Maintaining Health (Formerly Health and Efficiency)Alsaker, Rasmus Larssen
Science
Maintaining Health (Formerly Health and Efficiency)
Alsaker, Rasmus Larssen
Diet; Hygiene
The milk cure consists in feeding sick people on nothing but milk for
varying periods. Generally the patient is told to either take great
quantities three or four times a day, or to take smaller quantities
perhaps every half hour. The milk cure has no special virtue, except
that it is a monotonous diet. The body soon rebels if forced to subsist
on an excessive amount of but one kind of food. The individual loses his
desire for food and even becomes nauseated. If the advocates of the milk
cure would prescribe milk in moderation, instead of in excess, they
would have better success. (It is fully as harmful to partake of too
much milk as it is to eat excessively of other foods.)
The benefit derived from the milk cure comes from the simplicity, not
from the milk. A grape cure, an orange cure or a bread and milk cure
would be as beneficial. The milk cure is ancient. It was employed
twenty-five centuries ago.
_Clabbered milk_: Clabbered milk or sour milk needs no special
preparation. Put the milk into an earthen or china dish. Do not use
metal dishes, for the lactic acid acts upon various metals. Cover the
dish so as to keep particles of matter in the air away, but the covering
is not to be airtight. Put the dish in a warm place, but not in the sun.
Milk that sours in the sun or in an air-tight bottle is generally of
poor flavor. Clabbered milk is a good food. It does not form big, tough
curds in the stomach, it is easy to digest, and the lactic acid helps to
keep the alimentary tract sweet. The various forms of milk may be used
in similar combinations.
_Buttermilk_: The real buttermilk is what remains of the cream after the
fat has been removed by churning. It is slightly acid and has a
characteristic taste, to most people very agreeable. The flavor is
different from that of artificially made buttermilk. In composition it
is almost like whole milk, except that it contains very little fat.
Many people make buttermilk by beating the clabbered milk thoroughly,
until it becomes light. The buttermilk made from sweet milk and the
various brands of bacterial ferments obtainable at the drug stores is
all right. These ferments have as their basis the lactic acid bacteria,
and if the manufacturers wish to call their germs by other names, such
as Bacillus Bulgaricus, no harm is done. It is unnecessary to add any of
these ferments, for the milk clabbers about as quickly without them.
Buttermilk is an excellent food. The casein can be seen in fine flakes
in the real buttermilk. Adults usually digest buttermilk and clabbered
milk more easily than the sweet milk. The lactic acid seems to be quite
beneficial. Metchnikoff thought for a while that he had discovered how
to ward off decay and old age by means of the lactic acid bacteria in
milk.
Milk can be clabbered quickly by adding lemon juice to sweet milk.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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