Gone are the days of heavy partying :(
I’ve just been reading up on the negatives of drinking. Which is a shame really because I enjoy a good glass of red. However, to get really healthy, I need to give it up.
Firstly, alcohol retards food digestion. As I’m trying to lose weight, at first I though YAY! I can eat more and it won’t get digested. The problem is, it’s the bad stuff that still gets digested, but it’s the good stuff that gets blocked.
And here, in order to give those who are not familiar with the process of digestion a clear idea of how important it is, and the effect produced when alcohol is taken with food, I’m going to quote you from the lecture of an English physician, Dr. Henry Monroe, on “The Physiological Action of Alcohol.”
He says:
“Every kind of substance employed by man as food consists of sugar, starch, oil and glutinous matters, mingled together in various proportions; these are designed for the support of the animal frame. The glutinous principles of food fibrine, albumen and casein are employed to build up the structure; while the oil, starch and sugar are chiefly used to generate heat in the body. (so far, so good.)
‘The first step of the digestive process is the breaking up of the food in the mouth by means of the jaws and teeth. On this being done, the saliva, a viscid liquor, is poured into the mouth from the salivary glands, and as it mixes with the food, it performs a very important part in the operation of digestion, rendering the starch of the food soluble, and gradually changing it into a sort of sugar, after which the other principles become more miscible with it. Nearly a pint of saliva is furnished every twenty-four hours for the use of an adult. (Now, that’s ALOT of spit!) When the food has been masticated and mixed with the saliva, (i.e. chewed up and soggy…) it is then passed into the stomach, where it is acted upon by a juice secreted by the filaments of that organ, and poured into the stomach in large quantities whenever food comes in contact with its mucous coats. It consists of a dilute acid known to the chemists as hydrochloric acid, composed of hydrogen and chlorine, united together in certain definite proportions. (Who-da’ thunk.) The gastric juice contains, also, a peculiar organic-ferment or decomposing substance, containing nitrogen something of the nature of yeast termed pepsine, which is easily soluble in the acid just named. That gastric juice acts as a simple chemical solvent, is proved by the fact that, after death, it has been known to dissolve the stomach itself.’ (Sorry.. you really DIDNT need to know that.. eeww gross.)
‘It is an error to suppose that, after a good dinner, a glass of spirits or beer assists digestion; or that any liquor containing alcohol even bitter beer can in any way assist digestion. Mix some bread and meat with gastric juice; place them in a phial, and keep that phial in a sand-bath at the slow heat of 98 degrees, occasionally shaking briskly the contents to imitate the motion of the stomach; you will find, after six or eight hours, the whole contents blended into one pultaceous mass. If to another phial of food and gastric juice, treated in the same way, I add a glass of pale ale or a quantity of alcohol, at the end of seven or eight hours, or even some days, the food is scarcely acted upon at all. This is a fact; and if you are led to ask why, I answer, because alcohol has the peculiar power of chemically affecting or decomposing the gastric juice by precipitating one of its principal constituents, viz., pepsine, rendering its solvent properties much less efficacious. Hence alcohol can not be considered either as food or as a solvent for food. Not as the latter certainly, for it refuses to act with the gastric juice.’
I still don’t understand then how beer-guts form!
One of the mysteries of life, I guess.