EXHIBITION OE 18()8. 
437 
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NUTRITIOUS QUALITIES OF BUTTER AND CHEESE. 
There is another question in regard to the products of the dairy, upon 
which people generally have very loose notions. The common impression 
among consumers is, that butter is more nutritive than cheese—that cheese 
is an article of mere luxury, and therefore cannot be classed among the 
economical articles of food. This is a great mistake, which the English la¬ 
borer obliged to economize in his food, has long since discovered. The Eng¬ 
lish laborer often lives months without any other animal food than cheese. 
He will endure the most exhaustive labor on bread, cheese and ale. 
Americans generally have very little conception of the vast consumption 
of cheese in Great Britain by all classes, the rich as well as the poor. And 
this assumption is founded upon correct principles of health, nutrition and 
economy. Recent writers affirm that nitrogenized foods are alone capable 
of conversion into blood and of forming organized tissues—that, in fact, 
they are the foods properly so called. The non-nitrogenized foods, of which 
butter or fat is one, are pronounced incapable of transformation into blood, 
and are, therefore, unfitted for forming original or living tissues. They are, 
nevertheless, essential to health, and Liebig asserts that their function is 
to support the process of respiration, (by yielding carbon and hydrogen, the 
oxygenation of which is attended with the development of heat), and some of 
them, he states, contributed to the formation of fat. These non-nitrogenized 
foods he calls elements of respiration. They consist of fat, starch, gum, 
cane-sugar, grape-sugar, sugar of milk, pectine, bassoriiie, wine, beer, and 
spirits. The nitrogenized foods, or plastic elements of nutrition, are vege¬ 
table fibrin, albumen, casein, animal flesh and blood. It has been found by 
experiment in animals, that gum, sugar, starch or butter, cannot alone pre¬ 
serve the health or life of animals. Magendie found that dogs fed exclusive¬ 
ly on sugar and water died in from thirty-one to thirty-four days, and similar 
results were obtained with butter and gum. Tiedemann and Gmelin have con 
firmed Magendie’s statement. 
In the report of the Gelatine Commission of the French Academy of Scien¬ 
ces, it is stated that a dog fed on french butter only, continued to eat it 
irregularly sixty-eight days. He died subsequently of inanition, though in a 
remarkable state of embonpoint. During the whole experiment he exhaled a 
strong odor of butyric acid, his hair felt greasy, and his skin felt unctuous and 
was covered with a fatty layer. At the autopsy all the tissues and organs 
were found infiltrated with fat. Tlie liver was in a state called in patho¬ 
logical anatomy,By analysis, a very large quantity of stearin (mar¬ 
garine) but little or no olein, was found in it. Into this organ therefore 
there had been a kind of infiltration of fat. Non-nitrogenized foods sup 
port the process of respiration by yielding carbon, and in some cases 
hydrogen to be burnt in the lungs, and thereby to keep up the animal tem¬ 
perature. This is the reason why fatty foods are relished, and are even 
necessary in cold climates, and also why they are repulsive to persons living 
in the torrid zone, when heat is supplied to excess by climate. 
