Beverages, Alcohol and Tobacco : Part 2

A Handbook of Health
by Woods Hutchinson

(Page 12 of 32)

The most disturbing effects of tea and coffee upon the digestion are due to the tannin which they contain if boiled too long, especially in the case of tea. This tannin, fortunately, will not dissolve in water except by prolonged boiling or steeping; so that if tea is made by pouring boiling water over the tea leaves and pouring it off again as soon as it has reached the desired strength and flavor, and coffee by being just brought to a boil and then not allowed to stand more than ten or fifteen minutes before use, no injurious amounts of tannin will be found in them. Tea, made by prolonged stewing on the back of the stove, owes its bitter, puckery taste to tannin, and is better suited for tanning leather than for putting into the human stomach.

Boys and girls up to fifteen or sixteen years of age are much better off without tea, coffee, or cocoa; for they need no artificial stimulants to their appetites, while at the same time their nervous systems are more liable to injury from the harmful effects of over-stimulation. If the beverages are taken at all, they should be taken very weak, and with plenty of milk and cream as well as sugar.

Alcohol

How Alcohol is Made. The most dangerous addition that man has ever made to the water which he drinks is alcohol. It is made by the action of the yeast plant on wet sugar or starch - a process called fermentation. Usually the sugar or starch is in the form of the juice of fruits; or is a pulp, or mash, made from crushed grains like barley, corn, or rye. As the spores of this yeast plant are floating about almost everywhere in the air, all that is usually necessary is to let some fruit juice or grain pulp stand at moderate warmth, exposed to the air, when it will begin to "sour," or ferment.

Wine. When the yeast plant is set to work in a tub or vat of grape juice, it attacks the fruit sugar contained in the juice, and splits it up into alcohol and carbon dioxid, so that the juice becomes bubbly and frothy from the gas. When from seven to fifteen per cent of alcohol has been produced, the liquid is called wine. It contains, besides alcohol, some unchanged fruit sugar, fruit acids, and some other products of fermentation (known as ethers and aldehydes), which give each kind of wine its special flavor.

Beer, Ale, and Cider. If the yeast germ be set to work in a pulp or mash of crushed barley or wheat, the starch of which has been partly turned into sugar by malting, it breaks up the sugar into alcohol and carbon dioxid. When it has brewed enough of the starch to produce somewhere from four to eight per cent of alcohol, then the liquid, which still contains about three or four per cent of a starch-sugar called maltose, is called beer, or ale. It is usually flavored with hops to give it a bitter taste and make it keep better. If the same process be carried out in apple juice, we get the well known hard cider with its biting taste.

Whiskey, Brandy, and Rum. When left to itself, the process of fermentation in most of these sugary or starchy liquids will come to a standstill after a while, because the alcohol, when it reaches a certain strength in the liquid, is, like all other toxins, or poisons produced by germs, a poison also to the germ that produces it. The yeast-bacteria probably produce alcohol as a poison to kill off other germs which compete with them for their share of the sugar or starch. So even the origin of this curious drug-food shows its harmful character. We should hardly pick out the poison produced by one germ to kill another germ as likely to make a useful and wholesome food.

If man had been content to leave this fermentation process to nature, it is probable that many of the worst effects of alcohol would never have been heard of. But these lighter forms of alcoholic drinks did not satisfy the unnatural cravings which they had themselves created. Some people never can leave even bad-enough alone. So man, with an ingenuity which might have been much better used, sought a way of getting a liquor which would contain more alcohol than nature, unaided, could be made to brew in it. A little experimenting showed that the alcohol in fermenting juices was lighter than water; so that by gently heating the fermenting mass, the alcohol would evaporate and pass off as vapor, with a little of the steam from the water. Then, by catching this vapor in a closed vessel and pouring cold water over the outside of the vessel, it could be condensed again in the form of a clear, brownish fluid of burning taste, containing nearly fifty per cent of alcohol, instead of the original five or six.

This evaporated or distilled mixture of alcohol and water, if made from a mash of corn, wheat, rye, or potatoes, is called whiskey; if from fruit-juice, brandy. A similar liquor, made out of fermented rice, is known as arrack in India, or saké in Japan; and the liquor made from fermented molasses is called rum.

Alcohol not a True Food, but a Drug. The much disputed question as to whether alcohol is a food or not, is really of little or no practical importance. It is quite true, as might be expected, from its close relation to sugar and the readiness, for instance, with which it will burn in an alcohol lamp or stove, that alcohol, in small amounts, is capable of being burned in the body, thus giving it energy. This may give it a certain limited value in some forms of sickness, as, for instance, in certain fevers and infections, when the stomach does not seem to be able to digest food. But here it acts as a medicine rather than as a true food and, like all other medicines, should be used only under skilled medical advice and control. For practical purposes, any trifling food value it may have is more than offset by its later poisonous and disturbing effects and, secondly, by its enormous expensiveness.

The greatest amount of alcohol that could be consumed in the body at all safely would barely supply one-tenth of the total fuel value needed; and if any one were to attempt to supply the body with energy by the use of alcohol, he would be blind drunk before he had taken one-third of the amount required. From the point of view of expense alone, to take alcohol for food is like killing buffalos for their tongues and letting the rest of the carcass go to waste, as the Indians and pioneer hunters of the plains used to do. It never has more than a fraction of the food value of the grain or fruit out of which it was made; and the amount of nutriment that it contains costs ten times as much as it would in any of the staple foods.

Houghton Mifflin Company
Copyright, 1911, By Woods Hutchinson
All Rights Reserved
Tenth Impression

About the Author

Woods Hutchinson (1862-1930) was an American physician, born at Selby, Yorkshire, England. He graduated from Penn College, Oskaloosa, Iowa, in 1880 and received his medical degree from the University of Michigan four years later. He worked as a professor of anatomy at the State University of Iowa and then became a professor of comparative pathology at the University of Buffalo.