The proper amount of pure non-mineral water taken with food will do much to remove the causes of superacidity and the long train of ills that follow this disorder. (See "Chart," Lesson I, page 9.)
In this work I shall constantly refer to these various uses of water, especially as a solvent (an aid to digestion), and as a remedial and curative agent.
Theories have been promulgated by hygienic teachers in the past few years that man should get his supply of water wholly from the juices of fruits, and not drink ground-waters, which are contaminated with mineral substances. While it may be true that water in certain localities, such as in the alkali deserts, is unfit for drinking, yet the writer believes that the promulgators of the theory that man is not a drinking animal never did a hard day's work in a harvest field. In the dry winds of the western plains water evaporates from the surface of the body at the rate of twelve or fifteen pounds a day. The theory of deriving one's water supply wholly from fruits would not stand the test of such facts.
We have learned that the air is composed chiefly of oxygen and nitrogen. These are not combined as oxygen and hydrogen are in water, but are simply mixed together, four-fifths of the mixture being nitrogen. Nitrogen is also found in combination in a large number of substances in nature. It is found in the nitrates, as salt-peter or potassium nitrate, KNO₃, and Chili salt-peter or sodium nitrate, NaNO₃. It is also found in the form of ammonia, which is a compound of nitrogen and hydrogen of the formula NH₃, and exists in that form in a limited quantity of the air. In most foods, especially in those of animal origin, nitrogen occurs in chemical combination.
Nitrogen is a colorless, tasteless, odorless gas which does not burn, and does not combine readily with oxygen, or with any other element except at a very high temperature, and except in the formation of living plants, or in animal life. Just as nitrogen does not support combustion, so also it does not support life. An animal would die confined in a tank of nitrogen, not on account of any active poisonous properties in the nitrogen, but for lack of oxygen.
When a compound containing carbon, hydrogen and nitrogen is heated in a closed vessel, so that the air is excluded, and so that it cannot burn, the nitrogen passes out of the compound, not as nitrogen, but in combination with hydrogen, which forms ammonia. Nearly all animal substances contain carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, and nitrogen, and many of them give off ammonia when heated as above described.