Rocking Grass

Currently Featured

Encyclopaedia Britannica 1902: Dietetics (Part 3)

This is from the entry in the 1902 Encyclopaedia Britannica on Dietetics. See Part 1 and Part 2.

Diet in Childhood and Youth - At this stage of life the diet must obviously be the best, which is a transition from that of infancy to that of adult age. Growth is not completed, but yet entire surrender of every consideration to the claim of growth is not possible, nor indeed desirable. Moreover that abundance of adipose tissue, or reserve new growth, which a baby can bear, is an impediment to the due education of the muscles of the boy or girl. The supply of nutriment need not to be so continuous as before, but at the same time should be more frequent than for adults. Up to at least fourteen or fifteen years of age the rule should be four meals a day, varied indeed, but nearly equal in nutritive power and in quantity, that is to say, all moderate, all sufficient. The maturity the body then reaches involves a hardening of the bones and cartilages, and a strengthening of the digestive organs, which in healthy young persons enables us to dispense with some of the watchful care bestowed upon their diet. Three full meals a day are generally sufficient, and the requirements of mental training may be allowed to a certain extent to modify the attention to nutrition which hitherto has been paramount. But it must not be forgotten that the changes in figure and in internal organs are not completed till several years have passed, and that they involve increased growth and demand full supplies. As less bulky food is used, care should be taken that it is sufficiently nutritious, and habits should be acquired which conduce to making the most of it for the maintenance of strength.

The nutritiousness of food depends on digestibility and concentration. Food is digestible when it yields readily its constituents to the fluids destined for their reduction to absorbable chyme. It is more or less concentrated, according as a given weight contains more or less matter capable of supporting life. The degree in which they possess these qualifications united constitutes the absolute nutritive value of alimentary matters.

The degree of cohesion in the viands influences digestibility. Tough articles incapable of being completely ground up by the teeth, remain unused, while fluids and semifluids lead the van of digestibles. The tissues of young vegetables and young animals are for this reason more digestible than old specimens. It is desirable also that the post mortem rigidity, which lasts several days in most instances, should have merged into softness before the meat is cooked, or should have been anticipated by warming before the flesh is cold. In warm climates and exceptionally warm weather the latter course is the preferable. The dietician, especially when the feeding of the young is in question, will prefer these methods of culinary preparation which most break of the natural cohesion of the viands. And it may be noticed that the force of cohesion acts in all directions, and that it is no advantage for an article to be laterally friable is it remains stringy in a longitudinal direction.

Fat interposed between the component parts of food diminishes its digestibility. It is the interstitial fat between the fasciuli of muscular fibre in beef which renders it to young persons and to dyspeptics less digestible than mutton.

A temperature above that of the body retards digestion. Meat, which is digested by the gastric juice in the stomach, has time to cool before it gets there; but farinaceous food, which depends on its conversion into chyme on the salivary glands, suffers a serious loss if by reason of being too hot it cannot avail itself of the saliva supplied by the mouth. It should also be borne in mind that a temperature much above that of the body cracks the enamel of the teeth.

Excessive concentration impairs digestibility. The principal medium by which nutriment is carried through the absorbent membrane of the digestive canal is water. There is no doubt that it passes more rapidly by endosmosis than anything else. The removal, then, of water is an injury to viands, and drying, salting, over-frying, over-roasting, and even over-boiling renders them less soluble in the digestive juices, and so less nutritious. A familiar illustration of this may be taken from eggs. Let an egg be lightly boiled, poached in water, custarded, or raw, and the stomach even of an invalid can bear it; but let it be baked in a pudding which requires a hot oven, or boiled hard, or otherwise submitted to a high temperature for a prolonged period, and it becomes a tasteless, leathery substance, which can be of no more use in the stomach than so much skin or hair. It is obvious then that it is mainly in a commercial point of view that articles of diet can be called nutritious in proportion to their concentration. About this there can be no question; milk adulterated from the pump is worth so much less than pure milk, and a pound of beef steak sustains a man longer than a pint of veal broth.
It’s interesting to see that the “traditional” British Isles cooking, consisting of boiling vegetables for a long time, was seen as being less than desirable even in 1902. It’s also interesting to note how much the use of language in a specialised area like this has changed; you’d have a hard time finding “nutriment” and “chyme” in modern writing. Not to mention that there’s something subtly odd about word order and the use of prepositions.

posted 9 March 2008 @ 16:20 by Drew Shiel » One Comment

• Categories

  • Britannica
  • Equipment
  • Festival
  • Finnish Food
  • Food
  • Irish Food
  • Medieval Food
  • Meta
  • Obscure Supplies
  • Personal
  • Review
  • Seasonal
  • Spices and Herbs
  • Spotted

• Sponsors

• Meta

  • Login
  • Valid XHTML
  • Valid CSS
  • WordPress
  • sIFR Rich Typography
  • Gridlock 1.4 by hyalineskies