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Show AIDS THE DIGESTIVE ORGANS Importance of Thorough Mastication of Food Is Hardly Properly Understood. "Chew your food well." is a motto which should be written large on the walls of dining rooms, restaurants, and every other place where human beings cat The reason Is that in order or-der to digest food in the shortest possible pos-sible time, and with the least possible effort, It must first be dissolved, and this can be accomplished only by adequate ade-quate chewing. Just how much thorough chewing lessens the strain on the digestive apparatus ap-paratus can be seen by a very simple experiment. Take a one-inch cube of hard, solid. non-porous sugar candy and drop It Into a pint of water. It will take at least half at hour and perhaps much longer to dissolve, because a cube of this size has only six square Inches of surface exposed to the solvent action ac-tion of the water. If, however, a similar cube of candy is broken into 100 smaller pieces before be-fore being placed in the water it will dissolve 10,000 times as quickly, because be-cause there is now 10.000 times, as much surface area exposed. In digestion we have to deal not merely with simple solution but with the chemical conversion of insoluble into soluble substances a much more difficult process. For this reason a one-inch cube of solid fcyd would take much more than 10,000 times as long to digest as the same quantity which has been reduced to fine bits by the action of the teeth and the saliva glands. Science now believes that much modern dyspepsia arises from our having hav-ing lost the habit of living on hard, dry foods. When all our food was so hard that it had to be well chewed before be-fore we could swallow It our salivary glands were kept more active aud our teeth cleaner. |
