Health and Temperance

International Tract and Missionary Society · Oakland, California · Feb 11, 1886

Health and Temperance.

Alcohol neither Food nor Fuel.

Scientific experiments show that alcohol is in no proper sense either food or fuel. It is entirely indigestible. The stomach cannot assimilate it, and it cannot be converted into tissue. If after death the body of even a moderate drinker is dissected, the alcohol is found in the tissues as alcohol. Not so the milk which he has drank or the beefsteak which he has eaten; they have become a part of himself, while the alcohol remains in him a foreign substance and an intruder. As alcohol is not properly food, so neither is it properly fuel. It does sometimes add heat to the body; but it furnishes heat in the body as it furnishes heat in the room: when alcohol is thrown upon the open fire, there is an instantaneous flash, that is all. Some years ago an extensive experiment was tried in the Russian army, and it was found that those soldiers who did not use spirits endured the cold better than those who used them. A similar experience as to the effect of the use of wine on the soldiers during the siege of Paris we quote from Dr. Klein’s lecture, as quoted in Mr. Gustafson’s volume:—

“It was just the time when the wine merchants are used to buy their stock for the year when the war broke out, so we had plenty of wines of every description. It was distributed by the Government very liberally indeed. We drank because we had nothing to eat. We found most decidedly that alcohol was no substitute for bread and meat. We also found that it was not a substitute for coals. You know how cold the weather was during the winter. We of the army had to sleep outside of Paris on the frozen ground and in the snow; and when we got up in the morning we were as stiff as planks. We had plenty of alcohol; but it did not make us warm. We thus found out by bitter experience that alcohol did not make us warm, did not replace food of any kind, and did not replace coals. Let me tell you there is nothing that will make you feel the cold more, nothing which will make you feel the dreadful sense of hunger more, than alcohol.”

Thus, whether we look at the results of our own personal observation, or through other eyes take in a larger horizon, or ask the vital statistics of the scientific world, or study the direct effects of alcohol on the human frame, we are forced to the one conclusion that wine-drinking is not so well for health as water-drinking, and that it is as true now as in the days of Daniel, that he who lives simply is fairer and fatter of countenance than he who eats at the king’s table. (Dan. 1: 11–16.) For it must not be forgotten that simplicity of diet goes naturally with abstinence from intoxicants, that luxurious living and highly spiced viands produce the unnatural craving which demands stimulants, and they in turn the unnatural craving which demands unnatural and luxurious food. It may not always be easy to draw the line between food and medicine, it may not always be easy to determine what is that invalidism which requires something more than food; but it is something to have learned that wine and beer are not foods, and that he is happiest and healthiest who is able to dispense with them altogether.—Sel.