GENEKAL HEALTH HINTS 705 



Tea, even in a very small quantity, completely para- 

 lyzed the pty aline of the saliva, while wine jDromptly 

 arrested salivary digestion. Salivary digestion was 

 not formerly considered a matter of very great con- 

 sequence, as it was supposed that the action of saliva 

 upon the digestion of food was quickly suspended in 

 the stomach by the secretion of hydrochloric acid; but 

 the observations of Ewald and others, which have been 

 confirmed by the author in the chemical examination 

 of nearly three thousand stomach liquids, indicates that 

 salivary digestion proceeds in a normal stomach so 

 rapidly as to cause the complete disappearance of 

 starch by the end of the first hour of digestion. Many 

 cases of intestinal dyspepsia are doubtless due to the 

 failure of salivary and peptic digestions in the stomach. 



FOOD COMBINATIONS 



Many persons suffer from indigestion, not because 

 they eat too much, or because they eat indigestible 

 articles of food, but by reason of the fact that the sev- 

 eral articles of food taken together do not make natural 

 and wholesome combinations. The principle involved 

 in the question of the proper combination of foods is 

 simply this,— different articles of food are digested 

 chiefly or entirely in different portions of the alimen- 

 tary canal ; for instance, meat is chiefly digested in the 

 stomach, while the digestion of milk takes place almost 

 entirely in the small intestines. Fats and cane sugar 

 are digested only in the intestines. Vegetables require 

 considerable digestion in the stomach as a preparation 

 to intestinal digestion. Fruits, if well disintegrated, 

 leave the stomach, as a rule, within an hour or two 



