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The Chemistry of Food and Nutrition by A. W. Duncan
page 74 of 110 (67%)
salts. It has been much over-estimated as a food either for invalids or
healthy persons; still it is often valuable as a flavouring to add to
soups, beef-tea, etc., and it is a nerve food allied to tea." Meat
extracts stimulate the action of the heart and the digestive processes,
but as in the case of other stimulants there is a succeeding period of
depression. The _British Medical Journal_ says that the widespread belief
in the universal suitability of concentrated beef-tea is frequently
responsible for increasing the patient's discomfort, and is even capable
in conditions of kidney inefficiency, of producing positive harm. Some of
the meat bases, the leucomaines, have been found to possess marked
poisonous effects on the body. The manfacturers of meat extracts continue
to mislead the public by absurdly false statements of the value of their
products. They assert that their extracts contain the nutritive matter of
30, 40 or 50 times their weight of fresh meat, or that one or two
meat-lozenges are sufficient for a meal. One company, asserts by direct
statement, or imply by pictorial advertisement, that the nutritive matter
in an ox can be concentrated into the bulk of a bottle of extract; and
another company that a tea-cup full is equivalent in food value to an ox.
Professor Halliburton writes: "Instead of an ox in a tea-cup, the ox's
urine in a tea-cup would be much nearer the fact, for the meat extract
consists largely of products on the way to urea, which more nearly
resemble in constitution the urine than they do the flesh of the ox."
Professor Robert Bartholow has also stated that the chemical composition
of beef-tea closely resembles urine, and is more an excrementitious
substance than a food. Those whose business it is to make a pure
meat-broth, for the purpose of preparing therefrom a nutrient for
experimenting with bacteria, cannot fail to recognise its similarity both
in odour and colour to urine. Little consideration is needful to show the
untruthfulness and the absurdity of the statements made by manufacturers
as to the food value of these extracts. Fresh lean beef contains about 25
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