The choice of food / by Henry Simpson.

  • Simpson, Henry.
Date:
[between 1870 and 1879?]
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: The choice of food / by Henry Simpson. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by The University of Glasgow Library. The original may be consulted at The University of Glasgow Library.

    8/22 (page 86)
    dissolves it, and makes it capable of passing through the walls of the digestive canal, and of being taken into the blood. This is rendered all the easier because, instead of lying still in the stomach, the food is rolled round and round by the movements of its muscular walls, and so brought into contact and mixed up the more readily with the gastric juice. Now whether the nitrogenous matter consists of the flesh of an animal, or of boiled peas or beans, or of a glass of milk, it has to undergo the same changes before it can be taken into the blood and be made use of in building up the tissues. In the raw white of egg we have a nitrogenous fluid which we call egg albumen, and you might think it would be fit for the use of the body without this change; but it will not in that state pass through animal membrane, and cannot therefore be taken up by the blood before being changed by digestion. Our food must consist of all the classes we have ■ mentioned before, and we will now say a few words on the uses: of fat. The quantity present in the human body is estimated at 61b. It is found in almost all the organs and tissues, but most abundantly in the brain, which contains 8 per cent; in the spinal cord, which contains about 23^ per cent; and in what is called' the fatty tissue, which is abundant under the skin, of which it forms more than 82^ per cent; and most abundant of all in the • marrow of bones, where 96 per cent consists of fat. The principal forms in which we take fat as food are, the fat of \ animals, where it is often intimately mixed with the flesh or lean part, as in bacon, and as butter, lard, suet, or dripping. In many parts of the world vegetable fat is much used, in the form of oil,. as olive oil, and as existing in various seeds, containing much fatty. matter. Of these seeds I may name a few, as the cotton seed and . linseed, which are used largely as food for catde, and mustard and rape seed. In some parts of Central Africa, where milk and butter: are rarely to be obtained, vegetable fats, as palm oil, are among the. necessaries of life; and you are aware, no doubt, of the enormous^ quantity of fat which enters into the food of the Esquimaux and: other dwellers in the arctic regions. There, of course, vegetable, fats cannot be obtained, and the fat of the seal and of the: whale, which they call blubber, is eaten to an extent we should \ scarcely believe if it were not a well-known fact The principal part of the fat stored up in the body iss derived from the fatty matters introduced into the food. In the^- carnivora, or flesh-eating animals, this is easily understood, but: in the herbivora, or those animals which live on vegetable food, it '■