"Gulp: Adventures on the Alimentary Canal"

[fiefoe]

I missed chunks of Mary Roach's audiobook driving on the highway with a noisy toddler in the back seat, and initially remembered the book as plodding. Luckily there's Kindle's 'shared highlights' feature. Still, people disappoint me by not finding operations for "dropped organs" (when X-rays were introduced) and the great finesse of jaw muscles as noteworthy as I did in passing.

• Because there are more cancers than basic colors, awareness ribbons are like paint chips now
• Mollusk scientist Steve Geiger surmised that a cleanly shucked oyster could likely survive a matter of minutes inside the stomach. Oysters can “switch over to anaerobic” and get by without oxygen, but the temperature in a stomach is far too warm.
• The forestomach of a killer whale, a far smaller creature, has been measured, unstretched, at five feet by seven feet—about as big as a room in a Tokyo capsule hotel, with a similar dearth of amenities.
• They grind and sculpt them into a moistened bolus that is delivered, via a stadium wave of sequential contractions, into a self-kneading sack of hydrochloric acid and then dumped into a tubular leach field, where it is converted into the most powerful taboo in human history. Lunch is an opening act.
• About 80 percent of a person’s gut microflora transmit from his or her mother during birth. “It’s a very stable system,” says Khoruts. “You can trace a person’s family tree by their flora.”
• In reality, the average person eats no more than about thirty foods on a regular basis. “It’s very restricted,” says Adam Drewnowski... who did the tallying. Most people ran through their entire repertoire in four days.
• The extent to which health care bureaucracy stands in the way of better patient care is occasionally astounding.
• “I can get a python to eat a beer bottle if I put a rat head on it."
• "The first part that a wild animal usually eats in its kill is the liver and stomach, the GI tract.” Organs in general are among the most nutritionally giving foods on Earth. A serving of lamb spleen has almost as much vitamin C as a tangerine. Beef lung has 50 percent more. Stomachs are especially valuable because of what’s inside them.
• “So this python is full of gas. You set it down by the campfire because you’re going to eat it. Somebody kicks it or steps on it, and all this hydrogen shoots out of its mouth.” Hydrogen, as the you and I of today know but the you and I of the Pleistocene did not know, starts to be flammable at a concentration of 4 percent. And hydrogen, as Stephen Secor showed, comes out of a decomposing animal at a concentration of about 10 percent. Secor made a flamethrowery vhooosh sound. “There’s your fire-breathing serpent. Imagine the stories that would generate. Over a couple thousand years, you’ve got yourself a legend.” He did some digging. The oldest stories of fire-breathing dragons come from Africa and south China: where the giant snakes are.
• By far the oddest reverse delivery on record is the holy-water enema. The first reference I came upon, a passing mention in an art journal, suggested that the holy-water clyster was a routine weapon in the exorcist’s arsenal.
• “Morning breath” is hydrogen sulfide released by bacteria consuming shed tongue cells while you mouth-breathe for eight hours; saliva normally washes the debris away.
• People eat physics. You eat physical properties with a little bit of taste and aroma. And if the physics is not good, then you don’t eat it.
• Anal tissue is among the most densely innervated on the human body. It has to be. It requires a lot of information to do its job. The anus has to be able to tell what’s knocking at its door: Is it solid, liquid, or gas? And then selectively release either all of it or one part of it. The consequences of a misread are dire. As Mike Jones put it, “You don’t want to choose poorly.”
• The Greeks got it from the Roman Catholics, whose priests used to baptize with spittle. The priests got it from the Gospel of Mark—the bit where Jesus heals the blind by mixing dirt with his saliva and rubbing the mud on a man’s eyelids. “It’s an interesting passage,” former Catholic priest Tom Rastrelli told me, “because the writers of the gospels of Luke and Matthew, who used Mark as their source, redacted a line.” Mark had included a bit about a blind man opening his eyes and seeing what looked like trees walking around. In other words, the treatment was minimally effective. The miracle of Jesus bestowing rudimentary vision to the blind doesn’t have the same ring to it, so the line was cut.
• Human teeth can detect a grain of sand or grit ten microns in diameter. A micron is 1/25,000 of an inch. If you shrank a Coke can until it was the diameter of a human hair, the letter O in the product name would be about ten microns across.
• Like people, bacteria are good or bad not so much by nature as by circumstance.
• Mice are also available in fuzzy (ten to fifteen days old), white peach fuzzy (“Just the right size when a pinky is too small and a fuzzy is too large”), hopper, weanling, and adult. Feeder rats and guinea pigs are sized like T-shirts: XS, S, M, L, XL, and XXL.
• Of all the so-called variety meats, none presents a steeper challenge to the food persuader than the reproductive organs.
• I was always jealous of people who study lobsters.
• Laundry detergent is essentially a digestive tract in a box. Ditto dishwashing detergent: protease and lipase eat the food your dinner guests didn't.
• The J.W. vitrine doesn’t exhibit a corpse—just a colon. That this glass case is not much larger than the one that holds Lenin.
• Of course, our Berkeley nutritionists, spooning bacteria onto dinnerware and stepping back like nervous chefs to see how it goes.
• Amylase breaks starches down into simple sugars that the body can use. You can taste this happening when you chew bread. A sweet taste materializes as your saliva mixes with the starch. Add a drop of saliva to a spoonful of custard, and within seconds it pours like water.
• With one exception, the bacteria (if they even exist) in probiotics are aerobic; culturing, processing, and shipping bacteria in an oxygen-free environment is complicated and costly.
• In 1926, the Indian Research Fund Association compared rats who lived on chapatis and vegetables with rats fed a Western diet of tinned meat, white bread, jam, and tea. So repellent was the Western fare that the latter group preferred to eat their cage mates, three of them so completely that “little or nothing remained for post-mortem examination.”
• Penguins can shut down digestion by lowering the temperature inside their stomach to the point where the gastric juices are no longer active. The stomach becomes a kind of cooler to carry home the fish they’ve caught for their young. Penguins’ hunting grounds may be several days’ journey from the nest.
• The fistulated—or “holey,” as the students like to say—cow has been an ag-school standard for decades. My husband Ed recalls, as a child, hearing from his dad about the cow at Rutgers with “a window in its side.” The operation is simple. The bottom of a coffee can is traced with chalk on the cow, a topical anesthetic applied, and the circle cut from the hide, along with a matching opening in the rumen. The two holes are stitched together and the hole is outfitted with a plastic stopper. It is little more barbaric than the earlobe plugs of my local Peet’s barista or Ariel’s facial adornments.