Waste-products of bacterial fermentation
In the alimentary canal there exists an abundance of carbohydrate and proteid substances which form excellent food material for numerous species of bacteria. The substances produced by the growth of these various kinds of bacteria are numerous. They include the gases, carbon dioxid, hydrogen, hydrogen sulfid, marsh-gas or methane, and ammonia. Butyric, lactic, and other acids, together with alcohol, are also produced as a product of bacterial fermentation in the intestines. Perhaps the most detrimental of all are the substances produced by the bacterial putrefaction of proteids, of which indol and skatol are the two most important.
Under ordinary conditions the bacteria themselves do not penetrate the intestinal walls, and their evil influence would be confined to mechanical disturbance of gas in the digestive organs, and to the destruction of a portion of the Solubility and distribution of bacterial waste-products nutritive material of food, were it not for the fact that these harmful and poisonous waste-products I have mentioned, are soluble, and hence pass through the intestinal walls with the digested food material, into the blood, and are thus distributed throughout the body.
It has been observed in the presence of intestinal congestion, where the food lies in the intestines for an abnormally long period, that the amount of these harmful nitrogenous decomposition products excreted by the kidneys, is considerably increased, proving that these products have circulated throughout the body.
Causes of hardening of the arteries
Arterio-sclerosis, or the hardening of the walls of the arteries, which has for many years been recognized by scientists as one of the principal causes of old age, comes from two causes:
(1) The over-consumption of starchy foods, especially of the cereal group; and (2) by the continued presence, in the blood, of small quantities of poisonous material which gradually destroys the protoplasm of the arterial walls, and causes them to be replaced by a degenerate form of tissue.
For example, alcohol and the poison of syphilis are prolific causes of the hardening of the arteries. If the diet were balanced so as to avoid excesses of starch and these toxic substances, the hardening of the arteries would not take place.
Overeating an ultimate cause of old age