henry Monroe says, “every kind of substance utilized by man as food consists of sugar, starch, oil and glutinous matter mingled along in various proportions. These are designed for the support of the animal frame. The glutinous principles of food fibrine, albumen and casein are utilized to build up the structure whereas the oil, starch and sugar are chiefly used to generate heat in the body”.
Now it’s clear that if alcohol is a food, it will be found to contain a number of of those substances. There must be in it either the nitrogenous elements found chiefly in meats, eggs, milk, vegetables and seeds, out of that animal tissue is constructed and waste repaired or the carbonaceous elements found in fat, starch and sugar, in the consumption of that heat and force are evolved.
“The distinctness of these groups of foods,” says Dr. Hunt, “and their relations to the tissue-producing and warmth-evolving capacities of man, are thus definite and therefore confirmed by experiments on animals and by manifold tests of scientific, physiological and clinical expertise, that no try to discard the classification has prevailed. To draw thus straight a line of demarcation on limit the one entirely to tissue or cell production and the other to heat and force production through normal combustion and to deny any power of interchangeability under special demands or amid defective offer of 1 selection is, indeed, untenable. This doesn’t in the least invalidate the actual fact that we have a tendency to are able to use these as ascertained landmarks”.
How these substances when taken into the body, are assimilated and how they generate force, are well-known to the chemist and physiologist, who is in a position, in the sunshine of well-ascertained laws, to determine whether alcohol does or does not possess a food value. For years, the ablest men within the medical profession have given this subject the most careful study, and have subjected alcohol to each known take a look at and experiment, and the result is that it has been, by common consent, excluded from the class of tissue-building foods. “We tend to have never,” says Dr. Hunt, “seen however a single suggestion that it may so act, and this a promiscuous guess. One author (Hammond) thinks it possible that it might ’somehow’ enter into combination with the product of decay in tissues, and ‘under certain circumstances may yield their nitrogen to the development of new tissues.’ No parallel in organic chemistry, nor any evidence in animal chemistry, will be found to surround this guess with the areola of a attainable hypothesis”.
Dr. Richardson says: “Alcohol contains no nitrogen; it’s not one of the qualities of structure-building foods; it is incapable of being remodeled into any of them; it is, thus, not a food in any sense of its being a constructive agent in increase the body.” Dr. W.B. Carpenter says: “Alcohol cannot provide something that is crucial to the true nutrition of the tissues.” Dr. Liebig says: “Beer, wine, spirits, etc., furnish no element capable of coming into into the composition of the blood, muscular fibre, or any half that is that the seat of the principle of life.” Dr. Hammond, in his Tribune Lectures, in which he advocates the employment of alcohol in bound cases, says: “It is not demonstrable that alcohol undergoes conversion into tissue.” Cameron, in his Manuel of Hygiene, says: “There is nothing in alcohol with that any half of the body can be nourished.” Dr. E. Smith, F.R.S., says: “Alcohol is not a real food. It interferes with alimentation.” Dr. T.K. Chambers says: “It’s clear that we tend to must cease to regard alcohol, as in any sense, a food”.
“Not detecting in this substance,” says Dr. Hunt, “any tissue-creating ingredients, nor in its ending any combinations, like we can trace in the cell foods, nor any proof either in the experience of physiologists or the trials of alimentarians, it’s not wonderful that in it we tend to ought to realize neither the expectation nor the realization of constructive power.”
Not finding in alcohol anything out of that the body can be built up or its waste supplied, it is next to be examined as to its heat-manufacturing quality.
Production of heat.
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“The first usual test for a force-producing food,” says Dr. Hunt, “and that to which alternative foods of that class respond, is the production of heat in the mix of oxygen therewith. This heat means that vital force, and is, in no little degree, a live of the comparative worth of the so-called respiratory foods. If we examine the fats, the starches and also the sugars, we tend to will trace and estimate the processes by which they evolve heat and are changed into vital force, and will weigh the capacities of various foods. We have a tendency to notice {that the} consumption of carbon by union with oxygen is that the law, that heat is the merchandise, and {that the} legitimate result is force, whereas the result of the union of the hydrogen of the foods with oxygen is water. If alcohol comes in the slightest degree beneath this category of foods, we tend to rightly expect to search out a number of the evidences which attach to the hydrocarbons.”
What, then, is the results of experiments during this direction? They have been conducted through long periods and with the greatest care, by men of the highest attainments in chemistry and physiology, and also the result’s given in these few words, by Dr. H.R. Wood, Jr., in his Materia Medica. “No one has been able to detect within the blood any of the normal results of its oxidation.” That’s, nobody has been able to search out that alcohol has undergone combustion, like fat, or starch, or sugar, and thus given heat to the body.
Alcohol and reduction of temperature.
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instead of skyrocketing it; and it has even been utilized in fevers as an anti-pyretic. Thus uniform has been the testimony of physicians in Europe and America as to the cooling effects of alcohol, that Dr. Wood says, in his Materia Medica, “that it will not seem value whereas to occupy space with a discussion of the subject.” Liebermeister, one of the most learned contributors to Zeimssen’s Cyclopaedia of the Observe of Medication, 1875, says: “I long since convinced myself, by direct experiments, that alcohol, even in comparatively massive doses, does not elevate the temperature of the body in either well or sick people.” So well had this become known to Arctic voyagers, that, even before physiologists had demonstrated the actual fact that alcohol reduced, instead of skyrocketing, the temperature of the body, they’d learned that spirits lessened their power to withstand extreme cold. “In the Northern regions,” says Edward Smith, “it was proved that the whole exclusion of spirits was necessary, in order to retain heat underneath these unfavorable conditions.”
Alcohol does not build you strong.
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If alcohol does not contain tissue-building material, nor provide heat to the body, it cannot probably raise its strength. “Every quite power an animal will generate,” says Dr. G. Budd, F.R.S., “the mechanical power of the muscles, the chemical (or digestive) power of the stomach, the intellectual power of the brain accumulates through the nutrition of the organ on which it depends.” Dr. F.R. Lees, of Edinburgh, when discussing the query, and educing evidence, remarks: “From the very nature of things, it can now be seen how impossible it’s that alcohol will be strengthening food of either kind. Since it cannot become a part of the body, it cannot consequently contribute to its cohesive, organic strength, or fixed power; and, since it comes out of the body simply because it went in, it cannot, by its decomposition, generate heat force.”
Sir Benjamin Brodie says: “Stimulants do not produce nervous power; they merely enable you, as it were, to assign that that is left, and then they leave you additional in want of rest than before.”
Baron Liebig, therefore so much back as 1843, in his “Animal Chemistry,” identified the fallacy of alcohol generating power. He says: “The circulation will appear accelerated at the expense of the force obtainable for voluntary motion, however without the production of a greater amount of mechanical force.” In his later “Letters,” he once more says: “Wine is kind of superfluous to man, it is constantly followed by the expenditure of power” whereas, the 000 operate of food is to present power. He adds: “These drinks promote the change of matter within the body, and are, consequently, attended by an inward loss of power, that ceases to be productive, as a result of it’s not used in overcoming outward difficulties i.e., in working.” In different words, this great chemist asserts that alcohol abstracts the power of the system from doing helpful work in the field or workshop, in order to cleanse the house from the defilement of alcohol itself.
The late Dr. W. Brinton, Physician to St. Thomas’, in his nice work on Dietetics, says: “Careful observation leaves little doubt {that a} moderate dose of beer or wine would, in most cases, directly diminish the most weight that a healthy person could lift. Mental acuteness, accuracy of perception and delicacy of the senses are all thus so much opposed by alcohol, as that the maximum efforts of each are incompatible with the ingestion of any moderate amount of fermented liquid. One glass can often suffice to take the sting off both mind and body, and to reduce their capacity to something below their perfection of work.”
Dr. F.R. Lees, F.S.A., writing on the topic of alcohol as a food, makes the following quotation from an essay on “Stimulating Drinks,” revealed by Dr. H.R. Madden, as long ago as 1847: “Alcohol isn’t the natural stimulus to any of our organs, and hence, functions performed in consequence of its application, tend to debilitate the organ acted upon.
Alcohol is incapable of being assimilated or converted into any organic proximate principle, and hence, cannot be thought of nutritious.
The strength experienced after the use of alcohol isn’t new strength added to the system, however is manifested by calling into exercise the nervous energy pre-existing.
The ultimate exhausting effects of alcohol, due to its stimulant properties, produce an unnatural susceptibility to morbid action in all the organs, and this, with the plethora superinduced, becomes a fertile source of disease.
A one who habitually exerts himself to such an extent as to require the daily use of stimulants to chase away exhaustion, may be compared to a machine operating below high pressure. He can become abundant a lot of obnoxious to the causes of disease, and will definitely break down before he would have done underneath more favorable circumstances.
The additional frequently alcohol is had recourse to for the purpose of overcoming feelings of debility, the additional it can be needed, and by constant repetition a amount is at length reached when it cannot be foregone, unless reaction is simultaneously brought about by a short lived total modification of the habits of life.
Driven to the wall.
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Not finding that alcohol possesses any direct alimentary price, the medical advocates of its use have been driven to the idea that it is a reasonably secondary food, in that it’s the ability to delay the metamorphosis of tissue. “By the metamorphosis of tissue is supposed,” says Dr. Hunt, “that change which is continually occurring within the system which involves a constant disintegration of fabric; a breaking apart and avoiding of that that is no longer aliment, creating area for that new supply that is to sustain life.” Another medical author, in referring to this metamorphosis, says: “The importance of this process to the maintenance of life is instantly shown by the injurious effects that follow upon its disturbance. If the discharge of the excrementitious substances be in any approach impeded or suspended, these substances accumulate either in the blood or tissues, or both. In consequence of this retention and accumulation they become poisonous, and rapidly manufacture a derangement of the vital functions. Their influence is principally exerted upon the nervous system, through which they manufacture most frequent irritability, disturbance of the special senses, delirium, insensibility, coma, and at last, death.”
“This description,” remarks Dr. Hunt, “seems virtually meant for alcohol.” He then says: “To claim alcohol as a food because it delays the metamorphosis of tissue, is to claim that it in some method suspends the conventional conduct of the laws of assimilation and nutrition, of waste and repair. A number one advocate of alcohol (Hammond) thus illustrates it: ‘Alcohol retards the destruction of the tissues. By this destruction, force is generated, muscles contract, thoughts are developed, organs secrete and excrete.’ In different words, alcohol interferes with all these. No wonder the author ‘is not clear’ how it does this, and we tend to aren’t clear how such delayed metamorphosis recuperates.
Not an originator of vital force.
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that isn’t known to own any of the standard power of foods, and apply it to the double assumption that it delays metamorphosis of tissue, and that such delay is conservative of health, is to pass outside of the bounds of science into the land of remote possibilities, and confer the title of adjuster upon an agent whose agency is itself doubtful.
Having failed to spot alcohol as a nitrogenous or non-nitrogenous food, not having found it amenable to any of the evidences by which the food-force of aliments is mostly measured, it can not do for us to speak of profit by delay of regressive metamorphosis unless such method is accompanied with one thing evidential of the very fact something scientifically descriptive of its mode of accomplishment in the case at hand, and unless it is shown to be practically fascinating for alimentation.
There will be little doubt that alcohol will cause defects within the processes of elimination that are natural to the healthy body and that even in disease are typically conservative of health.
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