38 THE PROTEIN ELEMENT IN NUTRITION 



in quantities up to and exceeding 26 ounces of the dried material. 

 When it is borne in mind that rice swells up on being cooked to 

 almost five times its dried bulk, it will be readily understood 

 how voluminous a diet rice provides. It has been calculated that 

 the gaol diet of Lower Bengal attains such a bulk on being cooked 

 that an ordinary sized stomach would be required to be filled to 

 the extreme limits of its capacity three times a day in order to 

 accommodate the total amount. According to Hutchison, the 

 total capacity of an ordinary sized European stomach is about 

 1,200 grammes, while the weight of a full gaol diet of rice exceeds 

 3,000 to 3,500 grammes. 



Continental and American observers state that rice is absorbed 

 with very great completeness in the intestine, while its progress 

 through the stomach is slow. Thus Hutchison states that practi- 

 cally none of the starch is lost, but the waste of protein amounts 

 to 19 per cent. Rubner and Atwater place the protein absorption 

 at 84 per cent. Oshima,* in his digest of Japanese investigations, 

 gives the average absorption of the protein of rice as 75-6 per 

 cent., and of rice gruel as 56-1 per cent. These results, however, 

 were obtained in the majority of cases when rice was eaten in 

 comparatively small quantities. When the quantity of rice in 

 the diet is large, the digestibility and protein absorption from it 

 falls, and from the results of investigation on prisoners in India 

 there is strong evidence that the protein absorption from rice, or 

 from diets containing rice, varies largely with the actual volume 

 or bulkiness of the diet. 



In diet scales in Europe and America the question of bulk is 

 not one of much importance ; the diets are very much concen- 

 trated, and are never sufficiently voluminous to cause distension 

 of the stomach, while the contrary is commonly the condition 

 met with when large quantities of rice are consumed. This 

 question of bulk is a very important one from the standpoint of 

 the absorption of protein. It was found in feeding experiments 

 on prisoners in Bengal that when a diet was bulky out of all 

 proportion to the nutriment it contained, the absorption of 

 protein was greatly interfered with, and that by decreasing or 

 increasing the quantity of rice in the diet, an increased or de- 

 creased absorption of protein takes place i.e., under certain 

 conditions a decrease in the bulk of a diet will cause not only an 



* Oshima, " A Digest of Japanese Investigations on the Nutrition of Man," 

 U.S. Department of Agriculture, Bulletin No. 159. 



