Meat for Digestion

A quarter-pound of meat stimulates almost twice as much gastric juices as does a quarter-pound of bread or other carbohydrates, and is correspondingly better for normal digestion. Doctors, dietitians and gastronomers in general did not know that fact until last week when they received a leaflet from Drs. Martin E. Rehfuss* and George H. Marcil of Philadelphia.

Those two investigators fed healthy students and hospital patients roast beef, hamburger (Liberty) steak, beefsteaks, stewed beef, boiled corned beef, dried beef and bologna sausage. They fed pork and lamb, fish, chicken and guinea-hen, eggs and milk, toast gruel, oatmeal, rolls, potatoes, vegetables. And immediately after each meal, 'they slid a well lubricated yard of stomach tubing down each test case's gullet. By lowering the free end of the tubing they siphoned out a teaspoonful or so of the case's stomach contents and every few minutes they were able to study the progress of digestion.

One very new thing they discovered: some normal "rapid" stomachs digest a meal in two and a half hours. Other normal "slow" stomachs require three and a half hours for the process. Those rates pertain only to the stomach. Digestion proceeds all the way down the ten yards of bowels.

As stomachics, eggs and milk stand between the meats and carbohydrates.

In medicine Drs. Rehfuss' and Marcil's discoveries have several diagnostic values. Persons giving a similar gastric response to bread and meat cannot be considered normal. Gastric digestion of meat is some-what impaired in heart and kidney diseases, in blood poisoning. In peptic ulcer, meat digestion is not impaired so far as concerns the stomach's ability to secrete gastric juices. If a patient fails to secrete the juices on both meat and bread diets, that is serious. Such failure is a sign of cancer of the stomach, of pernicious anemia, of delayed healing in lobar pneumonia and inflammation of the gall bladder.

In physiology and biology this quicker, more ample response to meats than to breads seems to confirm the popular belief that man is fundamentally more carnivorous than herbivorous. In gastronomy, the Philadelphia revelations indicate that for appetizers, hors d'oeuvre, antipasto, Zuspeise or a "chaw" of preserved beef might well be substituted for cocktails.

--Assistant Professor of Medicine, Jefferson Medical College, author & editor of newly published DISEASES OF THE STOMACH, Sounders ($12).