Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 31.djvu/239

Rh eating it for breakfast, as I had done before, the acidity immediately disappeared and has not returned.

In this connection I would say that I had previously observed the same phenomenon of complete exemption from acid stomach while using Carlsbad Zwieback, as the sole farinaceous food at breakfast. Zwieback, as most persons already know, is bread cut in thick slices and baked a second time. In Carlsbad the second baking is carried so far that the slice is browned through its entire thickness. If there remains a white central portion it is not good, and will undergo acid decomposition in the dyspeptic stomach when the properly made Zwieback will remain for a long time unchanged except by gastric fluids. But, while useful as a temporary expedient, Zwieback has not much nutrition after undergoing the three processes of raising, baking, and rebaking to incipient carbonizing. It is incapable of being used alone as a sufficient aliment. To gofio there is no such objection. The roasting is the first and only cooking of the food. Gofio is a food dry cooked, no fluid coming to it till the very moment of eating it; and we know that dry heat produces changes in the structure and composition of cereals different from those produced by moist heat. The roasting process is essentially different from the steaming, baking, or boiling process, and, for one thing, converts starchy particles into more soluble and more friable forms. Moderately browned bread-crust illustrates the change produced.

Perhaps the roasting process has a protecting efficacy against the action of the ferments which are always present in the alimentary tract, ready to effect some form of decomposition should digestion be long enough delayed to allow them to act. In fact, there is no doubt that, in many cases, the stomach actually becomes a receptacle for the cultivation of microbes. As one meal after the other is taken into the stomach, each succeeding mass of fermentable material is affected by the ferment-germs developed and energized by those which have preceded it, till a high degree of potency is reached as in the usual method of bacteria cultivation. In such a case normal digestion is anticipated by fermentation, the wholesomeness of the food is impaired by antecedent decomposition, the gastric power is lessened by contact with noxious acids and gases, and we have the confirmed dyspeptic. The worst of it is, that such a condition is self-propagating, all ordinary means failing to energize digestion or to de-energize the ferment that the former may precede the latter in the usual way. Even the useful and often indispensable stomach-pump sometimes fails to prevent prompt fermentation of the first food taken after its careful use for cleansing purposes. In all my previous personal and professional experience, I found, when once the rapid acidulation of the food demonstrated the potentialization of the microbic ferment, there was no so sure way to overcome it as, in turn, to energize the digestive action by prolonged abstinence from food. In that case the ferment becomes