Says Oswald: “We can not breathe pure oxygen. For analogous reasons bran flour [whole meal] makes better bread than bolted flour; meat and saccharine fruits are healthier than meat extracts and pure glucose. In short, artificial extracts and compounds are, on the whole, less wholesome than the palatable products of nature. In the case of bran-flour and certain fruits with a large percentage of wholly innutritious matter, chemistry fails to account for this fact, but biology suggests the mediate cause: the normal type of our physical constitution dates from a period when the digestive organs of our (frugivorous) ancestors adapted themselves to such food——a period compared with whose duration the age of grist-mills and made dishes is but of yesterday.”
This doctoring of the cereals can never prove of service in the end, except to the manufacturers and dealers; these “preparations,” however honestly made, and supposing for argument’s sake that the machinery accomplishes what the manufacturers intend, will never, in and of themselves,——_i. e._, except so far as they take the place of _white flour_——prove beneficial to mankind, and least of all to sick people, valetudinarians, and the sedentary classes,——the very ones who need the best. Imagine a constipated dyspeptic, with a heavy fur coat on his tongue, and, of course, a heavier one on the lining of his stomach——his entire alimentary canal so covered with this morbid growth that digestion and absorption are well-nigh prohibited——alarmed lest the microscopic particles of wheat-hulls should injure his delicate and sensitive inwards! “Delicate!” “sensitive!” why, it takes half a cupful of salts to move them, and that but faintly, while a pint of strong coffee makes no impression; when if they were even normally sensitive a tablespoonful of the former, or a single cup of the latter, would purge them violently. Sensitive! they are _dead_, or at least dying. Why, for this class of patients, I would sooner _add the straw_ than remove the hull, as better calculated, by all odds, to meet the necessities of their condition. On the other hand, when the disease assumes the opposite form——when the tongue is raw, and the intestinal tract acutely inflamed, and from any cause preternaturally sensitive——there is but one thing in the Materia Medica of Nature that is absolutely fit to swallow, and that is _pure water_. (See Chronic Dyspepsia.) It matters not what else is comforting, temporarily,——medicine, gruel, beef-tea, milk, or what not,——the comfort and advantage are derived solely from the water, which constitutes three-fourths to nine-tenths of the whole; the other elements being injurious, and, often enough, fatal, preventing as they do the healing of the inflamed mucous membrane.