Good Health and How We Won It, With an Account of the New HygieneSinclair, Upton
Science
Good Health and How We Won It, With an Account of the New Hygiene
Sinclair, Upton
Hygiene
Appetite, and hunger, are not synonymous terms with the mere
habit-craving for food which most people consider to be either appetite
or hunger. Real hunger, or appetite, only comes to the body when the
body has earned it. There must be an expenditure of tissue, which
the body requires to be repaired; or there must be a real need for
energy to carry on work before the body will manifest its need for
energy-supplying material. In other words, the body cares nothing
about our likes or dislikes, our whims or our fancies, in the nature
of food, save when it has a real need for food. Professor Chittenden
demonstrated that most people simply eat the entire round of meals from
mere habit. The disturbance when for any reason they miss one or two
meals from the accustomed routine is simply the outcry of a habit and
not the outcry of a real need. While Dr. Kellogg advises that no meal
be missed, yet he also strongly advises us not to eat unless really
hungry, merely drinking a little fruit juice or something of the kind
at the meal hour in order to keep up the normal action of the digestive
organs.
The digestive juice which is manufactured by the body when it is really
hungry and food has been given to it has been shown by Pawlow and
Hanecke to be the most important element in digestion. The chemical
juices produced in the stomach and intestines while food is in them is
of small importance and value compared with the juices that are formed
while food is being chewed when the body has a good appetite or is
really hungry.
This juice begins to flow at the very sight of food, and continues to
from three to five minutes after beginning mastication. The production
of juice in the stomach is stimulated by the contact of food with the
mouth, and only during that contact; so it is obvious that the longer
the food is held in the mouth, if it is held there in enjoyment, and
the more completely it is chewed, so long as chewing is accompanied
by taste, the more thoroughly are the flavors set free by the act of
chewing, and the higher becomes the stimulating effect of these flavors
upon the psychic centers which cause the appetite juice to flow into
the stomach.
These facts prove the dependence of gastric digestion, or stomach
digestion, upon mastication. Pawlow was experimenting with gastric
juice when he hit upon this demonstration; and he has concluded that
we cannot have gastric digestion at all well without thorough mouth
digestion; that the complete mastication of food, in other words, is
the thing necessary to prepare the stomach to receive the food. Thus,
if you chew your food well, the food will be predigested in the mouth,
and when it enters the stomach it will find already there waiting for
it not only enough gastric juice to digest it, but just the particular
kind of gastric juice that is needed.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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