Alcohol has no food price and is exceptionally constrained in its action as a remedial agent. Dr. Henry Monroe says, “Each kind of substance employed by man as meals consists of sugar, starch, oil, and glutinous, which rely on being mingled together in diverse proportions. These are designed to guide the animal frame. The glutinous ideas of meals fibrine, albumen, and casein are hired to accumulate the shape simultaneously as the oil, starch, and sugar are chiefly used to generate warmness in the body”.
Now, it’s clear that if Alcohol is a meal, it will incorporate one or more of those materials. It has to contain both the nitrogenous elements found chiefly in meats, eggs, milk, greens, and seeds, out of which animal tissue is built and waste repaired, or the carbonaceous elements located in fat, starch, and sugar, within the consumption of which heat and pressure are developed.
“The distinctness of these agencies of ingredients,” says Dr. Hunt, “and their relations to the tissue-producing and heat-evolving capacities of guy, are so definite and so confirmed with the aid of experiments on animals and by way of manifold tests of scientific, physiological and scientific experience, that no try to discard the classification has prevailed. To draw so straight, a line of demarcation restricts the one entirely to tissue or cellular manufacturing and the alternative to warmth and pressure production through regular combustion. It denies any strength of interchangeability underneath special needs or amid defective supply of one variety, which is untenable. This does no longer, within the least, invalidate the truth that we’re able to use these as ascertained landmarks”.
How these materials, whilst taken into the frame, are assimilated and how they generate pressure are widely recognized to the chemist and physiologist, capable, within the mild of properly-ascertained legal guidelines, to decide whether Alcohol does or does now not possess a food value. For years, the ablest men in the scientific career have given this concern the most careful look and subjected Alcohol to every recognized check and test. The result is that it’s been, using not unusual consent, excluded from the magnificence of tissue-building ingredients. “We have never,” says Dr. Hunt, “seen a single notion, however, that it can so act, and this a promiscuous guess. One author (Hammond) thinks it viable that it can ‘one way or the other’ enter into an aggregate with the products of tissue deterioration, and ‘underneath sure situations may yield their nitrogen to the construction of new tissues.’ No parallel in organic chemistry nor any animal chemistry evidence can be observed to surround this bet with the areola of likely speculation”.
Dr. Richardson says: “Alcohol consists of no nitrogen; it has none of the qualities of shape-constructing ingredients; it’s far incapable of being transformed into any of them; it is, therefore, now not a food in any feel of its being a positive agent in constructing up the body.” Dr. W.B. Carpenter says: “Alcohol can not deliver anything essential to the proper nutrition of the tissues.” Dr. Liebig says: “Beer, wine, spirits, and so on., supply no detail capable of moving into the composition of the blood, muscular fiber, or any component that’s the seat of the principle of lifestyles.” Dr. Hammond, in his Tribune Lectures, in which he advocates the use of Alcohol in certain cases, says: “It isn’t demonstrable that alcohol undergoes conversion into tissue.” In his Manual of Hygiene, Cameron says: “There is nothing in alcohol with which any a part of the body can be nourished.” Dr. E. Smith, F.R.S., says: “Alcohol isn’t real food. It interferes with alimentation.” Dr. T.K. Chambers says: “It is apparent that we ought to quit to treat alcohol, as in any sense, meals.”
“The first common take a look at for pressure-generating meals,” says Dr. Hunt, “and that to which other foods of that elegance reply is the manufacturing of warmth within the mixture of oxygen in addition to that. This heat approaches vital force and is, to no small degree, a degree of the comparative fee of the so-called breathing ingredients. If we observe the fats, the starches, and the sugars, we will hint at and estimate the procedures by which they evolve heat and are modified into crucial forces and might weigh the capacities of different meals. We discover that the consumption of carbon by union with oxygen is the law, that heat is the product, and that the legitimate result is a force, even as the union of the hydrogen of the ingredients with oxygen is water. If Alcohol comes in any respect underneath this elegance of meals, we rightly expect to find some evidence which connects to the hydrocarbons.”
What, then, is the result of experiments in this path? They have been performed for long periods and with the finest care by men of the best chemistry and physiology attainments. The result is given via Dr. H.R. Wood, Jr., in those few phrases in his Materia Medica. “No one has been capable of locations within the blood any of the regular consequences of its oxidation.” That is, no person has found that Alcohol has undergone combustion, like fat, starch, or sugar, and so given warmth to the body.
Alcohol and reduction of temperature.
Instead of increasing 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 results of Alcohol that Dr. Wood says, in his Materia Medica, “that it does now not appear worthwhile to occupy space with a dialogue of the situation.” Liebermeister, one of the most discovered members of Zeimssen’s Cyclopaedia of the Practice of Medicine, 1875, says: “I long since satisfied myself, using direct experiments, that alcohol, even in comparatively huge doses, does not increase the temperature of the frame in either nicely or unwell people.” So nicely had this come to be acknowledged to Arctic voyagers that, even earlier than physiologists had proven the reality that Alcohol reduced, instead of growing, the temperature of the body, they had discovered that spirits lessened their power to face up to the excessive cold. “In the Northern areas,” says Edward Smith, “it was proved that the complete exclusion of spirits became vital, with a purpose to hold heat beneath these destructive situations.”
Alcohol does not make you strong.
If Alcohol no longer comprises tissue-constructing cloth nor delivers warmness to the frame, it can not possibly upload to its energy. “Every sort of strength an animal can generate,” says Dr. G. Budd, F.R.S., “the mechanical power of the muscle groups, the chemical (or digestive) electricity of the belly, the intellectual electricity of the brain accumulates via the nutrition of the organ on which it depends.” After discussing the query and reducing evidence, Dr. F.R. Lees of Edinburgh gave feedback: “From the very nature of things, it’s going to be now visible how impossible it is that Alcohol may be strengthening food of either kind. Since it can’t end up part of the frame, it can not, therefore, contribute to its cohesive, organic power, or constant power; and, since it comes out of the body just as it went in, it cannot, using its decomposition, generate heat force.”
