Digestion and indigestion : proper and improper feeding in health and disease / by A. Lockhart Gillespie.

  • Gillespie Alexander Lockhart, 1865-1904.
Date:
1896
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Digestion and indigestion : proper and improper feeding in health and disease / by A. Lockhart Gillespie. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by the Royal College of Physicians of Edinburgh. The original may be consulted at the Royal College of Physicians of Edinburgh.

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    imtler the circumstances. Such a diet, however, would be fixr too monotonous, and the capiicious human appetite would soon fail. Nature’s laboratory is so fashioned that an excess of one class compensates for a defect in another. One class is built up in the body from the others, another is formed through another’s splitting. FOOD PRINCIPLES. Let us now look more closely but briefly into the essential principles of food. (1) fFaier.—Water forms from 60 to 70 per cent, of the body, enters into the composition of every tissue, and plays an important part in all the changes by which life is maintained. The enamel of the teeth contains the smallest quantity of water, only 2 per thousand, the muscles or flesh as much as 757 parts in every thousand, while the sweat and the saliva are composed of 995 parts of water in each thousand. Water acts as a solvent in digestion, and is a constituent of every tissue. An adult takes, as a rule, about four pints of water in and with his food each day, and excretes about four and a half pints during the same length of time, the extra half-pint arising from chemical processes in the body. Water increases tissue changes, facilitates the getting rid of waste products, and thereby increases the appetite. If too little water be taken, as is frequently the case in women who are afraid of becoming stout, the w^aste products are not removed in sufficient quantity, they accumulate in the system, and gradual loss of appetite and ill-health results. (2) Albuminous Foods.— Albuminous food, such as the white of an egg, which is almost solely made up of pure albumin, or the lean of meat, forms the most important class. The body can be nourished on albuminous food alone if water and some mineral salts be present. It enters into the formation of every cell, can form both fats and sugars in the body, and is one of the sources of energy whereby we move and live. All albuminous bodies contain an element called nitrogen, which is indispensable in the body. Neither fats nor sugars contain this element. The albumins in the body exist in two forms, that which is fixed in the tissues and that which is contained in the blood and other fluid media. The first form is little aflected in the daily