"If a man drinks daily 8 or 10 quarts of the best Bavarian beer, in a year he will have taken into his system the nutritive constituents contained in a 5 pound loaf of bread."
Eight quarts a day for a year would be 2,920 quarts, or a little more than 23 barrels. If sold to the consumer at the low rate of five cents a pint, it would cost him $292; a high price for as much nourishment as in a 5 pound loaf!
Analyses of wine by reliable chemists show that the consumer must pay $500 for the equivalent in nourishment of a 5 pound loaf of bread, wine being higher priced than beer. Wines average 80 per cent. water, about 15 per cent. alcohol, and 5 per cent. residue. This residue is composed of sugar, tartaric, acetic and carbonic acids, salts of potassium and sodium, tannic acid, and traces of an ethereal substance which gives the peculiar or distinguishing flavor. The only one of these ingredients possessing food value is sugar; this exists chiefly in what are called sweet wines. Yet how many thousands of people spend money they can ill afford for wines and beers to build up the failing strength of some loved one! A costly delusion, and too often a fatal one!
"Distilled liquors, if unadulterated, contain literally nothing but water and alcohol, except traces of juniper in gin, and the flavor of the fermented material from which they have been distilled."--_Influence of Alcohol_, by N. S. Davis, M. D.
It is the solemn duty of those to whom the people look for instruction in matters of health to undeceive the toiling masses as to the food-value of alcoholic liquids. Some of the medical profession are faithful in this regard, but too many others are themselves deceived, or care not for the destruction of the people.
A lady asked her family physician several years ago what he thought of the views of those medical writers who class alcohol as a narcotic, and not a stimulant. He answered with some heat, "Any one who says alcohol is not a stimulant is either a fool or a knave!" He could not have been aware that some of the most distinguished professors in American medical colleges teach that alcohol is not, properly speaking, a stimulant, but a narcotic.
The accepted definition of a stimulant in medical literature is some agent capable of exciting or increasing _vital activity_ as a whole, or the natural activity of some one structure or organ.