The above rules, as stated, apply to people in ordinarily good health. In wasting disease it may be necessary to supply nutrition even as often as every half hour; and in all serious digestive troubles it is wiser to eat six times a day than three, the meals to be light, nutritious in quality, and small in quantity, so as not to impose too great a burden at one time on the weakened digestive apparatus.
We will now consider the action of several substances, in common use, that are inimical to health, and that have an especially demoralizing effect upon digestion.
The first of these is alcohol, which only serves as fuel, but does not form tissue. Its best friends in the medical profession no longer claim anything for it but a stimulating effect. Its action on the digestive organs (especially the stomach) is disastrous in the extreme. It destroys the appetite, although it temporarily sustains vigor by unnatural excitation.
Without going so far as to say that a man is lost to all sense of decency because he takes an occasional drink, we will say that it is in nowise necessary to the system--that the habit, indulged in to excess, is the most fatal that can be contracted, and that inasmuch as the majority of people have not sufficient will-power to curb their appetites, the wisest plan is to avoid the use of alcoholic beverages altogether.
The man who is addicted to the excessive use of alcoholic stimulants is over-taxing the vital organs of his body in the most outrageous manner, and although Nature incessantly enters protest against being overworked, he either ignorantly fails to recognize the warnings, or wantonly disregards them. Let us for a few moments consider the work which the heart is called upon to do, and the amount of extra labor imposed upon it by the unwise use of alcohol. The average life of a man is thirty-eight years, and, in a healthy man, the number of heart-beats per minute is seventy, or during an average life, 76,536,740,000. Now, the use of alcohol in anything like an excessive quantity increases the action of the heart ten beats per minute, making 600 extra beats per hour, 14,400 per day, 482,000 per month, 9,784,000 per year, 195,568,000 in twenty years, and 372,793,000 in a lifetime of thirty-eight years. Or, supposing a man should live fifty years, the number of pulsations of the heart during that period, at the normal rate, would be 917,239,680. Now, if ten extra beats be added to this, for, say the last twenty-five years, we find that the heart is called upon to make 91,840,000 extra beats. Think of that enormous amount of additional work imposed upon a delicate, complex piece of mechanism like the human heart!