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, 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
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