Madame Young's Guide to Health / Her experience and practice for nearly forty years; a true family herbal, wherein is displayed the true properties and medical virtues of all the roots, herbs, &c., indigenous to the United States, and their combination in all the diseases the human body is heir to; also, an explanation of the human body, its liability to injuries through ignorance of its structure. Dedicated exclusively to her sex.

by Amelia Young

MASTICATION.

Mastication, or chewing, is the first step in the process of digestion. When food is taken, it should be thoroughly masticated, before it is suffered to pass into the stomach, or it is unprepared for the action of the gastric juice. Besides this, the action of chewing causes the food to be mixed with the saliva, which is an important item in the preparation of it for the action of the stomach and its juice. The food should be taken with sufficient moderation, to give time for the process of mastication, and the discharge of saliva from the glands of the mouth. Eating fast, or even talking while chewing, besides its incongruity with politeness and good breeding, is directly at war with thorough mastication.

Many persons seem to think, that hurrying their meals to save time is economy; their business drives them, and they drive their time of meals into the smallest possible compass. This is miserable economy; for, when they hurry down their food, half chewed and half moistened with saliva, it deranges the process of digestion throughout, and, as a consequence, the food not only sits bad on the stomach, and in time causes dyspepsia, but fails to accomplish the sole object of taking it—the nourishment of the body. In order to derive nourishment from food, it must be well digested; hence it must be well masticated. When, therefore, we hurry our eating, we hasten our steps on the wrong road; time curtailed in eating, is worse than hiring money at three per cent. a month. If we cannot spare time to eat, we had better not eat at all; this idea cannot be too deeply impressed upon the minds of all. Thousands, by this kind of careless and reckless eating, have, found themselves the victims of dyspepsia, and all its attendant train of evils; the digestive organs may bear the abuse awhile, without giving many signs of trouble, but the penalty of that broken law must sooner or later come; and it may come in the form of a broken constitution.