34 
may recover from two or even three times the dose fatal to controls.® 
While these facts are not sufficient to justify the conclusion that in 
many cases alcohol has not a true food value, yet they are sufficient 
to indicate caution in applying, wdthout further consideration, the 
brilliant and very exact results on the proteid sparing power of 
alcohol to practical dietaries.^ 
The method of experimenting pursued in the above, namely, the 
determination of the effect of the long-continued use of a drug upon 
the action of other drugs seems adapted to the study of other problems 
in pharmacology such as those dealing with effects of food pre- 
servatives, for example, where experiments made upon healthy men 
and animals with small doses have often led to as inconclusive results 
as similar experiments with alcohol. 
« It is probable that the explanation of the increased resistance to acetonitrile of 
animals fed largely upon carbohydrates is that such animals do not break up so much 
of the nitrile. Thus in experiments upon two dogs, one of which had been kept for 
some time upon a diet consisting largely of lean meat, the other upon a diet consisting 
largely of rice, lard, and sugar, the meat-fed dog excreted 1.8 times as much cyanogen 
in the form of sulphocyanate, after a given dose of acetonitrile, as did the carbohydrate- 
fed dog; the symptoms of poisoning were also more severe in the former. Proteids are 
generally held to increase certain physiological oxidations; hence the above results 
are in accord with the hypothesis that processes of oxidation are involved in poisoning 
by acetonitrile. The markedly increased resistance of animals receiving a limited 
amount of food (see experiments on mice above) may similarly be supposed to be due 
to a lowering of certain of the processes of oxidation in the body; in two experiments 
on guinea pigs which had received, for some time, a limited diet there was a decidedly 
smaller excretion of sulphocyanate after the administration of acetonitrile than in the 
normal animals. Upon such a diet the body seems to acquire the ability to limit the 
decompositon of this poison just as it does that of the consumption of proteids and 
energy in certain diseases (Ki’ehl, Clinical Pathology, translation, p. ,319). On the 
other hand it may be, as !Mr. Clowes has suggested, that in the case of the large proteid 
diet the cyanogen, rather than the methyl group, should be considered; that is, that 
the organism accustomed to dealing with the nitrogen groups of proteids would attack 
the cyanogen group first, setting it free much more rapidly than it could be neutmlized 
by sulphur. 
b Chittenden (Med. News, v. 86, p. 721) also cautions against accepting, without 
reservation, the view that alcohol should be considered a food comparable with the 
carbohydrates; he bases this view upon Beebe’s work on the effect of alcohol upon uric 
acid excretion which he interprets as showing that alcohol diminishes the oxidation of 
uric acid. Chittenden expresses his conclusions in the following forceful words: 
“However this may be, it is, I think, quite plain that while alcohol in moderate 
amounts can be burned in the body, thus serving as food in the sense that it may be a 
source of energy, it is quite misleading to attempt a classification or even comparison 
of alcohol with carbohydrates and fats, since, unlike the latter, alcohol has a most dis- 
turbing effect upon the metabolism or oxidation of the purin compounds of our daily 
food. Alcohol, therefore, presents a dangerous side wholly wanting in carbohydrates 
and fats. The latter are simply burned up to carbonic acid and water, or are trans- 
formed into glycogen and fat, but alcohol, though more easily oxidizable, is at all times 
liable to obstruct, in some measure at least, the oxidative processes of the liver, and 
probably of other tissues also, thereby throwing into the circulation bodies such as 
uric acid which are inimical to health; a fact which at once tends to draw a distinct 
line of demarcation between alcohol and the two nonnitrogenous foods — fat and 
carbohydrate.” 
