Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 90.djvu/763

 Popular Science Monthly

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��This Machine Tells You How Much You Ought to Eat

HERE is a machine that tells you what to eat, or, more accurately speaking, how much you are eating in the terms that the chemist uses to measure food values.

It is a calculating scales from the dial of which one reads the number of calories and the number of grams of protein in the portion of food on the scale pan. The principle is similar to that of the commercial computing scales, which, if the price per pound be known, shows by the indicator the retail price of the amount of merchandise being weighed.

From a dietetic standpoint it is meaning- less to weigh food in pounds. The proper unit of the fuel value or energ\- yielding power of food is the calorie. Lettuce con- tains 65 calories per pound and olive oil contains 4200 per pound.

Wide differences are also found in the protein or flesh building contents of foods. Pure oils, starches and sugar contain no protein at all and a Robinson Crusoe would starv^e to death if his desert island were one vast mountain of starch and sugar with fountains of purest olive oil, honey and maple syrup gushing from its side.

So the hungry man who wishes to eat scientifically sits down to dinner and places his soup plate on the scale pan. He first adjusts the tare weight (on the worm thread at the left) to offset the weight of the plate. Then the poured in, which c; the fan-shaped dial swing sideways. The scientific diner now finds the word "soup" under the heading "Cal- ories" and reads directly from the scales the num- ber of calories he is to consume Protein can be read separately on another portion of the dial. Each food must be weighed separately, for the machine can't think straight if one tries to weigh butter and bread

���A collection of buffalo skulls and elk antlers, found recently in a secluded valley in the West in a remarkable state of preservation

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���The calculating food scale which measures the energy value of each dish that you eat

��Relics of the Almost Extinct American Buffalo

OW and then, through the West one finds such a collection of horns and heads of the now almost extinct American buffaloes, as is shown in the picture above. The massiveness and strength of the buffalo is phenomenal. Were a large steer's skull placed alongside the big buffalo head at the right-hand corner of the picture, it would appear puny and shell-like by comparison. The horns and frontal bone in the immediate foreground are the re- ains of the head of a Rocky Mountain B ighorn. The branching antlers shown belonged to a one-time ma- jestic elk, the largest and most lordly of the American deer kind, with the exception of the moose. The horns to the left are an especially fine set. As the elk is far more war>' than the buffalo and moreover does not travel, as a rule.

��together.- Such a calculating food scale should find practical use in the numerous investigations and demonstrations now being conducted to determine the cost of living.

��as a rule, m large herds, he has not suffered the practi- cal extinction which has befallen the buffalo, and now all the Western State game laws afford him adequate protection. His distinctly American name is W^apiti.

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