Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 27.djvu/349

Rh nutritious. Is it bread that we are conjured to buy? Then it is warranted to contain some chemical element; let it be, for example, "the phosphates in large proportion"—a mysterious term which the advertising tradesman has for some time past employed to signify a precious element, the very elixir of life, which somehow or other he has led the public to associate with the nutriment of the brain and nervous system, and vaunts accordingly. He has evidently caught the notion from the advertising druggist, who loudly declares his special forms of half-food, half-physic, or his medicated preparations of beef and mutton, to contain the elements of nutrition in the highest form of concentration, among which have mostly figured the aforesaid "phosphates"—as if they were not among the most common and generally prevalent of the earthy constituents of all our food! Then, lest haply a stomach, unaccustomed to the new and highly concentrated materials, should, as is not improbable, find itself unequal to the task of digesting and absorbing them, a portion of gastric juice, borrowed for the occasion, mostly from the pig, is associated therewith to meet, if possible, that difficulty, and so to introduce the nourishment by hook or by crook into the system. I don't say the method described may not be useful in certain cases, and on the advice of the experienced physician, for a patient exhausted by disease, whose salvation may depend upon the happy combination referred to. But it is the popular belief in the impossibility of having too much of that or of any such good thing, provided only it consists of nutritious food, that the advertiser appeals to, and appeals successfully, and with such effect that the credulous public is being gulled to an enormous extent. Then even our drink must now be nutritious! Most persons might naturally be aware that the primary object of drink is to satisfy thirst, which means a craving for the supply of water to the tissues—the only fluid they demand and utilize when the sensation in question is felt. Water is a solvent of solids, and is more powerful to this end when employed free from admixture with any other solid material. It may be flavored, as in tea and otherwise, without impairing its solvent power, but when mixed with any concrete matter, as in chocolate, thick cocoa, or even with milk, its capacity for dissolving—the very quality for which it was demanded—is in great part lost. So plentiful is nutriment in solid food, that the very last place where we should seek that quality is the drink which accompanies the ordinary meal. Here at least we might hope to be free from an exhortation to nourish ourselves, when desirous only to allay thirst or moisten our solid morsels with a draught of fluid. Not so; there are even some persons who must wash down their ample slices of roast beef with draughts of new milk!—an unwisely devised combination even for those of active habit, but for men and women whose lives are little occupied by exercise it is one of the greatest dietary blunders which can be perpetrated.