Eating for Strength; Or, Food and Diet in Their Relation to Health and Work, Together with Several Hundred Recipes for Wholesome Foods and Drinks (Paperback)

Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER III. THE DAILY REQUIREMENTS OP THE BODY. Before considering the daily requirements of our bodies it will be necessary to know what is expected of them, or what they are capable of accomplishing. To this end we need a mathematical form of expression for the work which an average human being is able to perform daily. To secure this we must first convert the various kinds of labor into a common unit. This unit, as has been agreed upon by physiologists, is a foot-ton, or 2000 pounds raised one foot high, The number of foot-tons which can be lifted daily would constitute a day's work. There are, however, two kinds of work done by the body: one is internal work, such as circulating the blood, respiration, secretion, digestion, and all other kinds of labor except muscular. The other kind is known as external work, concerning which Dr. Alexander Wynter Blythe, in a little book entitled "Diet in its Relation to Health and Work," says: " The external work varies much. A country postman, 150 pounds in weight, walking his daily round of twenty miles, would do work equal to 353.4 foot-tons. Ordinary day laborers, such as we see on the road, probably average 350 foot-tons. In the case of a peddler, cited by Parks, who carried twenty-eight pounds on his back and walked twenty miles daily, the work was 419.5 foot-tons. "In Weston's feat of fifty miles a day, I have calculated his daily work to be no less than 793 foot-tons; but this large number was exceeded in a former feat, in which he walked 317 miles in five days, which would give, approximately, 1,010 foot- tons daily. "A very hard day's work for most men is 400 foot- tons. At the other end of the scale stand sedentary occupations, for example: needlewomen, the external work of which may fall as low as seventeen or eigh...