Milne Edwards, after treating at length the subject of alimentation, and offering many examples, arrives at the conclusion that the mean quantity of bread and meat required to sustain the life of man, consists of sixteen ounces of bread and thirteen ounces of beef daily. This conclusion is sustained by most of the experimentalists, and if lesser quantities are used, they must be of choice selections. A small loaf of bread made of flour, ground from ripe, healthy wheat, will accomplish more for nutrition than two or three larger loaves, baked of damaged and unripe grain; and likewise it is with meat: half a pound of beef from cattle killed instantly in their native pastures, when the flesh retains all its natural juices and sweetness, is worth more for the support of the system than two or three pounds of beef from animals that have been fasted and terrified, and have thereby lost, in a very great measure, their nutritious qualities.
The flesh of mammalia undergoes a great change in its nutritive qualities by reason of fasting, disturbance of sleep, and long-continued suffering, resulting in its becoming not only worthless, but deleterious.
XIV.
Vegetable substances alone will not sustain life for a great length of time in every climate, but there is a vast difference between the wants of man at the equator and his necessities at the pole.
Nature requires for the working of her plans materials of diverse natures: neither the oil, nor starch, nor sugar, will sustain life alone. Chemical analysis and physiological history point out to us how positive is the law which fixes the component parts of grains and plants, and how imperative the necessity of adjusting in alimentation these forms of nutritive matter, which spring up on every side in profusion, and offer endless variety to the wants of man.
There must be harmony of certain principles; there must be union of starch, of gluten, and fat, to complete the process of digestion and assimilation. To feed a patient upon arrow-root, tapioca, or sago, and the like, is to consign him to certain death. Instinct impels us sometimes to make use of articles which our habits have thrown aside.
XV.
It appears from the reasoning of Baron Liebig, that when we replace the flesh and bread of ordinary diet by juicy vegetables and fruits, the blood is beyond all doubt altered in its chemical character, the alkaline carbonates being substituted for the phosphoric acid and alkaline phosphates, which are supposed to exert a disturbing influence in so many diseases, especially typhoid and inflammatory affections. The gluten of grain, and the albumen of vegetable juices, are identical in composition with the albumen of blood, but there are varieties of wheat, the ashes of which are in quantity and in relative proportion of the salts the same as those of boiled and lixiviated meats, and it cannot be maintained that bread made of such flour would, if it were the only food taken, support life permanently.
The experiments of the French academicians, show that dogs fed exclusively on white bread, made from the sifted flour, died in forty days; but when fed on black bread (flour with the bran), they lived without disturbance of health. Bread should always be made of grains grown in healthy places, and should contain the entire seed, with the exception of the husk; then it will realize the idea of Paracelsus: “When a man eats a bit of bread, does he not therein consume heaven and earth, and all of the heavenly bodies, inasmuch as heaven by its fertilizing rain, the earth by its soil, and the sun by its luminous and heat-giving rays, have all contributed to its production, and are all present in the one substance?”
Desiccated vegetables, which have lost the water of vegetation and other gaseous elements, which chemistry thus far has been unable to discover, cannot adequately replace the fresh articles; the particular principle, the water of vegetation, can no more be restored to them than the dust of the crushed quartz can be recrystallized by the simple addition of water.