Rensselaer Semi-Weekly Republican, Volume 19, Number 93, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 29 July 1898 — FRUIT AS A MEDICINE. [ARTICLE]

FRUIT AS A MEDICINE.

Acids in Fruit Assist the Action of the Stomach. Why for ages have people eaten apple sauce with their roast goose and suckling pig? is the conundrum asked by Popular Science Monthly, which then proceeds to elucidate as follows: Simply because the aoids and peptones in the fruit assist in digesting the fat so abundant in this kind of food. For the same reason at the end of a heavy dinner we eat our cooked fruits and when we want their digestive action even more developed we take them after dinner in their natural uncooked state as dessert. In the past ages instinct has taught men to do this; to-day science tells them why they did it, and this sarqe science tells us that fruit should be eaten as an aid to digestion of other foods much more than it is now. Cultivated,fruits, such as apples, pears, cherriesstrawberries, grapes, etc., contain on an analysis very similar proportions of the same ingredients, which are about one per cent, of malic and other acids, and one per cent, of flesh-forming albuminoids, with over 80 per cent, of water. Digestion depends upon the action of pepsin in the stomach. Fats are digested by these acids and the bile from the liver. Now, the acids and peptones in fruit peculiarly assist the acids of the stomach. Only lately even royalty has been taking lemon juice in tea instead of sugar, and lemon juice has been prescribed largely bj' physicians to help weak digestion, simply because these acids exist very abundantly in the lemon.