Salt-eating is often advocated on the ground that it aids digestion. It is even said to be essential to the formation of gastric juice. Strange is it not, if this is true, that carnivorous animals do not seek and eat salt?

Sylvester Graham says: "It is a little remarkable that some have contended for the necessity of salt as an article in the diet of man, to counteract the putrescent tendency of animal food or fresh meat, when there is not a carnivorous animal in Nature that ever uses a particle of it, and few if any of the purely flesh-eating portions of the human family ever use it in any measure or manner and most of the human family who subsist mostly on vegetable food wholly abstain from it."

The stimulating influence of salt upon the flow of saliva is well known. It is employed in some institutions in the form of a bath as the "salt-rub," because of its "stimulating" effect. The saliva poured out when salt is taken is an inactive juice mixed with much mucus.

Salt retards gastric digestion. Three parts of salt added to one thousand parts of gastric juice will, as shown by Linossier in 1900, retard protein digestion to the same extent as does the reduction of the amount of pepsin by 40 to 50 per cent. This is about the amount of salt consumed by the average person in an ordinary meal.

The genuinely absorptive work of the villi that line the small intestines can be understood only if we realize that it depends upon a selective absorption--the digested food is secreted into the blood; there is no mere osmotic passage of food through the intestinal wall. It must be that salt has a paralyzing effect upon the function of the villi, also, so that it hinders the absorption of food. It would be valuable to know how much of the reported failure of certain individuals to absorb vitamins is due to the large quantities of salt they habitually use.