566 TROPICAL HYGIENE, SANITATION, ETC. 



or an ounce. There should be about i| ounces in his diet. This 

 would be a fair native diet but some variety is essential. 



Meat proteins are more easily assimilated than those of vegetable 

 products and repair the tissues more rapidly in the proportion of 97 



to 80. 



Onlv 50 per cent, of protein should be procured from meats, the 

 remainder from vegetables and bread. Quantities above this place too 

 much strain on the kidneys and liver. Over-eating is common in the 

 tropics, which is so often accompanied by a sedentary life. 



Hindus take no animal food except that in milk and ghee, but 

 they are neither robust nor active. 



There must be a necessary modification of diet to suit the climate. 



The Hindu can live and fare well on rice principally while the 

 Esquimaux require large quantities of fat to maintain their body heat. 



Salted rations only will produce disease, as happened in the first 

 Burmese War and in the Cameroons. On the other hand excess of 

 fresh meat will cause intestinal disorders as happened in the French 

 campaign in Algeria and in the American Civil War, when the 

 enemy's cattle were captured and eaten. 



The Aryan races were meat eaters when they invaded India, but 

 now they are practically vegetarians. 



Meat extracts are not a concentrated form of nourishment, such 

 exist in name only. There is no true meat extract. About four-fifths 

 of the nutritive constituents of meat existing in the muscle fibre are 

 insoluble in either hot or cold water, but they are rendered soluble when 

 acted on by the pancreatic and gastric juices, hence nutritive con- 

 stituents cannot be present in water preparations. 



Some of the connective tissue can be dissolved out as gelatine but 

 its nutritive powers are very low and even then it is not a true tissue 

 former. Small quantities of albumin which are soluble in cold water 

 are insoluble after being coagulated in. hot water. This, however^ 

 will yield to the digestive juices. 



The meat bases, e.g., creatinine, zanthine, &c., and half the salts 

 are dissolved out bv water, the former being nerve stimulants like the 

 caffeine of coffee and are not nutrients. 



When the above nutrients have been peptonized they can be taken 

 in medicinal doses only, as increased quantities cause purging and 

 hence cannot be foods. One pound of beef steak, about 450 grm., is 

 about all the flesh former a man of eleven stone requires in twenty-four 

 hours, which in ex-war times costs about two shillings. The approxi- 

 mate equivalent in meat extract would be six bottles of 4 ounces each,, 

 costing los. 6d. as against is. for the real thing. In addition to 

 that its consumption would be unAvise because it would contain a 

 dangerous amount of nerve excitant and 3J ounces of common salt. 

 How can such preparations be called " meat extracts " ? 



