If the digestive apparatus is in good working order, the man may be said to be in perfect health. Food taken at regular times, its quantity being sufficient, and its quality good, the stomach and its absorbing apparatus being in perfect working order, thus enabling the food to be assimilated, one would, mentally and bodily, enjoy a perfect health. But what with the adulterations of food, the unwholesome food taken, and, altogether, our artificial mode of living, the picture that can be usually drawn of the average individual is one very different from good health. But things being as they are, our duty is to make the best of them, and, by more enlightened views being held, to some extent improve matters.
“Eat to live, not live to eat.” is an axiom that it would be well for all who suffer from any form of dyspepsia to remember. The foundation of most dyspeptic symptoms is laid by excessive eating and drinking. We all eat more than is necessary for the wants of the system supplying the loss resulting from the mere wear and tear.
Indigestion means just what it says. The foods are more or less imperfectly or incompletely digested; that is all. Food can not long remain what it is at the time of entering the stomach; because it is in the presence of heat, moisture and air. Whatever is eaten in excess, if not laid up in store in the form of fat, is wasted. Worse than that, if the food be of an indigestible nature, or very excessive in quantity, it is not only not assimilated, but also, by its irritant effects, prevents the ordinary digestible quantity from being absorbed, and thus one may get thin by excessive eating.
According to nature’s rule, the food entering the stomach serves as the stimulus in response to which digestion begins in the stomach and ends down in the bowel. But in the case of an indigestion, the food does not serve as the usual stimulus, and it is not digested, but is decomposed into an utterly different mess, which differs from the original as much as a rotten egg differs from a fresh one. This converted mess serves as a stimulus in response to which a series of events takes place quite different from those of digestion.
Some of the products undigested food material are gaseous and account for the bloating, and sometimes painful distension of the stomach and bowels. Some of the products, gaseous and liquid, are irritating and cause pain by irritation. The sufferer, who has gaseous distension and bloating, as they are often painfully irritating, understands this irritating quality.
In children, from their more delicate organism, the deleterious effects of over-feeding are more patent to observation, but not much more injurious, than to adults. In the latter, if not so fatal, over-feeding is more painful and chronic in its effects, Nature not relieving itself by vomiting so easily as in children; hence the train of irritant symptoms that exhibit themselves.