Alcohol has no food fee and is surprisingly limited in its movement as a remedial agent. Dr. Henry Monroe says, “Each form of substance hired by using the guy as meals consists of sugar, starch, oil and glutinous rely on mingled collectively in numerous proportions. These are designed for the support of the animal frame. The glutinous principles of food fibrine, albumen, and casein are hired to build up the shape while the oil, starch, and sugar are chiefly used to generate warmth in the body”.
Now, it’s miles clear that if Alcohol is a meal, it will likely be located to include one or more of those substances. There need to be in it both the nitrogenous elements discovered mainly in meats, eggs, milk, veggies, and seeds, out of which animal tissue is constructed and waste repaired, or the carbonaceous details determined in fats, starch, and sugar, inside the intake of which warmth and force are advanced.
“The distinctness of those businesses of foods,” says Dr. Hunt, “and their family members to the tissue-generating and heat-evolving capacities of guy, are so particular and so showed using experiments on animals and via manifold tests of scientific, physiological and clinical revel in, that no try to discard the category has prevailed. To draw so instantly a line of demarcation as to restrict the only absolutely to tissue or cell manufacturing and the opposite to heat and force manufacturing through everyday combustion and deny any strength of interchangeability underneath special demands or amid faulty supply of 1 variety is untenable. This does no longer, inside the least, invalidate the reality that we are capable of using these as ascertained landmarks”.
While taken into the body, these materials are assimilated, and how they generate force is widely recognized by the chemist and physiologist, who is capable, within the mild of well-ascertained legal guidelines, to determine whether or not Alcohol does or does not possess a food fee. For years, the ablest men in the clinical profession have given this challenge the most cautious observation and feature subjected Alcohol to every regarded check and test. The result is that it has been, by using commonplace consent, excluded from the class of tissue-building ingredients. “We have never,” says Dr. Hunt, “seen, however, an unmarried inspiration that it may so act, and this a promiscuous wager. One author (Hammond) thinks it viable that it may ‘come what may’ enter into an aggregate with the products of tissue deterioration, and ‘underneath sure occasions would possibly yield their nitrogen to the development of recent tissues.’ No parallel in natural chemistry nor any animal chemistry evidence can be found to surround this bet with the areola of a possible hypothesis”.
Dr. Richardson says: “Alcohol carries no nitrogen; it has none of the traits of shape-building meals; it is incapable of being transformed into any of them; it is, therefore, not a food in any feel of its being an optimistic agent in constructing the frame.” Dr. W.B. Carpenter says: “Alcohol can’t supply anything essential to the true nutrients of the tissues.” Dr. Liebig says: “Beer, wine, spirits, etc., grant no detail capable of stepping into the composition of the blood, muscular fiber, or any component which is the seat of the precept of life.” Dr. Hammond, in his Tribune Lectures, wherein he advocates the use of Alcohol in certain instances, says: “It isn’t demonstrable that alcohol undergoes conversion into tissue.” Cameron says in his Manual of Hygiene, “There is nothing in alcohol with which any part of the frame may be nourished.” Dr. E. Smith, F.R.S., says: “Alcohol is not a true food. It interferes with alimentation.” Dr. T.K. Chambers says: “It is apparent that we need to end to regard alcohol, as in any feel, meals”.
“Not detecting on this substance,” says Dr. Hunt, “any tissue-making components, nor in its breaking up any mixtures, which include we can hint within the mobile ingredients, nor any evidence both in the revel in of physiologists or the rigors of parliamentarians, it is not splendid that in it we should find neither the expectancy nor the belief of positive strength.”
Not finding in Alcohol something out of which the body may be built up or its waste furnished, it is after being tested as to its heat-generating excellent.
Production of Heat
“The first standard test for a force-producing food,” says Dr. Hunt, “and that to which other meals of that elegance respond is the manufacturing of heat in the combination of oxygen in addition to that. This warmth is an essential force and is, in no small degree, a measure of the comparative value of the so-referred respiration foods. If we look at the fat, the starches, and the sugars, we can hint at and estimate the methods by which they evolve warmth and are modified into crucial pressure and might weigh the capacities of different foods. We find that the consumption of carbon via union with oxygen is the regulation, that heat is the product, and that the legitimate result is pressure, even as the union of the hydrogen of the foods with oxygen is water. If Alcohol comes at all under this class of meals, we rightly count on to locate some of the evidence which connects to the hydrocarbons.”
What, then, is the result of experiments in this direction? They were carried out over long periods and with the greatest care by using guys of the very best attainments in chemistry and body structure, and the result is given in these few words by Dr. H.R. Wood, Jr., in his Materia Medica. “No one has been able to detect within the blood any of the regular outcomes of its oxidation.” That is, no person has found that Alcohol has passed through combustion, like fat, starch, or sugar, and so given heat to the body.
Alcohol and discount of temperature.
Instead of growing it, 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 consequences of Alcohol that Dr. Wood says, in his Materia Medica, “that it does not seem worthwhile to occupy the area with a dialogue of the challenge.” Liebermeister, one of the most learned members of Zeimssen’s Cyclopaedia of the Practice of Medicine, 1875, says: “I long because satisfied myself, through direct experiments, that alcohol, even in relatively huge doses, does now not raise the temperature of the body in either well or unwell people.” So properly had this come to be acknowledged to Arctic voyagers that, even earlier than physiologists had verified the truth that Alcohol decreased, in place of increasing the body’s temperature, that they had found out that spirits lessened their energy to resist excessive bloodlessness. “In the Northern regions,” says Edward Smith, “it becomes proved that the complete exclusion of spirits becomes vital to retain warmness beneath those unfavorable situations.”
Alcohol no longer makes you robust.
If Alcohol does not include tissue-building cloth nor deliver warmness to the body, it cannot likely add to its power. “Every form of power an animal can generate,” says Dr. G. Budd, F.R.S., “the mechanical energy of the muscular tissues, the chemical (or digestive) energy of the belly, the highbrow power of the brain accumulates via the nutrition of the organ on which it relies upon.” Dr. F.R. Lees of Edinburgh, after discussing the question and reducing evidence, remarks: “From the very nature of factors, it will now be visible how not possible it’s far that Alcohol may be strengthening meals of both type. Since it cannot end up a part of the body, it cannot consequently contribute to its cohesive, natural strength, or constant power; and, since it comes out of the body just as it went in, it can’t, by its decomposition, generate warmth pressure.”
Baron Liebig, to date again as 1843, in his “Animal Chemistry,” talked about the fallacy of Alcohol producing power. He says, “The circulation will seem improved at the expense of the pressure to be had for voluntary movement, however, without manufacturing a greater quantity of mechanical pressure.” In his later “Letters,” he once more says: “Wine is pretty superfluous to the guy; it’s far continuously accompanied via the expenditure of electricity,” while food provides power. He adds: “These drinks sell the alternative of relying on inside the body, and are, therefore, attended by an inward loss of electricity, which ceases to be productive, because it isn’t hired in overcoming outward problems, i.e., in working.” In other words, this exceptional chemist asserts that Alcohol abstracts the machine’s electricity from doing beneficial paintings in the subject or workshop to cleanse the residence from the defilement of Alcohol itself.
