180 STORRS AGRICULTURAL EXPERIMENT STATION. 
EXPERIMENTS ON THE DIGESTIBILITY OF CEREAL 
BREAKFAST FOODS. 
REPORTED BY W. O. ATWATER.* 
It has been frequently set forth in publications of this Station 
that in estimating the nutritive value of any food material, a 
very important consideration is its digestibility or availability. 
(See page 187). Itis necessary to take into account not only 
the chemical composition of the material, that is the amount of’ 
the different nutritive ingredients it contains, but also the pro- 
portion of each that will be digested and made available to the 
body for the purposes of nutrition—the building of tissue and 
the yielding of energy. ‘Two food materials may be very much 
alike in chemical composition and yet differ materially in actual 
nutritive value because of differences in digestibility. For ex- 
ample, it has been found that when coarse graham and fine 
white flours are milled from the same lot of wheat the com- 
position of the two is much the same, there being a little more 
protein in the graham than in the white flour; but the digesti- 
bility of the bread from the fine flour is so much greater than 
that from the coarse flour that the body actually obtains more 
nourishment from a given quantity of the fine flour than from 
the same quantity of the coarse flour. 
Considerable is now known concerning the digestibility or 
availability of mixed diet in general, and to some extent of 
different classes of food materials in particular. Much work of 
this nature still remains to be done, however, and the need for 
itis urgent. In view of the importance of knowledge concern- 
ing the availability of different food materials, much attention 

*Dr. H. C. Sherman and Mr. R. D. Milner were responsible for carrying out the de- 
tails of these experiments. Mr. Milner also had charge of the analytical work and 
the calculation and tabulation of the results, and assisted in preparing this report. 




