Cream as a Food.

Otago Witness, Issue 2722, 16 May 1906, Page 68

Cream as a Food.

The very cream of anything is an expression signifying the beat there is, yet few seem to appreciate the value of cream as an article of human diet, most people preferring to use milk fat in the form of butter. While good and properly-made butter may fairly be considered to be the best and most wholesome .'olid fat in use, it is quit© inferior to cre-am in respect to both economy and health. Many people who cannot take cod-liver c-il can take fresh cream, enjoy it and thrive on it. In many run down anJ weak cases where there is emaciation, cream .s often beneficial.

The superiority of cream over butter, or any other solid fat, consi-ts, first, in its being not exactly in a liquid form, 2>ut in a condition allowing of great mobility between its particles, permitting the gastric juioe to mix with it in the most perfect manner and with whatever else the stomach contains, thereby facilitating digestion. Its behaviour is quite different in this respect fiom that of butter and other pure fats. As soon as they become melted they grease over the other contents of the stomach, obstructing in a measura> the contact of gastric juices and hindering the progress of their digestion.

Cream is also superior to butter and other fats from its being intimately incorporated with albuminous or flesh-forming matter in a condition favourabla for easy and perfect digestion, so that while it §*lies the purpose ql all function^] maiter

in developing animal heat and force, it rebuilds tissue, an important consideration in the case of invalids.

It is a fact in the functions of the human stomach that neither fat alone ror albuminoids alone- are digested by it as well as when the two are mingled together in certain proportions. It does not seem to cope with any kind o f grease alone, and pure albuminoids it does not digest as well as that of animals in better condition, in whose muscles fat is mingled.

Tho palate instinctively ieeognises the difference between fat and no tat in tLe flesh of animals when need for food, always preferring that marbled with fat. A more •perfect combination of fat and flesh-form-ing food could hardly be 'magined than exists in cream, each fat globule of which it is composed being enclosed with an envelope o^ albuminous matter, and beside this being suspended, making the incorporation of fat and nutriment matter as intimate as it is possible to make it.— English Health Journal.