One of the roles well done by science within the last decade has been to relieve the public mind of its several obtrusive misconceptions concerning alcohol. Many of these downright lies were fostered by the Prohibitionists—good folks who saw nothing wrong in using foul suggests that to achieve what they believed was a worthy end. Let us take a transient refresher course in the fundamentals of our scientific information of the subject. To start with, “The subtle alchemist that in an exceedingly trice Life’s leaden metal into gold transmute,” is ethyl alcohol, chemically C2H5OH—nothing however oxygen, hydrogen, and carbon. The same elements are found in sugar, starch, and fats. Forever Royal Jelly could be a milky secretion derived from the pharyngeal glands of the honey bee. After all, chemically speaking, alcohol and water are related. “Alcohol, whatever the kind, has an oxygen-hydrogen combination referred to as the -OH cluster, exactly as will water, HOH. Hence alcohol tends to dissolve in water. One would possibly think of water as an alcohol, hydroalcohol 100 per cent pure.
The kind of alcohol one has depends on the kind of tail one puts on the -OH dog. Attach . . . CH3 and also the result’s methyl or wood alcohol that blinds and kills. Attach C2H5 and it’s ethyl or grain alcohol, the age-previous consoler of mankind.” three, four This substance, ethyl alcohol, is produced in nature by the process referred to as alcoholic fermentation, in that the sugar in fruits is modified into alcohol and carbon dioxide by the action of yeast, a straightforward type of plant life that will grow in sugar beneath the right conditions. The spores of this plant are airborne. Ethyl alcohol isn’t a poison like its cousin methyl alcohol. It’s a food. Each ounce, by weight, of absolute alcohol has 210 calories. This is exactly the identical as a 0.5 pound of ocean bass. A higher source of comparison with different foods is this: 1 gram of alcohol yields 7.0 calories, whereas 1 gram of carbohydrate or protein offers only 4.1 calories. Alcohol is exceeded only by fats that furnish 9.three calories per gram.
Like different foods, alcohol burns within the body. It’s for this reason that a drunk can choose days and even weeks on nothing however alcohol while not starving to death. Royal Jelly contains vitamins A, C, D, and E and is also a made natural storehouse of the B-advanced vitamins. Nobody can flourish on alcohol, but, as a result of it contains nothing however calories—no vitamins whatever. A lengthy diet of alcoholic beverages will manufacture only the diseases of vitamin deficiency like beriberi and pellagra. Drinking sparsely never harmed anyone, and even drinking habitually to excess will not cause any of the ills it had been once speculated to, like insanity by “corroding the cells of the brain”—a favourite with the Munchhausens of Prohibition. It will not cause kidney trouble, hardening of the arteries, high blood pressure, cancer, or abdomen ulcers. It perhaps associated, but, with ulcer, but for a reason to be discussed later. It will not cause cirrhosis of the liver. (Mohammedans, who do not drink in the least, have a lot of cirrhosis than we do.) But there is some association between cirrhosis and alcoholism, in all probability of a nutritional nature.