30 AGRICULTURE OF MAINE. 



the uses of food in the body and what constitutes a good food. 

 We have an old definition which says that food is anything 

 which will build up body tissue as supply energy. Now we 

 know that that is not inclusive enough today. It is true that the 

 foods must build body tissue and that these foods must supply 

 us with the energy to do work. We might liken our bodies to 

 an engine, if we will, that we put coal on ; as we put fuel into 

 this engine in order to give it power to do work, so we must 

 put fuel into our bodies in order to give them the power to do 

 work. We know that we need material to build up tissues in 

 the growth of the human being as well as in the growth of 

 plants or in the growth of animals, and that we need to supply 

 a comparatively constant amount for tissue repair during normal 

 daily life. But we have a third function which foods must do 

 besides building body tissues and yielding energy, and that func- 

 tion is the regulation of body processes. It has only been within 

 the last few years that we have paid much attention to this 

 phase of the food problem, and it is in this respect that the 

 apple is perhaps more important than for any other reason. 



The sugars and the starches are good energy producers in the 

 body, and we said that we had ten and eight-tenths per cent of 

 sugar in the apple. So that the apple will yield energy in the 

 body. It will help in supplying the power to do work, and in 

 building tissue, because we have the mineral matter present in 

 the body. Mineral matter is one of the important tissue build- 

 ers because it must be present in all of the tissues and cells ot 

 the body. We often think we have mineral matter simply in the 

 bones and in the structural tissues of the body ; but we have it 

 present in every cell of the body — in the muscle tissue, in the 

 blood, in the nervous tissue, and so on. The mineral matter 

 that we find in the apple is a good source for this tissue building 

 material. But it is most important, I should say, in the case of 

 fruits and vegetables, to consider the third problem of the 

 regulation of body processes. The uses of fresh fruits have 

 greatly increased in the temperate zone within the last few 

 years. We use a great deal more of the fruits in our diet today 

 than we did a number of years ago. 



Now, there is a physiological justification we might say for 

 this increased use of fruits. We have a tendency in our diet to 

 use more and more of the ready prepared and concentrated 



