Dodge City times. [volume] (Dodge City, Kan.) 1876-1892, 1879-07-12
A Question d Eating.

It has long been considered, as by
common consent a law Of health, that
all food should be eaten slowly, not
swallowed until well masticated. y
Some observations and experiments,
however, have been recently made which
Indicate strongly that this principle Of
slow eating, SO far as health is concern
ed, is not true with respect to all varie-
ties of food. ~ 3
Animals in Q state of nature, as is gen.
orally recognized, tend to accommodate
themselves in the most favorable man
ner to their conditions; If COW natural
" Eliminates, why should dog natural
" take a chunk Of meat at q swallow
without stopping to chew it? 1t may
be ssid that the ruminant has special
digestive apparatus, but the fact re-
mains that the food is eaten as is best
suited to it, and the dog, following ma
ture, does what is best for. him, or, in
other words, if it disagreed with his di-
gestion to eat rapidly, he would reform
and take it more slowly. Following out
this idea, experiments were made upon
a dog, with the following results: If
the meat, before being fed 10 the dog,
was reduced to a hash, or cut into fine
pieces, the digestion was at best impsr-
feet, a considerable portion Of the undi-
gested or imperfectly digestcd meat be-
ing found in the excreta. II, under the
same conditions, meat was fed to the
dog in large pieces, it was bottled at
gulp, with the result that little, if any,
passed through undigested; compared
with the result from the chopped meat,
it could be called perfect digestion for
the coarse form, as compared with de-
cidedly imperfect digestion for the fine
form. So far as simple experiment
goes, this must be pretty conclusive for
the dog; but can the same hold true
with respect to the human subject? 81
A brief review of the first portion Of
the digestive process, so far as under
stood with regard to man, will help in
answering this; and first to'be consid-
cred is the mouth and chewing appa-
ratus. SAYS Foster: The chief pur-
pose served by The saliva in digestion is
to moisten the food, and so assist in
and deglutitiOn. = i
In man. it has specific solvent action
on some of the food stuffs. On fats it
has only o slight enrnlsifying action,
and on proteids none. Its character
istic property is thatof converting starch
into grape-sugar." According to
Wundt, I" the mouth secretions possess.
besides mechanical, chiefly chemical
changing over of the starch
and glycogen contained in the food into
sugar. The ferment body, which pro.
duces this transformation, ptyaline, is
not specific element of the mouth Sc
cretion, since, aside from the intestinal
all tissues and fluids of the
body contain starch-ferment.r
From this it will be seen that no di-
gestive action on meat or animal food
takes place before reaching the stomach,
and that for vegetable food even, the |
seton of the manifestations is far
from all-important. -
As to the mechanical action of the
mouth in preparing the food for deglu-
tition, this is not specially necessary for
morsels of meat OF the ordinary size in
troduced into the mouth, while for a
large portion of the vegetable or plant
products eaten-and it is upon these |
that the saliva exerts its chemical action !
.mastication is necessary before they
can be swallowed. The meat foods are
in themselves sufficiently moist, while
many dried fruits, breads, and the like,
in endless variety, first need thorough
reduction. %
A piece of jelly the size of walnut
would give little trouble in swallowing,
since II is moist and Of q yielding char
acter, while few can swallow pill the
size of a pea without distress. Teeth |
and chewing, then, have their purpose,
but with the exception Of the incisors
that purpose does not in
clude meat unless it has become dried;
his is with respect to the food before it |
reaches the stomach, but, Of course, the
question then arises: Would it not be a |
better condition for digestion If il had |