Part 23

The function of saliva in digestion has commonly been understood to be the lubrication of the food so as to enable it to be swallowed. The truth is that it is the first and most important solvent necessary to digestion, the good offices of which are to separate, make alkaline, neutralise, saponify, and otherwise render the succeeding processes within the delicate organs of the body as easy as their delicacy requires, and thus not to strain and inflame them into festering breeding grounds for the myriads of microbes of diseases which we are compelled to draw in with every breath of air we inhale.

Drawn into a perfectly clean and healthy organism, some microbes aid and are a part of life, but taken into a system clogged by dirt and strained by overwork, these same harmless creatures become agents of destruction. Bacilli may be either friends or enemies and we have the choice.

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NATURAL LIFE LIMIT

It is said that the natural life of all animals, left to pursue a natural existence by being protected from the enemies of their species, and in reach of sufficient nourishment, is six times the growing period. If this is so no man need die or move his soul to another habitation until he has occupied the present one for from one hundred and ten to one hundred and forty years. If the proper use of the instincts and senses be conserved in children, the growing period may be prolonged to probably twenty-five years with a resultant tenure of life of one hundred and fifty years.

I have personally interviewed a patriarch, who, at sixty-five, was awaiting death with constant expectancy, and was helping to attain it by every sort of favourable suggestion. It happened that he had his portrait taken in a photograph gallery on his sixty-fifth birthday as a last souvenir to be distributed among his friends. Shortly after that, in the fruity and salubrious foothills of the Pacific Coast of California, he met with accidental suggestion which changed his habits of living, and, very soon, his attitude toward life and death.

I sat with the patriarch on his one hundredth birthday in the same photograph gallery, examined the portraits of sixty-five and one hundred years, conversed with the subject in a low tone of voice, looked upon a man who felt that he was yet in middle life, and in possession of an enjoyment of life that he said had never been equalled in the early years of his bondage to the ignorance and impatience of youth.

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STUDY NATURE

Watch good Nature, observe her methods, try to imitate them by way of experiment, and you will find that, as heretofore stated, there is a perfect way enfolded in all of Nature's problems and that man has only to discover the way to have it freely accessible to him.

Watch a child take its nourishment in natural manner. The sucking action is like the act of mastication in that it excites the glands which supply fluids to the mouth. Whatever number of these fluids there may be, I will class them all as saliva. Certainly in the case of milk being taken into the stomach, saliva is not needed to lubricate it. It is, therefore, reasonable to suppose that saliva is intended as a part of the mixture necessary to digestion; that is, to the conversion of the food into nutriment.

In the case of children nourished at the breast of the mother--the only natural way--the food is already alkaline and ready for digestion in the stomach and intestines as related previously.

Remember also that, in the case of invalids with very weak stomachs, physicians recommend taking milk and broth through a straw or through a glass tube. Taking fluid this way requires a sucking action of the mouth and thereby induces a flow of saliva. Of course, the fluid is better digested than when drunk because Nature's way has been followed, and it is no wonder that milk and often soups of different kinds are indigestible, if taken contrary to the natural way, except in digestive systems which have not yet exhausted their ten-horse-power resistance capacity.

I have tried milk and soups upon a stomach trained down so fine that it was like a pair of apothecary's balances, sensitive to the least inharmony, to find that if they are drunk there is a mild protest--a sort of a shrug of the shoulders, as it were--and that when the same liquids have been moved about in the mouth for the time necessary to naturally excite the Swallowing Impulse, they have passed into the stomach without the owner being conscious afterwards of their presence except by feeling of complete satisfaction.

It would seem, therefore, that the perfection of nutrition requires the proper mixture of saliva added to all food substances, and that mastication is not only a means of separation in order to give saliva a chance but a valve opener for salivary glands in order to make the proper solution for the stomach; and, that taste exists, in one of its important functions, to indicate how long the process should continue and when it has effected its healthful purpose.

Any one who tries it, no matter how perverted the taste has become by abuse, will find that Nature is not only kind but alluring. Meat or bread, without sauces or butter, are tasteless, in a degree, when first taken into the mouth dry. It is for this reason that butter, sauces, salt, sugar, etc., are used to make them what is called palatable. It is the salt or the sugar or other spices in these which excites the palate immediately when the dry morsel would not do so in such marked degree.

If you take the meat or the dry bread and masticate sufficiently, allowing the nutriment to become thoroughly solved by the saliva and separated from the dirt,--the indigestible, tasteless remainder--the taste will become more and more delicious as the saliva gets possession of the solution, and will have a final delicacy which sauces cannot equal, as a reward for pursuing Nature's invitation and rendering her the appointed service.

An easy experiment that will prove the above statement to be correct is to take a variety of breads, white and brown, toasted and untoasted, crust and soft, and afterwards some of the same soaked in soup or milk, or, in the juice of whatever meat you happen to have at your meal.

Taken dry, toast will only reduce and disappear, without effort of swallowing, into the stomach, leaving no tasteless dregs behind, after about thirty actions of the jaw. This is probably the reason why toast is an invalid's best diet; because mastication is required to crush it, saliva is liberated by the acts of mastication, less saliva is required to prepare toast for the stomach than any other form of bread, and therefore, the proper conditions are attained perforce, and easy digestion is promoted. Crust of French bread will do the same by means of about forty jets let loose by mastication; the soft inside of French bread will require fifty, or more; crust and inside of biscuits and of "home-made" bread somewhat more than the French bread; while "Boston brown bread" requires as many as seventy to eighty jets turned on by action of mastication to dissolve it.

The above refers to moderate mouthfuls. The process is incomplete until all is dissolved, taste ceases, and natural swallowing occurs.

Will it not be observed that mastication, as far as crushing or mangling is concerned, has small part in the reduction of "Boston brown bread," and little seeming use except to turn on the jets of the solving saliva, for the material itself is soft, and sometimes "mushy"? Saliva has little use as a lubricant in this case, for the reason that the brown bread experimented with can be easily swallowed when first taken in the mouth. Abundant experiment has been made by those to whom "Boston brown bread" was formerly little less than a poison, to prove the assertion that, sufficiently mixed with saliva, it is perfectly digestible and that the delicious taste of the bread after forty or fifty bites (1/3 to 1/2 minute) gets sweeter and sweeter, and attains its greatest sweetness and most delicate taste at the very last, when it has dissolved into liquid form and most of it has escaped into the stomach.

It will be noticed that the time, or attention, required to solve these different problems of nutrition as embodied in different sorts of breads is exactly proportionate to their recognised digestibility, and explains the reason why hot and "soggy" biscuits, after the American fashion, and "Boston brown bread" have been classed as not easily digestible.

Still further proof of my contention in favour of the importance of taste as a guide and guard in the process of nutrition is that, if you soak soft bread, or even toast, in the juice or gravy of any meat, the number of masticatory or tasting movements necessary to fit it for the stomach and satisfy the taste will be about the number required to masticate raw meat from which the juice has come and not such only as would seem requisite on account of the softness of the substance when made pulpy by soaking and which might be forcibly swallowed at once.

Tests like these alone are sufficient to prove my contention, but, when the result of the experiments is so immediate for good in every direction, as it has proved itself to be in all cases tried, there is no longer doubt but that Nature's most important secret relative to human alimentation has been heretofore practically undiscovered; that is, as far as any inquiry I have been able to make sheds light upon the subject.

The result, in all the cases of my observation, has been an immediate response of naturally increased energy; approach of weight toward the normal, whether the subject was over-weight or under-weight; a great falling off of the waste to be discharged by the avenue of the lower intestines and also through the kidneys; relief of bleeding hemorrhoids and catarrh--the diseases suffered by the patients; emancipation from headaches; clearing of the tongue of the yellow deposit--usually called fur--that is an indication of rotten conditions in the stomach; and return of the energy for work which all men and women should have, and which finds expression in healthy children in the form of great energy for play.

The tax upon the lower intestines has been, in my experiments, reduced so that there was no invitation to relief more frequently than once in four or five days, and the quantity of the deposit was less than half the quantity of a usual daily contribution to waste under former methods of taking in nourishment, thereby proving the fact that appetite and taste, when given full chance to serve, serve us well.

This feature (quantity of waste) differed in the cases of the different persons experimented with according to the carefulness with which they obeyed the test injunctions. In some, greed abnormality could not quickly be overcome, but, as the subjects were selected in part from the stratum of society where want is the constant dread, it is not to be wondered at that a lifetime habit of tremor and greed should resist even the dictates of their reason. But it was in these that the revelation excited the highest appreciation at last when they were put in possession of faculties and strength that they had supposed the Creator had denied them in a world of suffering.

There is no doubt but that it is possible to introduce nutrition into the system wherein, or rather wherewith, there is little or no waste material.