HOW ALCOHOL RETARDS DIGESTION.
And here, in order to present people who don’t seem to be familiar with, the process of digestion, a clear plan of that important operation, and therefore the effect created 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 quite substance utilized by man as food consists of sugar, starch, oil and glutinous matters, mingled along 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 create up the structure; whereas the oil, starch and sugar are chiefly used to generate heat in the body.
“The primary step of the digestive process is that the breaking up of the food within 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 because it mixes with the food, it performs a terribly necessary part within the operation of digestion, rendering the starch of the food soluble, and gradually changing it into a sort of sugar, when which the opposite principles become more miscible with it. Nearly a pint of saliva is furnished each 24 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 abdomen in giant quantities whenever food comes in touch 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, conjointly, a peculiar organic-ferment or decomposing substance, containing nitrogen something of the character of yeast termed pepsine , that is easily soluble in the acid simply named. That gastric juice acts as a easy chemical solvent, is proved by the actual fact that, after death, it’s been known to dissolve the abdomen itself.”
It is a blunder to suppose that, once a good dinner, a glass of spirits or beer assists digestion; or that any liquor containing alcohol even bitter beer will in any way assist digestion. Combine some bread and meat with gastric juice; place them during a phial, and keep that phial in a very sand-bath at the slow heat of ninety eight degrees, occasionally shaking briskly the contents to imitate the motion of the abdomen; you’ll realize, when six or eight hours, the entire contents blended into one pultaceous mass. If to a different phial of food and gastric juice, treated in the identical method, I add a glass of pale ale or a quantity of alcohol, at the tip of seven or eight hours, or perhaps 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 in every of its principal constituents, viz., pepsine, rendering its solvent properties much less efficacious. Hence alcohol can not be thought-about either as food or as a solvent for food. Not because the latter certainly, for it refuses to act with the gastric juice.
“‘It’s a exceptional fact,’ says Dr. Dundas Thompson, ‘that alcohol, when added to the digestive fluid, produces a white precipitate, thus {that the} fluid is no longer capable of digesting animal or vegetable matter.’ ‘The utilization of alcoholic stimulants,’ say Drs. Todd and Bowman, ‘retards digestion by coagulating the pepsine, an important part 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 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 was formed 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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