CHAPTER III
FEEDING THE BODY
Fig. 6 —Photograph of the outer dead skin pushed off from a black snake crawling through the brush.
Why the Body needs Food.—Every living thing, whether a plant or an animal, needs food. While the whole body lives, a part of it is constantly dying. The entire outer layer of a snake's skin dies three or four times during a year and is cast off, sometimes in a single piece. We can scrape dead bits of skin from the surface of our body at any time. Tiny particles are dying in all regions of the body, and we should soon waste away if food were not taken to make up the loss for the worn-out parts.
The body also needs food to help it do its work and keep warm. The body has the strange power of using food eaten to make the legs and arms move and the brain to think. In doing this the body is said to burn the food.
How the Body burns itself and also Food.—If a boy is weighed just before playing a game of ball and again afterward, he will find that part of his body has been used up and given off in the breath and sweat. He has burned part of his body, and the breath and sweat are like the smoke given off when a match is burned.
One fifth of the air is made of a gas called oxygen. When anything becomes very hot, this oxygen makes it burst into a flame and burn. We breathe in oxygen with the air and the living action of the body causes such a slow union of the oxygen and the tissues that there is no blaze although there is a little heat.
Kinds of Food.—There are four general classes of foods. These are the building foods, the sugars and starches, the fats, and the mineral foods. The building foods are those which help largely in forming new muscle and blood or other parts of the body. Proteids is another name for building foods.
Sugars and starches are placed in one group because starch changes to sugar within the body. If you chew a starchy food like bread for a few minutes, it will begin to taste sweet because the starch is becoming sugar.
Fats are got not only from fat meat but also from eggs, butter, milk, and many other foods. There is some mineral matter, such as potash and soda, in many of the vegetables and meats eaten, and we use much table salt to season other foods.
Fig. 7 —Good foods for building muscles, blood, and bone.
Body-building Foods.—A person with all the sugar, molasses, starch, butter, and lard he could eat would starve to death in a few weeks because none of these foods would help to build up the dying parts of the body. A large amount of body builder is found in lean meat, eggs, milk, peas, beans, corn meal, and bread. Bread and milk is a good food to make the body grow. If the body takes in more building food than it needs for repairs, it may store it up in the form of fat or burn it to help the body do its work.
The Fuel Foods.—The fuel foods are the sugars, starches, and fats. These are the foods which the body can easily burn to keep it warm and give it power to act. Candy, molasses, or sugar in any form, taken in small quantities, is a good food. Starch, which the body quickly changes to sugar, is a much cheaper food. Meats contain very little starch, but nearly all vegetables contain much starch. Three fourths of corn meal, rice, wheat flour, and soda crackers consists of starch. More than one half of white bread, dried beans, and peas is made of pure starch, and there is much starch in potatoes.
Fat is more abundant in animal than in vegetable food. Castor oil and cotton-seed oil are fats from vegetables. The fat of the cow is called suet or tallow, while the fat of the hog is known as lard. Butter is the fat collected from milk. Cream and eggs contain much fat. When persons eat too much of the sugars, starches, or fats, the body may store them up as fat. For this reason thin persons wishing to gain in flesh eat eggs, nuts, and rich milk.
The Mineral Foods.—The body must have not only lime to help form the bones, but iron, salt, soda, and potash for other parts of the body. All these minerals except salt are found in many of the common foods.
Fig. 8 —Good foods for giving the body power and heat.
Water is one of the most important of the mineral foods because it helps the body use all the other foods. Most people drink too little water to enjoy the best health. The body needs more than two quarts of water every day. There is much water in our foods. More than one half of eggs, meat, and potatoes is made of water, and more than three fourths of tomatoes, green corn, onions, cabbage, and string beans is composed of water. We should drink one quart or more of water daily. It should not be used ice cold, and very little should be taken at meal time.
Fig. 9 —Diagram showing how the drainage from a house with a sick person caused one hundred and twenty cases of typhoid fever at Mount Savage, Maryland.
Water and Health.—One of the common causes of sickness is bad water. Water from shallow wells within a hundred feet of barnyards, pigpens, or other outhouses is usually unsafe to drink. At Newport, Rhode Island, more than eighty persons were made sick with the fever by drinking the water from a well only ten feet deep. The impure water from one spring at Trenton, New Jersey, gave the fever to nearly a hundred persons in one season. At Mount Savage, Maryland, a hundred and twenty persons were made ill by using the water from a spring near a house drain.
Water from rivers and streams running near where many people live is likely to be made impure and is sure to bring sickness and death to some of those who use it. Water from a small stream at Plymouth, Pennsylvania, running past a house occupied by a typhoid patient, gave the fever to over a thousand persons in one month. The water from a small stream at Ithaca, New York, gave the fever to over thirteen hundred people in one season, and an almost equal number caught the fever in a few weeks at Butler, Pennsylvania, by drinking water from a small creek along which some sick persons lived.
Preventing Sickness from Bad Water.—It is better to go thirsty than to drink water which is likely to cause sickness. Any water can be made safe by boiling it one minute. Boiled water is the most healthful kind of water to use. The people of China and Japan seldom use water that has not been boiled.
Many cities using water from rivers run it through a layer of sand and gravel to remove the tiny things that cause so much sickness and death. This makes the water very much purer, but it is not so certain to make the water safe as is boiling it. Bad water makes nearly a quarter of a million of our people sick every year and kills twenty thousand of them.
How much Food does the Body Need?—Most people eat too much. Overeating overworks the stomach, poisons the body, makes one feel lazy, and causes headache. If you chew your food fine and stop eating as soon as hunger is satisfied without tempting the appetite with sweets, you are not likely to overeat.
About one seventh of a pound of building food is needed daily to keep the body in repair, and a quarter of a pound of fat and a pound of starches and sugars are required to help the body do a hard day's work. A half pound of bread, beans, and meat each, a pound of potatoes, a pint of milk, and a quarter of a pound of butter and sugar each, will give a working man all the food he needs for a day.
Fig. 10 —Bird's-eye view of Plymouth, Pennsylvania, showing where the waste from one sick room was thrown on the bank of a stream which several miles below supplied the town with water and caused over one thousand cases of fever and more than a hundred deaths within seven weeks.
Beer and Wine as Foods.—It was once thought that beer and wine were good foods, but hundreds of late experiments show that these drinks are very poor and expensive foods. A half glass of milk is of more use to the body as a food than a full quart of beer. The use of much wine or beer may seem to satisfy the appetite because they deaden the real feeling of hunger. Neither of these drinks can be used by the young without danger of doing much harm.
Fig. 11 —The little glass of milk contains nearly twice as much food for building flesh and blood as the large glass of beer.
PRACTICAL QUESTIONS
1. Why does the body need food?
2. Why do you weigh less after working?
3. What is oxygen?
4. From what do we get body-building foods?
5. In what is starch found?
6. How much water does the body need?
7. Where have people been made sick by using bad water?
8. How can we prevent sickness from bad water?
9. What harm does overeating do?
10. What can you say of beer as a food?