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HOW ALCOHOL RETARDS DIGESTION.

6 January 2010 No Comment

And here, so as to provide people who are not familiar with, the process of digestion, a transparent idea of that vital operation, and also the result produced when alcohol is taken with food, we tend to quote from the lecture of an English physician, Dr. Henry Monroe, on “The Physiological Action of Alcohol.” He says:

“Every reasonably substance employed by man as food consists of sugar, starch, oil and glutinous matters, mingled along in varied proportions; these are designed for the support of the animal frame. The glutinous principles of food  fibrine, albumen  and  casein  are used to make up the structure; whereas the  oil, starch  and  sugar  are chiefly used to come up with heat within the body.

“The primary step of the digestive process is the breaking from the food in the mouth by means that 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 important half within the operation of digestion, rendering the starch of the food soluble, and gradually changing it into a kind of sugar, after which the other principles become more miscible with it. Nearly a pint of saliva is furnished every twenty-four hours for the use of an adult. When the food has been masticated and mixed with the saliva, it’s then passed into the abdomen, where it is acted upon by a juice secreted by the filaments of that organ, and poured into the stomach in massive quantities whenever food comes up-to-date with its mucous coats. It consists of a dilute acid known to the chemists as hydrochloric acid, composed of hydrogen and chlorine, united along in bound definite proportions. The gastric juice contains, additionally, a peculiar organic-ferment or decomposing substance, containing nitrogen something of the nature of yeast termed  pepsine , that is easily soluble in the acid just named. That gastric juice acts as a easy chemical solvent, is proved by the very fact that, once death, it’s been known to dissolve the stomach itself.”

It’s a slip to suppose that, when a smart dinner, a glass of spirits or beer assists digestion; or that any liquor containing alcohol even bitter beer can in any manner assist digestion. Mix some bread and meat with gastric juice; place them in an exceedingly phial, and keep that phial in an exceedingly sand-tub at the slow heat of ninety eight degrees, often shaking briskly the contents to imitate the motion of the abdomen; you’ll find, once six or eight hours, the whole contents blended into one pultaceous mass. If to a different phial of food and gastric juice, treated in the identical means, I add a glass of pale ale or a amount of alcohol, at the top of seven or eight hours, or maybe some days, the food is scarcely acted upon at all. This can be a reality; and if you’re led to ask why, I answer, as a result of alcohol has the peculiar power of chemically affecting or decomposing the gastric juice by precipitating one amongst its principal constituents, viz., pepsine, rendering its solvent properties abundant less efficacious. Hence alcohol will not be considered either as food or as a solvent for food. Not as the latter actually, for it refuses to act with the gastric juice.

“‘It is a exceptional truth,’ says Dr. Dundas Thompson, ‘that alcohol, when added to the digestive fluid, produces a white precipitate, so {that the} fluid is no longer capable of digesting animal or vegetable matter.’ ‘The employment of alcoholic stimulants,’ say Drs. Todd and Bowman, ‘retards digestion by coagulating the pepsine, an essential component of the gastric juice, and thereby interfering with its action. Were it not that wine and spirits are rapidly absorbed, the introduction of those into the abdomen, in any quantity, would be a complete bar to the digestion of food, as the pepsine would be precipitated from the answer as quickly as it had been fashioned by the stomach.’ Spirit, in any amount, 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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