HOW ALCOHOL RETARDS DIGESTION.

And here, so as to administer those that aren't at home with, the method of digestion, a transparent plan of that vital operation, and also the impact created once alcohol is loving food, we have a tendency to quote from the lecture of associate English doc, Dr. Henry Monroe, on "The Physiological Action of Alcohol." He says: "Every reasonably substance used by man as food consists of sugar, starch, oil and gummy matters, mingled along in numerous proportions; these square measure designed for the support of the animal frame. The gummy principles of food fibrine, albumen and casein square measure used to make up the structure; whereas the oil, starch and sugar square measure principally accustomed generate heat within the body. "The opening of the organic {process|biological process} process is that the breaking apart of the food within the mouth by means that of the jaws and teeth. On this being done, the saliva, a sticky liquor, is poured into the mouth from the secretion glands, and because it mixes with the food, it performs a really vital half within the operation of digestion, rendering the starch of the food soluble, and bit by bit dynamical it into a kind of sugar, when that the opposite principles become a lot of compatible with it. Nearly a pint of spittle is appointed each time unit for the utilization of associate adult. once the food has been masticated and mixed with the spittle, it's then passed into the abdomen, wherever it's acted upon by a juice secreted by the filaments of that organ, and poured into the abdomen in massive quantities whenever food comes up-to-date with its mucose coats. It consists of a dilute acid known to the chemists as acid, composed of H and gas, united along in sure definite proportions. The digestive fluid contains, also, a peculiar organic-ferment or moldering substance, containing N one thing of the character of yeast termed pepsine , that is definitely soluble within the acid simply named. That digestive fluid acts as a straightforward chemical solvent, is proven by the actual fact that, when death, it's been known to dissolve the abdomen itself." It is a blunder to suppose that, when an honest dinner, a glass of spirits or brew assists digestion; or that any liquor containing alcohol even bitter can in any means assist digestion. combine some bread and meat with stomachic juice; place them during a ampule, and keep that ampule during a sand-bath at the slow heat of ninety eight degrees, often shaking briskly the contents to imitate the motion of the stomach; you may notice, when six or eight hours, the total contents blending into one pultaceous mass. If to a different ampule of food and digestive fluid, treated within the same means, I add a glass of ale or a amount of alcohol, at the tip of seven or eight hours, or maybe some days, the food is scarcely acted upon the least bit. this is often a fact; and if you're semiconductor diode to raise why, I answer, as a result of alcohol has the peculiar power of with chemicals touching or moldering the digestive fluid by causative one in every of its principal constituents, viz., pepsine, rendering its solvent properties a lot of less efficacious. thence alcohol can't be thought-about either as food or as a solvent for food. Not because the latter actually, for it refuses to act with the digestive fluid. "'It could be a outstanding truth,' says Dr. Dundas Thompson, 'that alcohol, once accessorial to the digestive juice, produces a white precipitate, in order that the fluid is not any longer capable of digesting animal or matter.' 'The use of alcoholic stimulants,' say Drs. Todd and expert, 'retards digestion by coagulating the pepsine, a necessary part of the digestive fluid, and thereby busybodied with its action. Were it not that wine and spirits square measure chop-chop absorbed, the introduction of those into the abdomen, in any amount, would be an entire bar to the digestion of food, because the pepsine would be precipitated from the answer as quickly because it was fashioned by the abdomen.' Spirit, in any amount, as a dietary adjunct, is pernicious on account of its antiseptic qualities, that resist the digestion of food by the absorption of water from its particles, in direct antagonism to chemical operation."