Suspicious Or Deleterious Foods

It would be quite easy to supplement our list of cases exhibiting marked idiosyncrasy to one or other kind of food, but enough has been said to serve our purpose. It is judicious, however, to look with some degree of suspicion on certain foods and food substances and to make diligent inquiries as to their source.

For some reason, not altogether explained by Metch-nikoff's theory of microbes on their exterior or poisonous fertilisers in their interior, fruits of various classes head the list. Bananas, cherries, melons, prunes, raspberries, oranges, grape-fruit, peaches, plums, apricots, and apples may all in their turn give rise to poisonous symptoms.

Amongst vegetables, in addition to those already mentioned, potatoes, turnips, radishes, onions, cabbage, sage, spinach, and asparagus have been known to excite gastrointestinal irritation; and onions and spinach, on account of their irritant properties, are frequently used as laxatives by certain individuals.

Oysters, even when not contaminated with typhoid germs, lobsters, crabs, salmon, cockles, and mussels are deservedly classed amongst the indigestibles by large numbers of people, and all excepting salmon are negligible sources of food supply. Like mushrooms they should only be looked upon in the light of flavouring agents.

Cheese may contain tyrotoxicon, a poisonous product with effects like cholera, and beans always contain an irritant principle which can only be extracted from them by most careful soaking.

In countries where rye is a staple article of diet, epidemics of a deadly nervous disorder called ergotism, due to the growth of the fungus ergot on the rye plant, are not unknown. Lathyrism is another disease, usually however confined to animals, caused by the consumption of a plant allied to the bean and containing a bitter toxic principle. We have already mentioned the incidence of beri-beri in rice-feeders; and pellagra, which is now endemic in the United States, is attributed to the consumption of maize.

Nuts of all kinds, but especially peanuts and walnuts, possess, in their kernels or the thin skin covering the kernel, an irritating substance which gives rise to severe colic in many people, and is quite unable to be tolerated by others.

The eating of flesh is regarded with extreme horror by vegetarians chiefly because of its tendency to originate disease in the body of the consumer, but in this country at any rate there is less evidence of its capacity to communicate disease directly, than there is amongst flesh-less food substances. It is true that epidemics of trichinosis were until recently fairly common in Germany, due to eating "measley" pork, but the few cases recorded in this country in the last half-century have all been imported from abroad. The allegation that cancer, rheumatism, and other diseases are attributable to flesh consumption is disproved by careful investigation.