More injurious is the action of various kinds of noxious food, especially if putrid, which remain for a long time in the intestines, thus creating a chemical laboratory constantly preparing poisons. Even the residue of less harmful foods, especially albuminous, even if of good quality, when taken into the body, can become deleterious if it remains too long in the intestines. It will, therefore, be a part of the highest wisdom to exercise care in having these highly important organs, on which all our nutrition depends, in thoroughly good working order by keeping them clean and by removing stagnant material. We have already designated the best way to effect this in a previous chapter, and we desire here to say a few words on the abuse of, and great dangers arising from, remedies constantly prescribed for constipation. We have insisted in the foregoing pages on the necessity of a daily bowel movement, and have stated that appropriate food is the best way to attain this. Food that leaves no residue, like meat or finely ground cereals, is incapable of producing a stool. Hence, as Schmidt has pointed out, constipation is often caused by the food being too completely absorbed. Strassberger, by analyzing and counting the number of bacteria in the stools, found that certain cases of constipation were caused by a diminished fermentation in the bowels. Lohrisch has found that in persons whose intestines possess a marked power for absorption there does not remain in them a residue sufficient for the action of the bacteria, and thus there will not be a sufficient fermentation to act as a stimulant to the intestinal walls to cause them to expel their contents. Uncooked cold milk (especially buttermilk, whey, sour milk, “yoghurt,” kefir, etc.), and dishes containing vegetables and fruit, grapes, puree of prunes, marmalade of oranges, and brown bread (Graham, Pumpernikel, etc.) should produce a movement of the bowels every day in a normal man or woman. There are, however, many exceptions to this, especially in the case of women, caused either by previous errors in diet, or by negligence in answering at once the demands of the bowels for an immediate evacuation, and also, very often, by an abuse of purgatives. All this is, of course, aggravated in those in whom the innervation of the bowels, which is controlled by the splanchnic nerves and the vagus, is altered by the degenerative condition of certain glands which influence these nerves: the sexual organs and the thyroid.