INSTINCT AS A GUIDE IN DIETETICS. 151 



not an economical food for the workingman. But that unscientific personage had 

 learned to prefer the fine white loaf to the coarse brown one, and declined to be a 

 convert to the new theory. His scientific brother naturally ascribed this to the 

 force of habit or prejudice, and was very severe upon the obstinate wastefulness 

 of the poor in throwing away an important part of their scanty fare. But, as we 

 now know, the instinct that led the workingman to stick to the bread which the 

 experience of many generations had taught him to prefer was right in its choice. 

 The brown bread did, indeed, contain more nutriment than the white, but in the 

 process of digestion the body got more nutriment from the latter than the former, 

 The action of the bran particles on the alimentary canal caused the coarse bread 

 to pass through it too rapidly, and the loss in this way was greater than the gain 

 in the other. Improved processes now furnish us a fine flour in which the old 

 waste of nutritious material is largely prevented ; but even under the old methods 

 of mining, the notion that "white bread is the poor man's food" was correct. It 

 was brown bread that was the luxury, suited to the dyspeptic rich man, but too 

 dear for the healthy and hard-working poor. Science was too hasty in its first 

 inferences, and has since learned that the digestibility of food and its aptitude for 

 assimilation must be considered, and not merely its chemical composition. 



Equally based upon sound principles is the working man's liking for animal 

 food. Scientific men have demonstrated that vegetable food contains essentially 

 the same nutritive matter, while it is a good deal cheaper. They have explained 

 that the fibrine of flesh has a very close analogy to the gluten of wheat, and is 

 fitted to serve the same purpose in nourishing the body, and so with animal fats 

 and vegetable oils and the other leading constituents of the two kinds of diet ; 

 but the poor man nevertheless persists in spending as much of his hard earnings 

 for meat as he can possibly afford. If he cannot have the coveted food every 

 day, he will have it when he can, if only once a week. Recent German investi- 

 gations prove that this preference for flesh has somewhat the same economical 

 arguments in its favor as that for the fine bread in comparison with the coarse. 

 It has long been known that, as a general rule, flesh is easier of digestion, and is 

 therefore more perfectly assimilated, than bread and other vegetable food. We 

 must consider not merely how much nutriment each puts into the body, but how 

 much of it remains there and how much is rejected as waste. Good authorities 

 have stated that, if equal nutritive quantities of each are eaten, the loss from the 

 vegetable is twice as much as from the animal food ; but it would seem from these 

 recent experiments and analyses that the waste of nutriment is often much greater 

 in the case of vegetables. 



Professor Hofmann gave to a servant of his looo grams of potatoes, 207 

 grams of lentils, and 40 grams of bread. On an average of six days it was found 

 that 356 grams of the solid matter were digested, 116 remaining undigested; 38.7 

 of nitrogenous matter had been digested, 44.4 undigested; 263.7 of starch 

 digested, and 28.2 not. It would here appear that not even one-half of the total 

 albuminous matter of this vegetable diet had been digested. 



