Health on the Farm: A Manual of Rural Sanitation and HygieneHarris, H. F. (Henry Fauntleroy)
Science
Health on the Farm: A Manual of Rural Sanitation and Hygiene
Harris, H. F. (Henry Fauntleroy)
Rural health; Sanitation, Household
_Wheat-bread the Best._--It may be confidently asserted that well-cooked
and perfectly dry wheat-breads are to be regarded as being generally the
most digestible of all bread-stuffs. This is not dependent on any
inherent property in wheaten starch as a result of which it is acted upon
more readily by the juices whose office it is to render it fit for
absorption in the body, but is wholly due to the fact that breads of
wheat-flour may be made very dry and light.
As has been already explained, it is particularly necessary that starches
should be thoroughly soaked in saliva, and this can only be accomplished
when the bread is of such consistence that it must be chewed for a time,
and so dry that it will readily absorb the salivary secretion. The
writer, then, would advocate well cooked light-bread or bakers' bread, or
toast made from either, as being the best of all food-stuffs of this
character. The crusts of biscuit a day or so old are quite digestible, as
are also waffles, if made with little grease and cooked thoroughly. The
soft inner portion of biscuit and that of hot rolls, as well as
batter-cakes, is decidedly unwholesome.
Graham-bread should not be constantly indulged in for the reason that it
contains multitudes of sharp particles of the husk of the grain that cut
the delicate mucous membrane of the stomach and intestines as it passes
along, and if its use be long and continued, severe ill effects
necessarily follow.
In this connection attention should also be called to the common
error that particles of husk are of advantage to breads of all
sorts; the former consist chemically of exactly the same thing as
sand, and are quite as indigestible, and this, in connection with
what has just been said of their action on the delicate mucous
membranes of the intestinal tract, should be quite enough to
convince anyone that they are not only useless, but injurious. It
is true that the irritation produced by the husk will oftentimes
cause the bowels to act, but results of the same character may be
induced by many other agencies, within themselves less harmful.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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