Ideal Home Life - online book

A valuable and well-organized system for home education(homeschooling) 3 to 12 years.

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	418                          IDEAL HOME LIFE
	climate the activities of the body are greater than in a warm one, more heat is required and is developed, and hence more food is necessary. It is also necessary to select for cold weather those varieties of food which have great heat-producing capacity, and which would be quite inappropriate for warm weather. Hence diet must be modified by climate as well as by age. The work which one must do should modify the diet; the lum­berman, the sailor, the miner require different food and more of it than the shopkeeper, the clerk, the teacher, or the lawyer. Both the quantity and the quality of the food must also be regulated by the physical condition in a given case. A robust person requires more food than a sick one, and he can eat, with­out fear of harm or indigestion, many forms of food which the stomach of the sick person would be unable to digest or would reject promptly. Many series of physiological experiments have been made, both upon man and animals, to determine the most useful sub­stances which may be employed as food, and it has been defi­nitely determined in the case of a large number of substances, just how much can be expected in the way of useful results when they are used for food. We learn from the study of physiology that the stomach digests only albuminoid substances (lean meat, eggs, milk, and certain portions of the cereals), and that the intestines, aided by the liver and pancreas, digest only the hydrocarbons (oils, fats, butter, potatoes, rice, and the greater portion of many of the vegetables); therefore, while it might be possible for a per­son to live upon food which was digested only by the stomach, or only by the intestines, at least for some time, it would be, to say the least, an unfair distribution of work to impose all upon the stomach, or all upon the intestines. The obvious con-• elusion would be that a diet should be composed of both albu­minoids and hydrocarbons, and this conclusion is fully borne out as the result of physiological experiments. That is to say, a mixed diet, meat, eggs, milk, and vegetables of different kinds, is not only the most rational, but the one which is best adapted to secure health and the highest results in the direction of physical and mental work.