HOW ALCOHOL RETARDS DIGESTION.
And here, in order to give those that aren’t familiar with, the process of digestion, a clear notion of that crucial operation, and the effect produced when alcohol is taken with food, we quote from the lecture of an english consultant, Dr. Henry Monroe, on “The physical Action of Alcohol.” he asserts :
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“every type of substance employed by man as food consists of sugar, starch, oil and glutinous matters, mingled together in assorted proportions ; these are created for the support of the animal frame. The glutinous principles of food fibrine, albumen and casein are employed to build up the structure ; while the oil, sugar and starch are customarily used to generate heat in the body.
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“the 1st step of the digestive process is the breaking up of the food in the mouth by means of the jaws and teeth. On this being done, the saliva, a viscid liquor, is poured into the mouth from the salivary glands, and as it mixes with the food, it performs a very important part in the operation of digestion, rendering the starch of the food soluble, and steadily changing it into a kind of sugar, after that the other elements become more miscible with it. Virtually a pint of saliva is furnished every twenty four hours for the utilising of an adult. When the food has been masticated and mixed with the saliva, it is then passed into the gut, where it is acted on by a juice released by the filaments of that organ, and poured into the belly in large amounts whenever food comes in touch with its mucous coats. It is composed of a dilute acid known to the chemists as hydrochloric acid, composed of hydrogen and chlorine, united together in certain definite proportions. The gut juice contains, also, a strange organic-ferment or decomposing substance, containing nitrogen something of the character of yeast named pepsine, which is simply soluble in the acid just named. That gut juice acts as a straightforward chemical solvent, is proved by the indisputable fact that, after death, it’s been known to melt the gut itself.”
It is an mistake to suppose that, after a good dinner, a pitcher of spirits or beer assists digestion ; or that any liquor containing alcohol even sour lager can in any fashion help digestion. Mix some bread and meat with gastric juice ; put them in a phial, and keep that phial in a sand-bath at the slow heat of 98 degrees, on occasion shaking quickly the contents to imitate the motion of the gut ; you will find, after six or eight hours, the entire contents mixed into one pultaceous mass. If to another phial of food and gut juice, treated in the same way, I add a pitcher of pale ale or a quantity of alcohol, at the end of seven or eight hours, or even some days, the food is scarcely acted upon at all . This is a fact ; and if you are led to ask why, I answer, because alcohol has the peculiar power of chemically influencing or decomposing the stomach juice by precipitating one of its principal components, viz, pepsine, rendering its solvent properties much less effective. Hence alcohol cannot be considered either as food or as a solvent for food. Not as the second certainly, for it will not act with the gastric juice.
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” ‘It is a remarkable fact, ‘ announces Dr. Dundas Thompson, ‘that alcohol, when added to the digestive fluid, produces a white precipitate, so that the liquid is no longer capable of digesting animal or plant matter. ‘ ‘The use of alcoholic stimulants, ‘ say Drs. Todd and Bowman, ‘retards digestion by coagulating the pepsine, an essential element of the gastric juice, and thus interfering with its action. Were it not that wine and spirits are quickly soaked up, the advent of these into the belly, in any quantity, would be a complete bar to the digestion of food, as the pepsine would be lead to from the solution as quickly as it was made by the belly. ‘ Spirit, in any quantity, as a dietary accessory, is pernicious on account of its antiseptic qualities, which fight the digestion of food by the assimilation of water from its particles, in direct antagonism to chemical operation.”
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