, while if the nut is ground fine
before feeding, it was readily digested. Comparisons of nut butters and
nut pastes with the whole nut also brought out this point. The
completely commuted nut butters showed consistently higher degrees of
digestion than the whole nut.

With the exception of the starch rich chestnut, the heating of the nut
did not seem to effect the digestibility whether this heat was boiling,
steaming or roasting. The raw nut apparently is as well digested as the
heated products. No differences were found between nut butters whether
the process involved steaming or roasting of the nut. I am not speaking
of the enhancing of the flavor that heating may bring about, but only of
the digestibility.

Dr. Longworthy and his co-workers in the Dept. of Agriculture have
investigated in recent years the digestibility of many vegetable oils,
among them nut oils, and have found as high a percent of utilization
with these as with butter and our other common animal food fats.

I believe that we are fully justified in the conclusion that nuts and
nut products, if rationally used in our diets, are as digestible and
fully as valuable from a nutritional point of view as our other
foodstuffs.

While we can now definitely speak of the high digestibility of nuts, it
is necessary to consider other phases of the part played by foods in
nutrition. The fact that a food after being taken into the body can be
broken up by the digestive juices of the alimentary tract, and the
products absorbed, as we have found, to be the case with the nuts, is
not the end of the story of the function of that food.

About fifteen years ago, it was discovered that during the progress of
digestion, the protein materials are reduced by the digestive juices of
our stomachs and intestines to smaller chemical compounds, and that it
is these smaller fragments of the protein molecule that are absorbed
into the blood and are used to build up our muscles and tissues. These
fragments or "building stones" as they have been fancifully called, are
all of a distant class of chemical compounds known to chemists as amino
acids. Eighteen of these acids have been found as the products of
protein digestion.

We may conceive of our bodies as being continually supplied with a mass
of these 18 building stones from which it selects the kind and number
that it needs to repair the everyday wear and tear of the tissues and in
the case of the growing child builds new s