Builders of the body : or lessons on food values / by Eustace Miles ... and Mariella John.

  • Miles, Eustace, 1868-1948
Date:
[1910]
Catalogue details

Licence: In copyright

Credit: Builders of the body : or lessons on food values / by Eustace Miles ... and Mariella John. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    crusts of bread, and that you would enjoy them. This is real hunger, and the pleasure that you get by satisfying it is a healthy one, so long as you do not eat too fast. Then you have to repair the parts of your body which you have used up. Your body— as you will see directly—is rather like the fire- place in which a fire is burning, and the wood and coals that make the fire as well (Fig. 3). Your body needs not only its wood and coals, its fuel, which it can get from such foods as butter and potatoes, but also a new fireplace. Your body actually consumes its own fireplace, its own tissues, as they are called : these it can restore by such foods as beef, cheese, eggs, and haricot beans. That is what our body is doing. It is burning up its fuel (some of this is stored up as fat), and it is using up its tissues. We need materials for fuel and tissues. We need enough—perhaps just a little more than enough, so as to be on the safe side ; but we do not need far too much, taken—as so many people take food and make up their fires—in large masses thrown in anyhow. Now, is there any other reason why we should eat, besides this—to give our bodies fuel, which they, like engines, can turn into power and work, and to rebuild our bodies ? There is another reason why we should eat— or, rather, why we should drink. That is, in