Fellow and Tutor in Theology William Wood
Published: 2012-02
Total Pages: 308
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Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER IV. FOOD AND DIET?THE PROXIMATE PRINCIPLES OP FOODS? FOOD-STUFFS. As the one thing which is necessary to be supplied frequently, food should take a first place in therapeutics. There is no question about our power to regulate or to arrest the supply; we can cut off all food for a time or we can diminish it. On the other hand, we can supply it more freely, but in this case we may not be able to assist its assimilation; often appetite fails, and then we may feel that we are in the position of the man who took his horse to the brook but could not make him drink. The arrest of supply, a fast, is a most powerful therapeutic agent. Further, we can regulate diet in reference to its various ingredients; we can exclude some constituents and introduce others. The substances we use as food are so numerous that to simplify their grouping we employ their proximate principles, which are either organic or inorganic?the latter class comprising water and salts. The organic elements of the food were divided by Liebig into two classes: I. Plastic, or proteinaceous, comprising nitrogenous substances, which he held were alone concerned in repair, growth, nervous and muscular energy. II. Elements of respiration, afterward better styled calorifacient principles, comprising the organic non-nitrogenous substances which he considered were employed in heat production. No doubt a very direct relation exists between nitrogenous food and muscular work, but that it must be converted into tissue before it can liberate force has not yet been proved. It has, in fact, been shown that heavy labor can be undergone for a short period on a non-nitrogenous diet. Prout took milk as the type of a perfect food, and no one will deny that it is so for the young, who both subsist and grow up...