166 FOODS 



has that of 7 calories per gram. The maximum food-allowance daily 

 qf alcohol, 60 cubic centimeters, with a specfic gravity of 0.820, weighs 

 49.2 grams, and would therefore furnish about 364.4 gross calories of 

 energy. But another element enters into the food-question itself: Is 

 alcohol a fat-sparer, a carbohydrate-sparer, and a proteid-sparer ? In 

 other words, when used for food (as, e.g., in illness), does alcohol furnish 

 only energy, or does it, as real foods do, also save the wearing-away of the 

 proximate principles of the tissues and thus of the tissues themselves? 

 If it does hot, alcohol is of little use as a food in illness, for it does not 

 replace or save loss of body-weight. Zunz and Geppert showed in 

 1887 that alcohol neither increased to any extent the consumption of 

 oxygen nor changed the excreted amount of carbon dioxide. In other 

 words, alcohol in the amount named does save the fats and carbohy- 

 drates of the tissues from consumption by the wear and tear of their 

 living processes, for the alcohol itself furnished the energy required by 

 the organism, leaving the tissue-fat and -carbohydrates nearly untouched. 

 This work, repeated and corroborated by many other competent men 

 since, establishes firmly the fact that alcohol spares at least the fat of 

 the body-tissues and therefore may be of use as a real food in therapeutics, 



But it does more than this as a food, for recent experiments, often 

 elaborate and painstaking to an extreme degree, have shown that feeding 

 alcohol spares the proteid of the tissues as well as the fat and carbohy- 

 drates (the latter existing only, of course, in comparatively small amount). 

 This is now practically as certain as it is that alcohol spares fat; to open 

 minds this important proposition is proved beyond a doubt. Atwater r 

 for example, found that 72 grams of alcohol daily taken by a man spared 

 0.2 gram of nitrogen and spared also one-fifth of the carbon- 

 excretion in respiration two-thirds as much nitrogen as was 

 spared by an isodynamic (equal-calorie) value of sugar, the latter being 

 well known as a proteid-sparer. Ott snowed that in the fever-condition 

 also, alcohol acts as well as sugar as a proteid-sparer. Clopatt found 

 that for the first five days of a twelve-day period it caused an increase 

 of proteid katabolism, but acted as a proteid-sparer, decreasing, that 

 is, the katabolism, for the other seven days. Again, Neumann, in 

 elaborate measurements proved beyond a doubt that in doses of 

 from 50 to 100 grams daily, it caused a noteworthy decrease in 

 proteid katabolism, although not acting in quite the same way 

 as fat in this respect. To have proved this sparing of proteid is 

 even more important than to have shown it a fat-sparer, for while fat 

 serves as a more or less dead and inactive store of material from which 

 at need energy could be produced, the proteid of the body is all active 

 and as such of vital importance to the organism either as muscle-cells, 

 epithelium, or other essential organs. 



On the body-temperature alcohol exerts in general a lowering effect, 

 as was asserted first in 1848 by Dumeril and Demarquay. Wendt 

 recently showed that even small amounts of alcohol at first, for ten 

 minutes only, raised the temperature 0.1 or 0.2, followed by an equal 

 lowering below its original position for twenty to thirty minutes. When 



