USEFULNESS AND HURTFULNESS OF COFFEE.
Since coffee possesses the quality of stimulating the nervous system, it
is a matter of course that in many cases its effect is rather injurious.
Phlegmatic people, especially, need coffee, and they are fond of
drinking it; for a similar reason it is a favorite beverage in the
Orient, where its consumption is immense. But to persons of an excitable
temperament the enjoyment of coffee is hurtful; they ought only to take
it very weak. With lively children it does not agree at all, and it is
very wrong to force them to drink it, as is often done; while elderly
people, who are in need of a stimulant for the decreasing activity of
their nerves, are right in taking as much of it as they choose.
In households of limited means it is often customary to use succory with
coffee. We do not pretend to pronounce this, if taken in moderate
quantity, hurtful; but we do say, that it is a poor substitute for
coffee, and that there is nothing in it to recommend its use. A far
better mixture is milk and sugar, and there is good reason for it; both
milk and sugar are articles of food. Milk contains the same ingredients
as blood, and sugar is changed in the body into fat, which is
indispensable to us, especially to the process of breathing. Having
taken no food through the night, the loss our blood has suffered during
sleep by perspiration, and the fat which has been lost by respiration,
must be compensated for in the morning. For this, milk and sugar in
coffee are excellent. It is good for children to have a taste for
sweetened milk, or milk-coffee, in the morning. We must not find fault
with them if they like it. Nature very wisely gave them a liking for
sugar; they need it, because their pulse must be quicker, their
respiration stronger, in order to facilitate the assimilation of food in
their bodies, and also to promote growth. Not that adults need no sugar;
but the sugar necessary for them is formed from the starch contained in
their food. For this purpose the digestive apparatus must be strongly
developed; with children this is not the case; therefore they are given
sugar, instead of the starch to make it from. Many diseases,
particularly rickets--prevailing mostly among the children of the
poor--are the consequence of feeding the child with bread and potatoes;
these contain starch it is true, but the digestive apparatus of children
being yet too weak to change them into fat, the result is that the flesh
falls away, and the bones grow soft and crooked.
But he who, to promote digestion, takes coffee immediately after dinner,
does best not to use sugar or milk; for both, so far from helping
digestion, are an additional burden to the full stomach, and disturb its
labor more than the coffee can facilitate it.
It is very good to take wheat bread for breakfast. Wheat has nearly
twice the quantity of sugar and starch that rye contains, and it is
besides easier to digest. And as it is our principal duty in the morning
to replace as quickly as possible what we have lost during the night, it
is a matter of importance to give the stomach such food as is both
nutritive and quickly digested.