Alcohol has no food worth and is exceedingly restricted in its action as a remedial agent. Dr. Henry Monroe says, “every quite substance utilized by man as food consists of sugar, starch, oil and glutinous matter mingled together in numerous proportions. These are designed for the support of the animal frame. The glutinous principles of food fibrine, albumen and casein are employed to make up the structure whereas the oil, starch and sugar are chiefly used to get heat within the body”.
Currently it’s clear that if alcohol is a food, it will be found to contain a number of of these substances. There should 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 parts found in fat, starch and sugar, within the consumption of which heat and force are evolved.
“The distinctness of those teams of foods,” says Dr. Hunt, “and their relations to the tissue-manufacturing and warmth-evolving capacities of man, are therefore definite and thus confirmed by experiments on animals and by manifold tests of scientific, physiological and clinical expertise, that no attempt to discard the classification has prevailed. To draw therefore straight a line of demarcation as to 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 beneath special demands or amid defective offer of 1 selection is, indeed, untenable. This does not in the smallest amount invalidate the fact that we tend to can 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 light of well-ascertained laws, to work out whether or not alcohol will or will not possess a food value. For years, the ablest men in 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’s been, by common consent, excluded from the category of tissue-building foods. “We tend to haven’t,” says Dr. Hunt, “seen however one suggestion that it could therefore act, and this a promiscuous guess. One author (Hammond) thinks it doable that it might ’somehow’ enter into combination with the merchandise of decay in tissues, and ‘under certain circumstances would possibly yield their nitrogen to the construction of recent tissues.’ No parallel in organic chemistry, nor any evidence in animal chemistry, can be found to surround this guess with the areola of a potential hypothesis”.
Dr. Richardson says: “Alcohol contains no nitrogen; it has not one of the qualities of structure-building foods; it’s incapable of being transformed into any of them; it is, therefore, not a food in any sense of its being a constructive agent in building up the body.” Dr. W.B. Carpenter says: “Alcohol cannot supply anything that is crucial to the true nutrition of the tissues.” Dr. Liebig says: “Beer, wine, spirits, etc., furnish no component capable of entering into the composition of the blood, muscular fibre, or any part that is the seat of the principle of life.” Dr. Hammond, in his Tribune Lectures, in that he advocates the use of alcohol in certain cases, says: “It’s not demonstrable that alcohol undergoes conversion into tissue.” Cameron, in his Manuel of Hygiene, says: “There’s nothing in alcohol with which any half of the body can be nourished.” Dr. E. Smith, F.R.S., says: “Alcohol isn’t a real food. It interferes with alimentation.” Dr. T.K. Chambers says: “It’s clear that we must stop to take alcohol, as in any sense, a food”.
“Not detecting in this substance,” says Dr. Hunt, “any tissue-making ingredients, nor in its ending any mixtures, like we have a tendency to are able to trace in the cell foods, nor any evidence either within the experience of physiologists or the trials of alimentarians, it’s not wonderful that in it we have a tendency to should realize neither the expectancy nor the belief of constructive power.”
Not finding in alcohol something out of which the body can be built up or its waste supplied, it’s next to be examined on its heat-manufacturing quality.
Production of heat.
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“The first usual test for a force-manufacturing food,” says Dr. Hunt, “and that to which alternative foods of that category respond, is the production of warmth in the mix of oxygen therewith. This heat means very important force, and is, in no small degree, a measure of the comparative worth of the thus-referred to as respiratory foods. If we examine the fats, the starches and the sugars, we have a tendency to can trace and estimate the processes by that 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 the law, that heat is the merchandise, and {that the} legitimate result is force, whereas the results of the union of the hydrogen of the foods with oxygen is water. If alcohol comes in any respect under this class of foods, we tend to rightly expect to find some of the evidences which attach to the hydrocarbons.”
What, then, is the results of experiments in this direction? They need been conducted through long periods and with the best care, by men of the best attainments in chemistry and physiology, and the result’s given in these few words, by Dr. H.R. Wood, Jr., in his Materia Medica. “Nobody has been able to detect in the blood any of the standard results of its oxidation.” That’s, nobody has been ready to find that alcohol has undergone combustion, like fat, or starch, or sugar, and therefore 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 on the cooling effects of alcohol, that Dr. Wood says, in his Materia Medica, “that it will not seem price while to occupy space with a discussion of the subject.” Liebermeister, one of the foremost learned contributors to Zeimssen’s Cyclopaedia of the Follow of Drugs, 1875, says: “I long since convinced myself, by direct experiments, that alcohol, even in comparatively massive doses, will not elevate the temperature of the body in either well or sick people.” Thus well had this become known to Arctic voyagers, that, even before physiologists had demonstrated the fact that alcohol reduced, instead of skyrocketing, the temperature of the body, that they had learned that spirits lessened their power to face up to extreme cold. “Within the Northern regions,” says Edward Smith, “it absolutely was proved that the complete 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 possibly augment its strength. “Every quite power an animal can generate,” says Dr. G. Budd, F.R.S., “the mechanical power of the muscles, the chemical (or digestive) power of the abdomen, the intellectual power of the brain accumulates through the nutrition of the organ on which it depends.” Dr. F.R. Lees, of Edinburgh, after discussing the question , and educing proof, remarks: “From the terribly nature of things, it can currently be seen how impossible it is that alcohol will be strengthening food of either kind. Since it cannot become a half of the body, it cannot consequently contribute to its cohesive, organic strength, or mounted 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 create nervous power; they simply enable you, because it were, to deplete that which is left, and then they leave you additional in would like of rest than before.”
Baron Liebig, thus so much back as 1843, in his “Animal Chemistry,” discerned the fallacy of alcohol generating power. He says: “The circulation will seem accelerated at the expense of the force out there for voluntary motion, but while not the assembly of a bigger quantity of mechanical force.” In his later “Letters,” he again says: “Wine is sort of superfluous to man, it is constantly followed by the expenditure of power” whereas, the important function of food is to administer power. He adds: “These drinks promote the amendment of matter in the body, and are, consequently, attended by an inward loss of power, that ceases to be productive, as a result of it is not utilized in overcoming outward difficulties i.e., in working.” In alternative words, this nice chemist asserts that alcohol abstracts the facility of the system from doing useful 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 very little doubt {that a} moderate dose of beer or wine would, in most cases, directly diminish the maximum weight which a healthy person may lift. Mental acuteness, accuracy of perception and delicacy of the senses are all therefore way opposed by alcohol, as that the most efforts of every are incompatible with the ingestion of any moderate quantity of fermented liquid. One glass can typically suffice to take the edge off each mind and body, and to reduce their capability to something below their perfection of work.”
Dr. F.R. Lees, F.S.A., writing on the subject of alcohol as a food, makes the subsequent quotation from an essay on “Stimulating Drinks,” printed by Dr. H.R. Madden, as way back as 1847: “Alcohol is not 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, can’t be thought-about nutritious.
The strength experienced after the employment of alcohol is not new strength added to the system, however is manifested by calling into exercise the nervous energy pre-existing.
The ultimate exhausting effects of alcohol, attributable to its stimulant properties, manufacture an unnatural susceptibility to morbid action in all the organs, and this, with the plethora superinduced, becomes a fertile source of disease.
A one that habitually exerts himself to such an extent as to require the daily use of stimulants to keep off exhaustion, could be compared to a machine operating below high pressure. He can become much more obnoxious to the causes of disease, and can certainly break down ahead of he would have done below a lot of favorable circumstances.
The additional frequently alcohol is had recourse to for the purpose of overcoming feelings of debility, the additional it will be required, and by constant repetition a period 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 value, the medical advocates of its use are driven to the belief that it’s a reasonably secondary food, in that it has the ability to delay the metamorphosis of tissue. “By the metamorphosis of tissue is meant,” says Dr. Hunt, “that change that is continually going on within the system which involves a constant disintegration of fabric; a calling it quits and avoiding of that that is now not aliment, creating area for that new supply that is to sustain life.” Another medical author, in referring to the present metamorphosis, says: “The importance of this method to the upkeep of life is instantly shown by the injurious effects which follow upon its disturbance. If the discharge of the excrementitious substances be in any way impeded or suspended, these substances accumulate either in the blood or tissues, or both. In consequence of this retention and accumulation they become toxic, and rapidly produce a derangement of the vital functions. Their influence is principally exerted upon the nervous system, through that they produce 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 say that it in some means suspends the conventional conduct of the laws of assimilation and nutrition, of waste and repair. A number one advocate of alcohol (Hammond) therefore 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 ‘isn’t clear’ how it will this, and we aren’t clear how such delayed metamorphosis recuperates.
Not an originator of important force.
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which isn’t known to own any of the same old 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 prospects, 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 that the food-force of aliments is mostly measured, it can not do for us to talk of profit by delay of regressive metamorphosis unless such method is accompanied with one thing evidential of the fact something scientifically descriptive of its mode of accomplishment within the case at hand, and unless it is shown to be practically desirable for alimentation.
There can be little question that alcohol does cause defects in the processes of elimination which are natural to the healthy body and which even in disease are often conservative of health.
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