Alcohol Has No Food Value
Alcohol has no meals value and is exceptionally restrained in its action as a remedial agent. Dr. Henry Monroe says, “each type of substance hired through man as food consists of sugar, starch, oil and glutinous matter mingled together in various proportions. These are designed for the assist of the animal frame. The glutinous principles of food fibrine, albumen and casein are hired to build up the shape at the same time as the oil, starch and sugar are chiefly used to generate warmth within the body”.
Now it is clear that if alcohol is a food, it will likely be observed to comprise one or greater of these materials. There have to be in it both the nitrogenous elements found chiefly in meats, eggs, milk, veggies and seeds, out of which animal tissue is built and waste repaired or the carbonaceous factors observed in fats, starch and sugar, within the intake of which warmth and force are developed.
“The distinctness of these businesses of ingredients,” says Dr. Hunt, “and their family members to the tissue-generating and heat-evolving capacities of man, are so particular and so showed by using experiments on animals and by means of manifold exams of medical, physiological and clinical experience, that no try to discard the type has prevailed. To draw so instantly a line of demarcation as to restriction the one completely to tissue or cellular manufacturing and the other to warmth and pressure manufacturing through normal combustion and to deny any energy of interchangeability below unique demands or amid faulty supply of 1 range is, certainly, untenable. This does now not inside the least invalidate the truth that we’re capable of use these as ascertained landmarks”.
How these materials while taken into the frame, are assimilated and the way they generate pressure, are widely known to the chemist and physiologist, who is capable, inside the mild of well-ascertained laws, to determine whether or not alcohol does or does not possess a food fee. For years, the ablest guys within the scientific profession have given this challenge the most careful look at, and feature subjected alcohol to every regarded take a look at and test, and the end result is that it’s been, by means of commonplace consent, excluded from the class of tissue-constructing foods. “We have never,” says Dr. Hunt, “seen however a unmarried concept that it may so act, and this a promiscuous wager. One creator (Hammond) thinks it feasible that it could ‘by hook or by crook’ input into mixture with the goods of deterioration in tissues, and ‘under certain instances would possibly yield their nitrogen to the construction of recent tissues.’ No parallel in natural chemistry, nor any proof in animal chemistry, may be discovered to surround this wager with the areola of a probable speculation”.
Dr. Richardson says: “Alcohol carries no nitrogen; it has not one of the characteristics of structure-constructing meals; it is incapable of being transformed into any of them; it is, therefore, not a meals in any sense of its being a optimistic agent in constructing up the frame.” Dr. W.B. Carpenter says: “Alcohol can’t deliver whatever that is crucial to the proper nutrients of the tissues.” Dr. Liebig says: “Beer, wine, spirits, etc., grant no detail able to entering into the composition of the blood, muscular fibre, or any part that’s the seat of the precept of existence.” Dr. Hammond, in his Tribune Lectures, in which he advocates the usage of alcohol in certain instances, says: “It isn’t demonstrable that alcohol undergoes conversion into tissue.” Cameron, in his Manuel of Hygiene, says: “There is not anything in alcohol with which any a part of the body may be nourished.” Dr. E. Smith, F.R.S., says: “Alcohol is not a real meals. It interferes with alimentation.” Dr. T.K. Chambers says: “It is apparent that we need to end to regard alcohol, as in any sense, a food”.
“Not detecting in this substance,” says Dr. Hunt, “any tissue-making elements, nor in its breaking apart any mixtures, along with we’re capable of hint within the cellular ingredients, nor any evidence either inside the revel in of physiologists or the pains of alimentarians, it isn’t top notch that during it we should discover neither the expectancy nor the conclusion of positive energy.”
Not finding in alcohol whatever out of which the body can be constructed up or its waste furnished, it’s miles subsequent to be examined as to its warmth-producing exceptional.
Production of heat.
“The first common take a look at for a force-producing food,” says Dr. Hunt, “and that to which other meals of that magnificence respond, is the production of warmth within the aggregate of oxygen therewith. This warmness manner vital force, and is, in no small degree, a measure of the comparative value of the so-called breathing meals. If we look at the fats, the starches and the sugars, we can trace and estimate the strategies with the aid of which they evolve heat and are modified into essential force, and might weigh the capacities of different meals. We find that the intake of carbon through union with oxygen is the law, that warmth is the product, and that the valid end result is pressure, whilst the end result of the union of the hydrogen of the meals with oxygen is water. If alcohol comes at all below this elegance of foods, we rightly expect to find a number of the evidences which attach to the hydrocarbons.”
What, then, is the result of experiments in this direction? They were performed through lengthy durations and with the greatest care, with the aid of men of the highest attainments in chemistry and physiology, and the result is given in those few words, by means of Dr. H.R. Wood, Jr., in his Materia Medica. “No one has been able to discover in the blood any of the ordinary results of its oxidation.” That is, no one has been able to find that alcohol has undergone combustion, like fats, or starch, or sugar, and so given warmth to the body.
Alcohol and reduction of temperature.
rather than growing it; and it has even been used in fevers as an anti-pyretic. So uniform has been the testimony of physicians in Europe and America as to the cooling results of alcohol, that Dr. Wood says, in his Materia Medica, “that it does now not seem really worth while to occupy space with a discussion of the situation.” Liebermeister, one of the most learned members to Zeimssen’s Cyclopaedia of the Practice of Medicine, 1875, says: “I long since convinced myself, with the aid of direct experiments, that alcohol, even in comparatively huge doses, does no longer raise the temperature of the body in either nicely or unwell humans.” So well had this come to be acknowledged to Arctic voyagers, that, even before physiologists had demonstrated the reality that alcohol decreased, instead of growing, the temperature of the body, they’d learned that spirits lessened their strength to withstand excessive cold. “In the Northern areas,” says Edward Smith, “it turned into proved that the whole exclusion of spirits changed into essential, on the way to preserve warmness beneath these adverse conditions.”
Alcohol does now not make you sturdy.
If alcohol does no longer include tissue-building material, nor give warmth to the frame, it can not probably upload to its energy. “Every kind of electricity an animal can generate,” says Dr. G. Budd, F.R.S., “the mechanical power of the muscle tissue, the chemical (or digestive) energy of the belly, the intellectual energy of the mind accumulates via the nutrition of the organ on which it depends.” Dr. F.R. Lees, of Edinburgh, after discussing the question, and educing evidence, feedback: “From the very nature of factors, it will now be visible how not possible it is that alcohol may be strengthening meals of both kind. Since it cannot turn out to be a part of the frame, it can not therefore contribute to its cohesive, natural power, or constant strength; and, because it comes out of the frame just because it went in, it cannot, by way of its decomposition, generate heat force.”
Sir Benjamin Brodie says: “Stimulants do no longer create worried electricity; they simply enable you, as it had been, to expend that that’s left, after which they depart you more in need of relaxation than before.”
Baron Liebig, to date back as 1843, in his “Animal Chemistry,” pointed out the fallacy of alcohol generating strength. He says: “The flow will appear improved on the cost of the pressure to be had for voluntary movement, but without the production of a more amount of mechanical force.” In his later “Letters,” he again says: “Wine is quite superfluous to man, it’s miles continuously accompanied by the expenditure of electricity” while, the real function of meals is to present electricity. He provides: “These beverages promote the change of depend inside the frame, and are, therefore, attended by using an inward lack of energy, which ceases to be effective, because it is not hired in overcoming outward difficulties i.E., in working.” In different words, this remarkable chemist asserts that alcohol abstracts the energy of the gadget from doing useful paintings within the subject or workshop, that allows you to cleanse the house from the defilement of alcohol itself.
The overdue Dr. W. Brinton, Physician to St. Thomas’, in his outstanding paintings on Dietetics, says: “Careful commentary leaves no doubt that a slight dose of beer or wine could, in maximum cases, at once lessen the maximum weight which a healthy man or woman ought to carry. Mental acuteness, accuracy of belief and delicacy of the senses are all to date hostile by way of alcohol, as that the maximum efforts of every are incompatible with the ingestion of any moderate quantity of fermented liquid. A unmarried glass will frequently suffice to take the brink off each thoughts and frame, and to lessen their capacity to something under their perfection of work.”
Dr. F.R. Lees, F.S.A., writing close to alcohol as a meals, makes the subsequent quotation from an essay on “Stimulating Drinks,” published through Dr. H.R. Madden, as long ago as 1847: “Alcohol isn’t always the natural stimulus to any of our organs, and subsequently, capabilities done in effect of its software, generally tend to debilitate the organ acted upon.
Alcohol is incapable of being assimilated or converted into any organic proximate principle, and as a result, can not be taken into consideration nutritious.
The strength experienced after using alcohol is not new energy added to the device, however is manifested by calling into exercising the apprehensive power pre-present.
The ultimate exhausting outcomes of alcohol, attributable to its stimulant homes, produce an unnatural susceptibility to morbid motion in all of the organs, and this, with the plethora superinduced, turns into a fertile source of disorder.
A individual who habitually exerts himself to such an volume as to require the day by day use of stimulants to keep off exhaustion, can be as compared to a gadget running under high strain. He turns into much more obnoxious to the reasons of disease, and will without a doubt wreck down earlier than he might have achieved beneath greater favorable circumstances.
The extra regularly alcohol is had recourse to for the purpose of overcoming feelings of debility, the more it will be required, and with the aid of regular repetition a length is at duration reached whilst it can’t be foregone, except response is simultaneously delivered approximately by using a temporary total exchange of the conduct of life.
Driven to the wall.
Not finding that alcohol possesses any direct alimentary fee, the medical advocates of its use were pushed to the belief that it’s far a type of secondary food, in that it has the electricity to delay the metamorphosis of tissue. “By the metamorphosis of tissue is meant,” says Dr. Hunt, “that exchange that is continuously going on inside the machine which includes a steady disintegration of fabric; a breaking up and heading off of that which is no longer aliment, making room for that new supply that is to sustain existence.” Another medical author, in regarding this metamorphosis, says: “The importance of this system to the maintenance of lifestyles is readily shown by way of the injurious consequences which observe upon its disturbance. If the release of the excrementitious substances be in any manner impeded or suspended, those materials collect both in the blood or tissues, or each. In effect of this retention and accumulation they become poisonous, and rapidly produce a derangement of the vital functions. Their affect is mainly exerted upon the frightened device, through which they produce most frequent irritability, disturbance of the special senses, delirium, insensibility, coma, and sooner or later, loss of life.”
“This description,” remarks Dr. Hunt, “appears nearly intended for alcohol.” He then says: “To claim alcohol as a meals as it delays the metamorphosis of tissue, is to assert that it in a few way suspends the regular behavior of the legal guidelines of assimilation and vitamins, of waste and restore. A leading endorse of alcohol (Hammond) for this reason illustrates it: ‘Alcohol retards the destruction of the tissues. By this destruction, pressure is generated, muscle groups contract, thoughts are advanced, organs secrete and excrete.’ In different words, alcohol interferes with some of these. No marvel the author ‘isn’t clear’ the way it does this, and we are not clean how such not on time metamorphosis recuperates.
Not an originator of essential force.
which isn’t known to have any of the usual energy of ingredients, and use it on the double assumption that it delays metamorphosis of tissue, and that such postpone is conservative of health, is to pass out of doors of the boundaries of technological know-how into the land of far flung possibilities, and confer the name of adjuster upon an agent whose organization is itself dubious.
Having did not identify alcohol as a nitrogenous or non-nitrogenous meals, not having discovered it amenable to any of the evidences by means of which the food-force of aliments is usually measured, it’s going to not do for us to talk of benefit by means of put off of regressive metamorphosis unless such process is accompanied with something evidential of the reality something scientifically descriptive of its mode of feat inside the case at hand, and except it is proven to be almost desirable for alimentation.
There may be no question that alcohol does reason defects inside the tactics of removal that are herbal to the wholesome frame and which even in disorder are regularly conservative of health.
