CHAPTER XIII BREAD AND CHEESE "When I was a bachelor I lived by myself, And all the bread and cheese I got I put upon the shelf, I was forced to go to London to get me a wife." Much is said about "Calories" and "Vitamines," and these things have a great deal to do with bread and cheese. It seems very queer to think of the human body as at all like a furnace, but there is this in common that they both keep warm even in cold weather, and so heat units, "Calories," are not so inappropriate after all. A "Calory" is not a variety of food but is the amount of heat that is required to warm 1 kilogram of water 1 degree Centigrade. In other words, to warm about two pounds or a quart of water 2 degrees Fahrenheit. The only reason they talk of "Calories" in connection with food is because they wish to measure the energy which food contains, and the easiest way to do that is to burn it and measure the heat it gives up in burning. Indeed, the human body does much the same to such food as it fully digests as fire would do. The principal end products in both cases are water, car bonic acid gas, and heat. So it is reasonably fair to measure the energy of food in Calories. On the other hand, the human body is far more than a furnace. The demands of a furnace are met by merely shoveling coal in and ashes out. Not so the human body. Every thought, every fear, every bit of good-natured laughter, has its little place in making us well or ill, even though we may have all the necessary Calories. Moreover, "one man's food is another man's poison." But in one respect, all men are alike, for vitamines are necessary for them all. Vitamines are quite too complex for chemical analysis. These elusive properties of fruits, vegetables, butter, and milk, in such almost unweighably small quantities as to be apparently of no use, are indispensable to health. In the old days, when these matters were not understood, ships which went on long cruises, victualled with salt beef and sea biscuit, used to suffer scourges of scurvy, a disease which after causing great physical and mental exhaustion, bleeding gums, and loosening of the teeth, in severe cases ends in death. Two hundred years ago the cure was found to be fresh vegetables, lemon juice and fruits in uncooked state. It is now recognized that the disease came from a lack of the vitamines supplied by uncooked foods. These substances do not survive even the temperature of "pasteurization," so that city milk, treated to make it safe from spreading typhoid, is thereby deprived of these valuable properties. However, the general use of the fruits, lemons, oranges, grapefruits, and of apples, grapes, pears, and lettuce with other ingredients in salads supplies probably enough of the vitamines without those of milk. Cow's butter is also rich in them. There are other varieties of vitamines besides the ones which prevent scurvy. Those others are more resistant to heating. One of these types, called "watersoluble B," prevents the tropical disease called beriberi. It is a disease of the nerves, very depressing and attended with loss of control of limbs and other parts of the body. Vitamines of the type water-soluble B are found in the coarser parts of grains such as rice, wheat and others, and are lost by too much refining of these grains in preparing them for food. These vitamines are plentifully supplied by eggs, by some of the less costly meats like liver and kidney, and also by yeast. Again there is a third type of vitamines called "fat-soluble A❞ present in green leaves, certain fats, milk, butter, and oils, which is the antidote of a disease of the eye, and of rickets. Thus all of these small but indispensable factors of the diet called vitamines are included in the uncooked, and the less esteemed foods, and are more or less rejected by the processes of manufacture by which foods are made more attractive and canned to keep indefinitely. These facts show some of the many physical advantages that country life presents to offset the good things of the city. Cows betray correct and natural ideas when they kick up their heels in pure joy at the first drive to pasture in spring after a winter on |