COOKING MILK.

The custom of cooking or sterilizing milk, due to ignorance, is little less than criminal.

Cooking milk is recommended by certain alleged dietetic authorities on the ground that it kills bacteria. They probably forget, maybe do not know, that all the five digestive fluids are strongly germicidal. The bacteria that may exist in milk, of which so much fear is entertained, could not live an instant after coming in contact with the gastric juice which is strongly aciduous, to say nothing of contact with the saliva, bile, and pancreatic and intestinal juices.

Milk, however, should be taken with some intelligence. A valuable lesson in its proper use can be learned from the calf, or nursing infant, which draw and swallow it in small quantities and which keep up a continuous motion of the jaws as if in chewing, thus pumping into the mouth enough saliva to aid nature in the first process of digestion.

Milk can be thoroughly insalivated by taking it into the mouth and mixing it with other foods which have been thoroughly masticated and are ready for swallowing.

The too free use of boiled or sterilized milk will produce scurvy in children, and when scurvy exists both sterilized and raw milk must be discontinued. It is certainly, therefore, much better to commence at once the use of milk in its natural condition than to risk the development of scurvy and then be compelled to entirely do without such a valuable food.

Sterilized milk lacks freshness. It tastes dead, and to a very great extent it is dead. Milk is rich in albuminoids, derived, as it is, from tissues that contain them, and are present in a vitalized form as proteids. The change that takes place in boiling is the coagulation of the proteid molecules, which sets free the inorganic molecules, thus rendering them as to the iron and fluorine unabsorbable, and as to the phosphates unassimilable. It is this most vital change that takes place when milk is cooked.

The use of sterilized milk becomes especially serious when it is remembered that children require both phosphatic and ferric proteids in a living form which are contained only in the natural or uncooked milk.

When adults have long violated the dietetic laws by overfeeding,—consuming large quantities of food and drink that have been devitalized by fire and fermentation,—milk is, in many cases, the one food that will restore a normal condition; especially is this true in advancing old age when the organs of digestion become weak, and the requirements of the body are more like those of the infant. Milk is then of more and more importance as an article of food.