“Oxidizability cannot be made the measure of usefulness in regard to this substance.”
Professor Gruber, president of the Royal Institute of Hygiene, Munich, said:—
“Does alcohol truly deserve to be called a food substance? Obviously, only such substances can be called food material, or be employed for food, as, like albumen, fat, and sugar, exert non-poisonous influence in the amounts in which they reach the blood and must circulate in it in order to nourish * * * * Although alcohol contributes energy it diminishes working ability. We are not able to find that its energy is turned to account for nerve and muscle work. Very small amounts, whose food value is insignificant, show an injurious effect upon the nervous system.”
Sir Victor Horsley, the well-known London surgeon, said:—
“We know that alcohol lowers the temperature of the body. It can only do that by diminishing the activity of the vital processes. It also diminishes very greatly the power of the muscles, and it diminishes the intellectual power of the nervous system. To call an agent that causes such diminution of activity throughout the whole body a food is ridiculous.”
An editorial in the Journal of the [American] Medical Association said:
“The fallacy of the reasoning which would place alcohol among the foods is very apparent when we put it in the form of a syllogism: All foods are oxidized in the body; alcohol is oxidized in the body; therefore alcohol is food. As logically we might say: ‘All birds are bilaterally symmetrical; the earthworm is bilaterally symmetrical; therefore the earthworm is a bird.’ Oxidation within the body is simply one of several important properties of food, as bilateral symmetry is one of several important characteristics of a bird.”
Schafer’s Physiology says:—
“It cannot be doubted that any small production of energy resulting from the oxidation of alcohol is more than counterbalanced by its deleterious influences as a drug upon the tissue elements, and especially upon those of the nervous system.”