98 OUR BODIES AND HOW WE LIVE 



comprehensive definition : A food is a substance whose 

 nature it is, when taken into the system, to build up and 

 repair the body and to supply it with energy for heat and 

 muscular work without injury to any of its tissues. 



Alcohol in small quantities, as we have just learned, is 

 oxidized in the body, and its energy transformed into heat, 

 as truly as sugar, starch, or fat. It by no means follows, 

 however, that alcohol is therefore a food in the ordinary 

 sense in which the term "food" is used. Many harmful 

 substances, as ether, morphine, and other powerful drugs, 

 are oxidized within the body and furnish a certain amount 

 of energy, and yet nobody classes these as foods. While it 

 may be true from a purely scientific and technical point of 

 view that alcohol by its oxidation may set free a certain 

 amount of energy within the body, the sum total of its 

 effects is injurious rather than beneficial. Hence there 

 is clearly no good reason for calling alcohol a food in the 

 ordinary meaning of the term. 



Standard authorities, moreover, class alcohol as a power- 

 ful drug, a narcotic poison rather than a food. When 

 we stop to think of the possibilities concerned in drinking 

 even a very small quantity of alcoholic liquor, the idea of 

 calling it a food is an evident contradiction of terms. 1 



1 Alcohol does not act as a food ; it cuts short the life of rapidly growing 

 cells or causes them to grow more slowly. LIONEL S. BEALE, M.D., Pro- 

 fessor of Principles and Practice of Medicine, King's College, England. 



I find alcohol to be an agent that gives no strength, that reduces the 

 tone of the blood vessels and heart, that reduces the nervous power, that 

 builds up no tissue, and can be of no use to me or any other animal as a 

 substance for food. SIR HENRY THOMPSON, M.D. 



Certainly alcohol cannot be regarded as an efficacious food for muscles, 

 nerve cells, and the like. Not even in a narrow sense can it take the place 

 of a force-generating food material. ADOLF FICK, M.D., University of 

 Wurzburg, Germany. 



