FEEDING THE BODY
[Illustration: FIG. 6.--Photograph of the outer dead skin pushed off
from a black snake crawling through the brush.]
=Why the Body needs Food.=--Every living thing, whether a plant or an
animal, needs food. While the whole body lives, a part of it is
constantly dying. The entire outer layer of a snake's skin dies three
or four times during a year and is cast off, sometimes in a single
piece. We can scrape dead bits of skin from the surface of our body at
any time. Tiny particles are dying in all regions of the body, and we
should soon waste away if food were not taken to make up the loss for
the worn-out parts.
The body also needs food to help it do its work and keep warm. The body
has the strange power of using food eaten to make the legs and arms move
and the brain to think. In doing this the body is said to burn the food.
=How the Body burns itself and also Food.=--If a boy is weighed just
before playing a game of ball and again afterward, he will find that
part of his body has been used up and given off in the breath and
sweat. He has burned part of his body, and the breath and sweat are
like the smoke given off when a match is burned.
One fifth of the air is made of a gas called _oxygen_. When anything
becomes very hot, this oxygen makes it burst into a flame and burn. We
breathe in oxygen with the air and the living action of the body
causes such a slow union of the oxygen and the tissues that there is
no blaze although there is a little heat.
=Kinds of Food.=--There are four general classes of foods. These are
the _building foods_, the _sugars_ and _starches_, the _fats_, and the
_mineral foods_. The building foods are those which help largely in
forming new muscle and blood or other parts of the body. _Proteids_ is
another name for building foods.
_Sugars_ and _starches_ are placed in one group because starch changes
to sugar within the body. If you chew a starchy food like bread for a
few minutes, it will begin to taste sweet because the starch is
becoming sugar.
Fats are got not only from fat meat but also from eggs, butter, milk,
and many other foods. There is some mineral matter, such as potash and
soda, in many of the vegetables and meats eaten, and we use much table
salt to season other foods.
[Illustration: FIG. 7.--Good foods for building muscles, blood, and
bone.]
=Body-building Foods.=--A person with all the sugar, molasses, starch,
butter, and lard he could eat would starve to death in a few weeks
because none of these foods would help to build up the dying parts of
the body. A large amount of body builder is found in lean meat, eggs,
milk, peas, beans, corn meal, and bread. Bread and milk is a good food
to make the body grow. If the body takes in more building food than it
needs for repairs, it may store it up in the form of fat or burn it to
help the body do its work.
=The Fuel Foods.=--The fuel foods are the sugars, starches, and fats.
These are the foods which the body can easily burn to keep it warm and
give it power to act. Candy, molasses, or sugar in any form, taken in
small quantities, is a good food. Starch, which the body quickly
changes to sugar, is a much cheaper food. Meats contain very little
starch, but nearly all vegetables contain much starch. Three fourths
of corn meal, rice, wheat flour, and soda crackers consists of starch.
More than one half of white bread, dried beans, and peas is made of
pure starch, and there is much starch in potatoes.
_Fat_ is more abundant in animal than in vegetable food. Castor oil
and cotton-seed oil are fats from vegetables. The fat of the cow is
called _suet_ or _tallow_, while the fat of the hog is known as
_lard_. _Butter_ is the fat collected from milk. Cream and eggs
contain much fat. When persons eat too much of the sugars, starches,
or fats, the body may store them up as fat. For this reason thin
persons wishing to gain in flesh eat eggs, nuts, and rich milk.
=The Mineral Foods.=--The body must have not only lime to help form the
bones, but iron, salt, soda, and potash for other parts of the body. All
these minerals except salt are found in many of the common foods.
[Illustration: FIG. 8.--Good foods for giving the body power and heat.]
Water is one of the most important of the mineral foods because it helps
the body use all the other foods. Most people drink too little water to
enjoy the best health. The body needs more than two quarts of water
every day. There is much water in our foods. More than one half of eggs,
meat, and potatoes is made of water, and more than three fourths of
tomatoes, green corn, onions, cabbage, and string beans is composed of
water. We should drink one quart or more of water daily. It should not
be used ice cold, and very little should be taken at meal time.
[Illustration: FIG. 9.--Diagram showing how the drainage from a house
with a sick person caused one hundred and twenty cases of typhoid
fever at Mount Savage, Maryland.]
=Water and Health.=--One of the common causes of sickness is bad
water. Water from shallow wells within a hundred feet of barnyards,
pigpens, or other outhouses is usually unsafe to drink. At Newport,
Rhode Island, more than eighty persons were made sick with the fever
by drinking the water from a well only ten feet deep. The impure
water from one spring at Trenton, New Jersey, gave the fever to
nearly a hundred persons in one season. At Mount Savage, Maryland, a
hundred and twenty persons were made ill by using the water from a
spring near a house drain.
Water from rivers and streams running near where many people live is
likely to be made impure and is sure to bring sickness and death to
some of those who use it. Water from a small stream at Plymouth,
Pennsylvania, running past a house occupied by a typhoid patient, gave
the fever to over a thousand persons in one month. The water from a
small stream at Ithaca, New York, gave the fever to over thirteen
hundred people in one season, and an almost equal number caught the
fever in a few weeks at Butler, Pennsylvania, by drinking water from a
small creek along which some sick persons lived.
=Preventing Sickness from Bad Water.=--It is better to go thirsty than
to drink water which is likely to cause sickness. Any water can be
made safe by boiling it one minute. Boiled water is the most healthful
kind of water to use. The people of China and Japan seldom use water
that has not been boiled.
Many cities using water from rivers run it through a layer of sand and
gravel to remove the tiny things that cause so much sickness and death.
This makes the water very much purer, but it is not so certain to make
the water safe as is boiling it. Bad water makes nearly a quarter of a
million of our people sick every year and kills twenty thousand of them.
=How much Food does the Body Need?=--Most people eat too much.
Overeating overworks the stomach, poisons the body, makes one feel
lazy, and causes headache. If you chew your food fine and stop eating
as soon as hunger is satisfied without tempting the appetite with
sweets, you are not likely to overeat.
About one seventh of a pound of building food is needed daily to keep
the body in repair, and a quarter of a pound of fat and a pound of
starches and sugars are required to help the body do a hard day's
work. A half pound of bread, beans, and meat each, a pound of
potatoes, a pint of milk, and a quarter of a pound of butter and sugar
each, will give a working man all the food he needs for a day.
[Illustration: FIG. 10.--Bird's-eye view of Plymouth, Pennsylvania,
showing where the waste from one sick room was thrown on the bank of a
stream which several miles below supplied the town with water and
caused over one thousand cases of fever and more than a hundred deaths
within seven weeks.]
=Beer and Wine as Foods.=--It was once thought that beer and wine were
good foods, but hundreds of late experiments show that these drinks
are very poor and expensive foods. A half glass of milk is of more use
to the body as a food than a full quart of beer. The use of much wine
or beer may seem to satisfy the appetite because they deaden the real
feeling of hunger. Neither of these drinks can be used by the young
without danger of doing much harm.
[Illustration: FIG. 11.--The little glass of milk contains nearly twice
as much food for building flesh and blood as the large glass of beer.]
PRACTICAL QUESTIONS
1. Why does the body need food?
2. Why do you weigh less after working?
3. What is oxygen?
4. From what do we get body-building foods?
5. In what is starch found?
6. How much water does the body need?
7. Where have people been made sick by using bad water?
8. How can we prevent sickness from bad water?
9. What harm does overeating do?
10. What can you say of beer as a food?