Food and Morals: 6th EditionClymer, J. F. (John F.)
Religion
Food and Morals: 6th Edition
Clymer, J. F. (John F.)
Food; Sermons, American -- 19th century
Again, chemistry long ago proved that the nitrogenous, albuminous
element of the great food staples (the cereal grains) known as GLUTEN,
was the chief source of muscular tissue in animals, whether obtained
from grasses, seeds, or other vegetable substances; that it could be
digested in a mixture of 1 part gastric juice and 10 parts water; that
it could be separated from its universal attendant, starch, by washing;
and that a kind of tasteless, insipid bread could then be made from
it, which was understood to be useful in a disease called diabetes.
Up to a few years ago these facts comprised pretty much all that the
scientific world knew about GLUTEN. It was known to exist; Koopman,
the German chemist, had shown it to be readily digestible; and it was
non-convertible into sugar, and therefore a safe food for those to whom
starch, or the sugar which results from digested starch, is little
less than poison. These slender facts were not sufficient to satisfy
the accurate investigator at the head of the Health Food Co. He deemed
it probable that this easily digested GLUTEN, this source of all the
tissues of the ox except the fatty ones, would be found to be of vast
value as a separate food for human beings, if while being practically
isolated from the starch and bran associates which nature provides,
it could still retain the pleasant grainy flavor of the cereal which
supplies it. He began a series of investigations to determine the
source of the agreeable flavor existing in sound wheat, and—as modified
by milling and cooking—in commercial wheat flour and the foods prepared
therefrom. The results of the researches of Prof. Henry B. Hill,
of Harvard University, and of those contemporaneously conducted by
Adolph Baeyer, of Munich, led him to conclude that to the oil known as
“furfurol,” existing in the exterior bran and interior cellulose of the
grain, the flour and bread chiefly owed their desirable flavors. The
cellulose of the interior of the wheat was found to contain enough of
the flavoring oil to impart to the insipid gluten an agreeable taste.
Accordingly, methods were devised for separating the gluten and the
cellulose from most of the starch, these three elements alone remaining
after the bran coats were peeled off.
This “whole wheat gluten,” as it is termed by the company, has proved
a most valuable food, not only for the diabetic, to whom it seems to
present the chief hope of recovery, but to the dyspeptic and feeble,
whether in brain or body. Its use has been attended with such signally
successful results as to attract the attention of large numbers of
prominent medical men, among whom I may mention Prof. Austin Flint, of
Bellevue Hospital Medical College, New York city, who passes upon it a
warm encomium in his last great volume. [See Flint’s Clinical Medicine,
pp. 452-53.]
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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