_An excess of starch is apt to pass into the stomach._--We have just seen that inefficient mastication tends to promote over-eating, and what has been said on this head applies to all kinds of food, starchy foods among others. It leads, however, to a further evil as regards these latter; not only does it tend unduly to increase the quantity of them consumed, but it too often causes the stomach and intestines to become flooded with starch in a wholly undigested form. I cannot too frequently repeat that in ancient times, especially in the pre-cooking age, laborious mastication was needed in the case of all starchy foods, partly because they were coarse and fibrous, but chiefly because the starch and other nutritive ingredients had, in order to become available for nutrition, to be liberated from their undigestible cellulose envelopes. In these days of prepared, soft, starchy foods, however, mastication is very little required for these purposes, but in other respects it is as needful as ever, indeed more needful, if the large quantities of starch which are now consumed are to be insalivated effectually. The laborious and sustained mastication to which primitive man was compelled to subject _his limited supplies of uncooked starchy food, went far to effect complete digestion of the starch within the mouth_, for raw starch is freely digested by the saliva,[23] and hence in his case _very little passed into the stomach in a wholly undigested form_. How different is the case with us moderns. Since the opening of the era of agriculture and cooking, man has enormously multiplied his supplies of saccharide, and he now consumes large quantities of starch which has been freed from its cellulose framework by cooking, milling, grinding, and the like, and reduced to a soft or pappy form, such as milk puddings, porridge, boiled potatoes, and new bread, all of which can be swallowed with little or no preliminary chewing; and when food can be swallowed easily, without mastication, few will take the trouble to masticate it. In these circumstances the starch does not undergo adequate salivary digestion, and a large quantity passes wholly undigested into, and out of, the stomach, not beginning to be digested until it reaches the bowel. Small wonder that the latter should rebel again this invasion and that flatulence, pain, and other dyspeptic evils should result.