Take Care of Your Stomach.
IN order to have strong, firm, healthy muscles, a vigorous intellect, and a body free from disease, one must have pure healthy blood; and to insure this, the stomach must have careful and kind attention. Overloading it, either by eating or drinking, is a prolific source of disease. By so doing, chymification is retarded, the contents of the stomach become acrid and sharp, and oftentimes aphthous patches are produced, and by the time the miserably digested food reaches the heart, it is in a poor condition to be sent throughout the system for its nourishment. As well expect a house built of poor, rotten timber to be strong and durable, as to expect the human fabric to be sound and healthy out of poorly digested food. It is an impossibility. We may live through such torture, and to a good old age, but there will always be something the matter. Either the head aches, or the stomach feels heavy, or there is general debility, or you are unnaturally peevish and irritable, or you have lost the power of concentrating thought, or some other ill that flesh, through ignorance, is afflicted with. Torturing the stomach with half-masticated food is another fruitful cause of unhealthy blood. The saliva when thoroughly mixed with the food by mastication exerts such an essential chemical influence upon it, and in fact is the only true solvent of certain portions of our diet, that we cannot, and be well, break this all important law of chewing our food fine. Our bodies are heterogeneous, nearly all the elements entering into their composition, and all essential to perfect development and sound health. When it is deprived of any one of these materials, it becomes weakened and unsound, just as much as any structure made by human hands, is comparatively worthless if made of imperfect timber. A man would appear insane to say that a good, strong, durable building could be made from poor materials, and yet thousands live every day as though they believed that the human fabric could be nourished and built strong and healthy out of poorly digested food. When we eat rapidly, we deprive our blood of certain essential elements; when we overload our stomachs, we send a vitiated fluid to our hearts to repair our bodies; when we habitually pour alcoholic drinks down our throat, we pervert the nutritive processes, prevent the hydro-carbonaceous products from being eliminated as freely as is compatible with health, and produce a fermentable condition of the blood. Our poor tortured stomach pleads with us by intense nausea, and oftentimes by throwing off its contents, and if we fail to heed this warning, our nerves begin to get weak and unstrung. . . . When we swallow our food whole, overload our stomachs, take cold, or break any law of nature whatever, she informs us almost immediately of our danger. If rapid eating, or overeating is indulged in, her language is at first a dull, uncomfortable feeling in the stomach, accompanied by a slight pain and depression of feelings. Not heeding this, the stomach continues to grow heavy like a fifty pound ball, the feelings sink into despondency, the liver becomes affected, the skin takes on a sole-leather hue, the features become distorted, the dispostion becomes wrangled and dyspepsia has completely routed health, and has us, soul and body in his destroying power. Nature warned, but we did not listen. She is peculiarly sensitive. Even the slightest cold that we take is not overlooked by her. Her language to us then is a dry, hot skin, headache, loss of appetite, etc.; she is trying to throw open her million of doors, or pores of the skin; if she succeeds we recover with but little inconvenience; if she fails to do this or to make us understand our condition, she continues to plead with us, by making us so ill that we are compelled, perhaps when too late, to heed her warnings. Happy the human being who pays attention to the language of nature; for every word she utters is a lesson turned to inestimable account. Health, happiness, life, is sacrificed every day owing to our obtuseness to her teachings. For the proof of these statements we have but to bring the cases of the temperate and the intemperate, the pernicious effects of the one and the beneficial results of the other. Nature is all truth, and whenever anything is wrong with the body, it is her language telling us that something is the matter, and that if we desire health, and not to "shuffle off our mortal coils" prematurely, we must obey.—New Jersey Mechanic.