Fruit Juice and Beef Juice
THE late Dr. Austin Flint asserted that many persons have been starved to death by the use of beef tea as the result of the popular notion that beef extracts, beef juices, beef teas, meat broths, represent a concentrated form of nutriment. It is difficult to understand how this absurd fallacy originated, but it is high time that it was thoroughly exposed. The writer has encountered a large number of cases in which persons have evidently suffered great injury from the continuous use of beef extracts and meat broths. Many physicians have reported similar instances. An eminent French surgeon recently asserted that beef tea is simply a solution of ptomains (germ poisons). The most eminent authors at the present time agree that beef tea has little or no nutritive value. Says Bunge, “We must guard against supposing that meat bouillon possesses a strengthening and nourishing influence. In regard to this, the most delusive notions are entertained, not only by the general public, but also by medical men. Until quite recently the opinion was held that bouillon contained the most nutritive part of meat. There was a confused idea that a minute quantity of material—a plateful of bouillon can be made from a teaspoonful of meat extract—could yield an effectual source of nourishment, that the extractives of meat were synonymous with concentrated food.” Bunge further asserts that the only value possessed by bouillon is that it “tastes and smells agreeable.” The eminent French chemist Hassel estimated that to furnish sufficient beef tea to supply the body with the amount of proteids or albumin required by a man one day, would necessitate the use of fourteen and one-half pounds of beef. To furnish the proper amount of other elements, for instance, carbohydrates, in the form of beef tea, would require a still larger amount of meat. The principal ingredient of meat extracts of various sorts is the waste products of the body, which consist largely of urea, this in life being eliminated through the kidneys. For example, Liebig’s extract of beef contains only .05 per cent of albumin, but nearly 60 per cent of excrementitious substances, while Valentine’s meat juice contains but .44 per cent, with nearly 25 per cent of waste substances. The extract of excrementitious substances found in beef tea and meat extracts, when applied to the brain of a rabbit, a portion of whose skull has been removed, manifests its poisonous properties at once by paralyzing the part to which the application is made. A solution of these substances applied to a living frog’s muscle paralyzes it so that it will not respond to the action of electricity, to which the normal muscle is very sensitive. Fruit juices, on the other hand, contain a large percentage of nutrient material ready for immediate absorption. The best and perhaps the most nourishing of all is the juice of the grape. Ripe sweet grapes contain more than sixteen per cent of carbohydrates, nearly fifteen per cent of which is in the form of levulose, which represents perfectly digested starch, and is a nutriment ready for immediate use by the body after absorption. The juice of the grape contains very little nitrogenous matter. Beef extract contains practically no albumin. In febrile conditions, the system requires a very small amount of proteids, being prepared neither to digest nor to appropriate this class of food elements. The most important class of food elements in fevers is carbohydrates, which should be administered in a form as nearly ready for absorption as possible. All the digestive fluids are absent in fever, so it is highly desirable to administer the foods, as far as possible, in a state requiring only absorption. The reviving effect at once experienced by a weary person from the eating of ripe grapes or drinking a glass of unfermented fruit juice is evidence of the high value of this class of nutrients. The administration of meat in any form or of meat extractives to fever patients is a most unscientific procedure. It is strange that we are so slow to recognize the results of laboratory research borne out by practical everyday experience. In no class of cases is the use of fruit juice contraindicated, and it is of high value not only in cases of fever, but in the case of feeble invalids of all classes, and as an aseptic food in cases of chronic toxemia and bacteriological infection of the stomach. The free use of grape juice or slightly acid fruit juices of other kinds is one of the best of all means of cleansing the stomach from pathological microbes and of encouraging normal digestion. This property of fruit juice and of fresh fruit is one which ought to be utilized in the treatment of many forms of febrile diseases.—Good Health.