How Often Should a Man Eat ?

Te Aroha News, Volume II, Issue 100, 2 May 1885, Page 5

How Often Should a Man Eat ?

There is a difference in the time of digestion between one meat and another, and between different conditions of the same meat. Eaw beef disappears from the stomach in about two hours, the samo boiled takes three hours, while thoroughly roasted beef is not digested until four hours have elapsed. If the different varieties of meat are arranged in the order of time jin which they disappear, their order ot solubility will be something as follows :—: — j

When it is considered that meats of all kinds are digested quicker than vegetable foods, it is pretty clear that an ordinary meal, whether it be breakfast or dinner, will not be fully digested under six hours; therefore if breakfast should be at 8 a.m., the stem, physiologically considered, requires nothing before 2 p.m., and a third meal will not be necessary before 9 p.m The activity of business and professional men is mainly exercised between ten in the morning and five in the evening; a midday meal involves loss of important time to such persons; a hearty breakfast and a " snack " in the middle of the day, with a good six o'clock dinner, is a common-sense system of feeding which agrees well with the majority. I have nothing to say in favour of the old four daily meals—breakfast, dinner, toa, and supper. Besides the waste of time, the organs are never permitted to rest; before one load of pabulum is disposed of, down comee another on top of the first. Soups and Bauces, sweets and bitters, hot drinks and cold, lutrteft, the mucous membrane.

The great glands, fatigued with the neverceasing work, are liable to strike and take themselves the repose which has been denied. Simplicity of diet has been preached ; the prophet eating the locust bean and wild noney— the Hindoo with his rice—nomad races living on cheese, milk, and goat's flesh, have been held up as examples worthy of all admiration. The poor, the uncivilised, and those who would rend the body for the soul's faults, use, from necessity or choice, simple diets ; but as a rule when man can get a complicated diet he eats it. A man in this climate, to do what he has to do well, requires to have at least twice a day a certain amount of complicated pabulum floating down the intestinal canal, and the amount must be a little in excess of what the body requires. The reason why the diet should be cf a complex character is because if several kinds of albuminous matter are present, and one fails to be digested, another succeeds ; if several kinds of fat are present, if one is unabsorbed another is taken up. And the reason why there should be an excess of nourishment taken is because the digestive organs are never perfect ; there is always waste. It must not be too rashly concluded that because those persons are as a rule in the best state of physical and mental health who take a generous diet, who eat of many kinds of meat, of many kinds of vegetables, and several varieties of starches, that the sumptuous banquets of public and private hospitality are beneficial. Quite the contrary. Hero complexity reaches an absurh and dangerous excess. The eye, the nose, the ear, and the palate, dazzled with fair sights, stimulated by delicious odours, charmed with music, and vitiated with variety of flavour, are all submitted to such a mitrailleuse of temptation that only strongminded persons can resist taking very much more both to eat and to drink than is either necessary or good. Here, as in most other things, the middle course is the safest— to eat, not to gorge ; to drink, not to Fwill ; to aim at satiety, not repletion. — •' Leisure Hour " for February.

Boiled. Tripe ... Turkey ... Beef Mutton ... Fowl ... Pork . . ... 1 hour. ...•24 „ - 3 „ ... 3 „ ... 4 „ ... 4 „ .Roast. Veni3on . . . Goose ... Mutton ... Fowl .. Beef ... 2 „ •■ 24 „ ... H „ ... 4 „ ... 4 „