HOW ALCOHOL RETARDS DIGESTION.

February 6th, 2010 | by MichaelZ |

And here, so as to relinquish those who aren’t acquainted with, the process of digestion, a transparent plan of that necessary operation, and the impact made when alcohol is taken with food, we quote from the lecture of an English physician, Dr. Henry Monroe, on “The Physiological Action of Alcohol.” He says:

“Each kind of substance employed by man as food consists of sugar, starch, oil and glutinous matters, mingled along in various proportions; these are designed for the support of the animal frame. The glutinous principles of food  fibrine, albumen  and  casein  are utilized to create up the structure; whereas the  oil, starch  and  sugar  are chiefly used to generate heat in the body.

“The primary step of the digestive method is the breaking from the food within the mouth by suggests that of the jaws and teeth. On this being done, the saliva, a viscid liquor, is poured into the mouth from the salivary glands, and because it mixes with the food, it performs a terribly vital part within the operation of digestion, rendering the starch of the food soluble, and gradually changing it into a kind of sugar, after that the opposite principles become additional miscible with it. Nearly a pint of saliva is furnished every twenty-four hours for the utilization of an adult. When the food has been masticated and mixed with the saliva, it is then passed into the stomach, where it’s acted upon by a juice secreted by the filaments of that organ, and poured into the stomach in large quantities whenever food comes connected with its mucous coats. It consists of a dilute acid known to the chemists as hydrochloric acid, composed of hydrogen and chlorine, united together in sure definite proportions. The gastric juice contains, also, a peculiar organic-ferment or decomposing substance, containing nitrogen something of the character of yeast termed  pepsine , which is well soluble within the acid just named. That gastric juice acts as a simple chemical solvent, is proved by the very fact that, after death, it has been known to dissolve the stomach itself.”

It is a mistake to suppose that, once a sensible dinner, a glass of spirits or beer assists digestion; or that any liquor containing alcohol even bitter beer can in any approach assist digestion. Combine some bread and meat with gastric juice; place them during a phial, and keep that phial in a very sand-bath at the slow heat of ninety eight degrees, occasionally shaking briskly the contents to imitate the motion of the abdomen; you will notice, after six or eight hours, the entire contents blended into one pultaceous mass. If to a different phial of food and gastric juice, treated in the identical manner, I add a glass of pale ale or a amount of alcohol, at the top of seven or eight hours, or maybe some days, the food is scarcely acted upon at all. This is a fact; and if you’re led to ask why, I answer, because alcohol has the peculiar power of chemically affecting or decomposing the gastric juice by precipitating one of its principal constituents, viz., pepsine, rendering its solvent properties abundant less efficacious. Hence alcohol will not be thought-about either as food or as a solvent for food. Not as the latter definitely, for it refuses to act with the gastric juice.

“‘It is a remarkable truth,’ says Dr. Dundas Thompson, ‘that alcohol, when added to the digestive fluid, produces a white precipitate, therefore {that the} fluid is now not capable of digesting animal or vegetable matter.’ ‘The employment of alcoholic stimulants,’ say Drs. Todd and Bowman, ‘retards digestion by coagulating the pepsine, an essential component of the gastric juice, and thereby interfering with its action. Were it not that wine and spirits are rapidly absorbed, the introduction of those into the stomach, in any amount, would be an entire bar to the digestion of food, as the pepsine would be precipitated from the answer as quickly as it was formed by the stomach.’ Spirit, in any quantity, as a dietary adjunct, is pernicious on account of its antiseptic qualities, that resist the digestion of food by the absorption of water from its particles, in direct antagonism to chemical operation.”

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