HOW ALCOHOL RETARDS DIGESTION.
And here, in order to present those who don’t seem to be acquainted with, the method of digestion, a transparent plan of that vital operation, and also the result produced when alcohol is taken with food, we quote from the lecture of an English physician, Dr. Henry Monroe, on “The Physiological Action of Alcohol.” He says:
“Each quite substance utilized by man as food consists of sugar, starch, oil and glutinous matters, 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 create up the structure; while the oil, starch and sugar are chiefly used to generate heat within the body.
“The primary step of the digestive process is that the breaking of the food within the mouth by means of the jaws and teeth. On this being done, the saliva, a viscid liquor, is poured into the mouth from the salivary glands, and as it mixes with the food, it performs a terribly necessary part in the operation of digestion, rendering the starch of the food soluble, and gradually changing it into a kind of sugar, when that the other principles become additional miscible with it. Nearly a pint of saliva is furnished each 24 hours for the employment of an adult. When the food has been masticated and mixed with the saliva, it is then passed into the abdomen, where it is acted upon by a juice secreted by the filaments of that organ, and poured into the abdomen in large quantities whenever food comes involved with its mucous coats. It consists of a dilute acid known to the chemists as hydrochloric acid, composed of hydrogen and chlorine, united together in sure definite proportions. The gastric juice contains, additionally, a peculiar organic-ferment or decomposing substance, containing nitrogen something of the character of yeast termed pepsine , that is easily soluble within the acid just named. That gastric juice acts as a straightforward chemical solvent, is proved by the actual fact that, once death, it’s been known to dissolve the abdomen itself.”
It is a slip to suppose that, when a sensible dinner, a glass of spirits or beer assists digestion; or that any liquor containing alcohol even bitter beer can in any method assist digestion. Mix some bread and meat with gastric juice; place them in a phial, and keep that phial in a sand-bath at the slow heat of ninety eight degrees, sometimes shaking briskly the contents to imitate the motion of the stomach; you may notice, once six or eight hours, the entire contents blended into one pultaceous mass. If to another phial of food and gastric juice, treated in the same way, I add a glass of pale ale or a amount of alcohol, at the top of seven or eight hours, or even some days, the food is scarcely acted upon at all. This is often a reality; and if you are led to raise why, I answer, because alcohol has the peculiar power of chemically affecting or decomposing the gastric juice by precipitating one in all its principal constituents, viz., pepsine, rendering its solvent properties abundant less efficacious. Hence alcohol will not be thought-about either as food or as a solvent for food. Not as the latter definitely, for it refuses to act with the gastric juice.
“‘It’s a remarkable fact,’ says Dr. Dundas Thompson, ‘that alcohol, when added to the digestive fluid, produces a white precipitate, thus {that the} fluid is not capable of digesting animal or vegetable matter.’ ‘The use of alcoholic stimulants,’ say Drs. Todd and Bowman, ‘retards digestion by coagulating the pepsine, a necessary component of the gastric juice, and thereby interfering with its action. Were it not that wine and spirits are rapidly absorbed, the introduction of these into the stomach, in any amount, would be an entire bar to the digestion of food, as the pepsine would be precipitated from the solution as quickly as it had been shaped by the stomach.’ Spirit, in any quantity, as a dietary adjunct, is pernicious on account of its antiseptic qualities, which resist the digestion of food by the absorption of water from its particles, in direct antagonism to chemical operation.”
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