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I had heard that Presley died on the toilet, but I'd assumed the location was happenstance, as it was with Judy Garland and Lenny Bruce: an embarrassing setting for a standard celebrity overdose. But the straining-at-stool theory made some sense. With all three autopsies--that of J.W., Mr. K., and E., as Presley's intimates called him--the collapse was abrupt and the autopsy revealed no obvious cause of death. (Though Presley had traces of ..
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Mary Roach |
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short piece headlined "Elvis Died of Constipation" had run as the site's lead story (and its middle and last story) under the category Constipation News. Why didn't the colonic inertia theory come up earlier? Nichopoulos says that at the time, he had never heard of it. Nor had the gastroenterologist who treated Presley in the 1970s. "Nobody knew about it back then," Nichopoulos says."
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Mary Roach |
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I didn't realize Farrah Fawcett had died of anal cancer. There were references to her ailment as cancer "below the colon." It was like my mother, when I was a kid, calling the vagina "your bottom in front." Up through 2010, anal cancer had no nonprofit society, no one to organize fund-raisers and outreach, no colored awareness ribbon. (Even appendix cancer has a ribbon.)* Like cervical cancer, anal cancer is caused by the human papillomavir..
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Mary Roach |
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I ask Nichopoulos to talk about precisely, medically, what caused Presley's death. "The night he died he was bigger than usual," he begins. Depending on how long it had been since Presley had managed to empty himself, his girth fluctuated between big and stupendous. He sometimes appeared to be gaining or losing twenty pounds from one performance to the next. "He wanted to get rid of his gut that night. He was pushing and pushing. Holding hi..
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Mary Roach |
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The body's response to this wild, Valsalvic seesawing of the vital signs can throw off the electrical rhythm of the heart. The resulting arrhythmia can be fatal. This is especially likely to happen in someone, like Elvis, with a compromised heart. Fatal arrhythmia is the cause of death listed on Presley's autopsy report.
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Mary Roach |
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Making matters riskier: bed pans! "The notorious frequency of sudden and unexpected deaths of patients while using bed pans in hospitals has been commented upon for many years," wrote the Cincinnati doctors. Notorious enough for a term to be coined: "bed pan death." Lying flat is as counterproductive a posture as squatting is productive. Squatting passively increases the pressure on the rectum. It does the pushing for you. It"
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Mary Roach |
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The other mode of defecation-associated sudden death is pulmonary embolism. The surge of blood when the person relaxes can dislodge a clot in a large blood vessel
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Mary Roach |
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sugar itself doesn't cause cavities; it's the acidic metabolites of the bacteria that feed on the sugar. As with acidic foods, saliva dilutes the acid and brings the mouth back to a neutral pH. You
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Mary Roach |
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eceb7fb
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Could thorough chewing lower the national debt? If saliva is full of bacteria, why do animals lick their wounds? Why don't suicide bombers smuggle bombs in their rectums? Why don't stomachs digest themselves? Why is crunchy food so appealing? Can constipation kill you? Did it kill Elvis? You
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Mary Roach |
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You may be wondering, though probably not, why newborns--who have no teeth to protect--produce excessive volumes of drool. Silletti has answers. One is simple mechanics. "They lack teeth to physically keep it in there."
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Mary Roach |
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Flavor is a combination of taste (sensory input from the surface of the tongue) and smell, but mostly it's the latter. Humans perceive five tastes--sweet, bitter, salty, sour, and umami (brothy)--and an almost infinite number of smells. Eighty to ninety percent of the sensory experience of eating is olfaction.
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Mary Roach |
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Humans are better equipped for sight than for smell. We process visual input ten times faster than olfactory.
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Mary Roach |
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Higher-end detergents contain at least three digestive enzymes: amylase to break down starchy stains, protease for proteins, and lipase for greasy stains (not just edible fats but body oils like sebum). Laundry detergent is essentially a digestive tract in a box. Ditto dishwashing detergent: protease and lipase eat the food your dinner guests didn't. Credit
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Mary Roach |
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Pet foods come in a variety of flavors because that's what we humans like,+ and we assume our pets like what we like. We have that wrong. "For cats especially," Moeller says, "change is often more difficult than monotony." Nancy"
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Mary Roach |
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THREE FAMOUS ENGRAVINGS depict Alexis St. Martin in his youth. I've seen them many times, in biographies of his surgeon William Beaumont, in Beaumont's own book, in journal articles about the pair. As detailed as the artworks are, you can't tell what St. Martin looked like from examining them. All three woodcuts are of the lower portion of his left breast, and the famous hole. I could pick St. Martin's nipple out of a lineup before I could ..
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Mary Roach |
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The two first met in June 1822, at a company store on Mackinac Island, part of a trading post owned by the American Fur Company. St. Martin was a French Canadian voyageur--an indentured trapper--hauling pelts by canoe and on foot through the woodsy landscape of the Michigan Territory. St. Martin retained little memory of the pair's historic meeting, lying, as he was, barely conscious on the floor. Someone's gun had discharged accidently, sp..
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Mary Roach |
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In 1817, d'Arcet Jr., a chemist by trade, came up with a method for extracting gelatin from bones (and money from Parisian welfare coffers). Public hospitals and poorhouses, having swallowed the preposterous claim that two ounces of d'Arcet's gelatin was the nutritional equivalent of three-plus pounds of meat, began serving soup made with the gelatin. So plentiful were
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Mary Roach |
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comparing traditional bouillon with gelatin-based broth. The latter was "more distasteful, more putrescible, less digestible, less nutritious, and . . . moreover, it often brought on diarrhea."
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Mary Roach |
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Of relevant interest, an 1859 issue of California Farmer and Journal of Useful Sciences offers a recipe* for a nutritional extract made from Peruvian seabird guano.
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Mary Roach |
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two to three tablespoonfuls was equal to two pounds of meat, with the advantage that it lends to the laborers' potatoes and peas "a very agreeable taste!"
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Mary Roach |
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The ducks of Mackinac Island are apparently not easily taken down. "Found a portion of the Lungs as large as a turkey's egg protruding through the external wound, lacerated and burnt, and below this another protrusion resembling a portion of the Stomach, what at first view I could not believe possible to be that organ in that situation with the subject surviving, but on closer examination I found it to be actually the Stomach, with a punctu..
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Mary Roach |
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In "Working Ethics: William Beaumont, Alexis St. Martin, and Medical Research in Antebellum America," historian Alexa Green explains the men's relationship as clearly one of master and servant." If the man wants to push a piece of mutton through your side, you let him."
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Mary Roach |
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For two people so firmly distanced by class and employment structure, Beaumont and St. Martin inhabited a relationship that could be oddly, intensely intimate. "On applying the tongue to the mucous coat of the stomach, in its empty, unirritated state, no acid taste can be perceived."
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Mary Roach |
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The one image I eventually found of Alexis St. Martin as a whole young man is in a painting by Dean Cornwell entitled Beaumont and St. Martin--part of the Pioneers of American Medicine series commissioned in 1938 by Wyeth Laboratories for an ad campaign. Despite the unfortunate side-parted bob that St. Martin appeared to stick with all through his adult life, the man as Cornwell rendered him is striking: broad cheekbones, vertically plungin..
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Mary Roach |
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The feline passion for pyrophosphates might explain the animal's reputation as a picky eater. "We make [pet food] choices based on what we like," says Reed, "and then when they don't like it, we call them finicky." There is no way to know or imagine what the taste of pyrophosphate is like for cats. It's like a cat trying to imagine the taste of sugar. Cats, unlike dogs and other omnivores, can't taste sweetness. There's no need, since the c..
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Mary Roach |
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Rodents, on the other hand, are slaves to sweetness. They have been known to die of malnutrition rather than step away from a sugar-water drip. In an obesity study from the 1970s, rats fed an all-you-can-eat "supermarket" diet that included marshmallows, milk chocolate, and chocolate-chip cookies gained 269 percent more weight than rats fed standard laboratory fare. There are strains of mice that will, over the course of a day, consume thei..
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Mary Roach |
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The moral of the story is this: It takes an ill-advised mix of ignorance, arrogance, and profit motive to dismiss the wisdom of the human body in favor of some random notion you've hatched or heard and branded as true. By wisdom I mean the collective improvements of millions of years of evolution. The mind objects strongly to shit, but the body has no idea what we're on about.
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Mary Roach |
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Fletcher believed--decided, really--that by chewing each mouthful of food until it liquefies, the eater could absorb more or less double the amount of vitamins and other nutrients. "Half the food commonly consumed is sufficient for man," he stated in a letter in 1901. Not only was this economical--Fletcher estimated that the United States could save half a million dollars a day by Fletcherizing--it was healthier, or so he maintained. By del..
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Mary Roach |
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And of a superior quality--as demonstrated by an unnamed "literary test subject" who, in July 1903, while living in a hotel in Washington, D.C., subsisted on a glass of milk and four Fletcherized corn muffins a day. It was a maximally efficient scenario. At the end of eight days, he had produced sixty-four thousand words, and just one BM."
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Mary Roach |
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At one chew per second, the Fletcherizing of a single bite of shallot would take more than ten minutes. Supper conversation presented a challenge. "Horace Fletcher came for a quiet dinner, sufficiently chewed," wrote the financier William Forbes in his journal from 1906. Woe befall the non-Fletcherizer forced to endure what historian Margaret Barnett called "the tense and awful silence which . . . accompanies their excruciating tortures of ..
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Mary Roach |
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tried to reenliven mealtimes by hiring a quartette to sing "The Chewing Song,"+ an original Kellogg composition,"
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Mary Roach |
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Fletcherism. The U.S. Army Medical Department issued formal instructions for a "Method of Attaining Economic Assimilation of Nutriment"--aka the Fletcher system. ("Masticate all solid food until it is completely liquefied," begins the familiar refrain.)"
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Mary Roach |
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Expert economics coming to the assistance of ambitious unintelligence." Let them chew cake."
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Mary Roach |
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Beaumont had been trying to determine whether the gastric juice would work outside of the stomach, removed from the body's "vital force." (It does.) He filled vial after vial with St. Martin's secretions and dropped in all manner of foods. The cabin became a kind of gastric-juice dairy." --
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Mary Roach |
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Cornwell's painting is set at Fort Crawford, in Michigan Territory, during St. Martin's second stint in Beaumont's employ, around 1830. At this stage in his digestive explorations, Beaumont had been trying to determine whether the gastric juice would work outside of the stomach, removed from the body's "vital force." (It does.) He filled vial after vial with St. Martin's secretions and dropped in all manner of foods. The cabin became a kind..
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Mary Roach |
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The prevailing mood of the painting is stoicism: one man enduring for the sake of science, the other for subsistence. Given the painting's intent--the glorification of medicine (and Beaumont and Wyeth labs)--it's fair to assume the emotional content has been given a whitewash. It can't have been a hoot for either. At least once in his notes, Beaumont mentions St. Martin's "anger and impatience." The procedure was not merely tedious; it was ..
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Mary Roach |
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What ensued was a game of Coyote and Roadrunner that dragged on for more than a decade. Sixty letters went back and forth among Beaumont, St. Martin, and various contacts at the American Fur Company who had located St. Martin and tried to broker a return. It was a seller's market with a fevered buyer. With each new round of communications--St. Martin holding out for more or making excuses, though always politely and with "love to your famil..
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Mary Roach |
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Is it possible to bolster one's hip bones by doing some type of controlled fall? Here
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Mary Roach |
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Obsession is a pair of blinders, and Beaumont wore his tightly. He far overstated the role of gastric acid, ignoring the digestive contributions of pepsin and of pancreatic enzymes introduced in the small intestine. As is regularly evidenced by tens of thousands of gastric reflux sufferers--their acid production pharmaceutically curtailed--humans can get by with very little gastric acid. The acid's main duty, in fact, is to kill bacteria--a..
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Mary Roach |
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People come to me and say, 'My wine stinks. What happened?'" Langstaff can read the stink. Off-flavors--or "defects," in the professional's parlance--are clues to what went wrong. An olive oil with a flavor of straw or hay suggests a problem with desiccated olives. A beer with a "hospital" smell is an indication that the brewer may have used chlorinated water, even just to rinse the equipment. The wine flavors "leather" and "horse sweat" ar..
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Mary Roach |
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there's a good chance St. Martin was happier in his simple shack with his family, "perfectly necket," than Beaumont was toiling in his labs, misunderstood by his colleagues. To each his own. Beaumont was a man for whom career came first. Like any experimenter, he was meticulous and exacting. People are messy, unpredictable things. Science you can control. Which is why St. Martin was such a bugbear for Beaumont."
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Mary Roach |
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Verbal facility with smells and flavors doesn't come naturally. As babies, we learn to talk by naming what we see. "Baby points to a lamp, mother says, 'Yes, a lamp,'" says Johan Lundstrom, a biological psychologist with the Monell Chemical Senses Center in Philadelphia. "Baby smells an odor, mother says nothing." All our lives, we communicate through visuals. No one, with a possible exception made for Sue Langstaff, would say, "Go left at ..
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Mary Roach |
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It's not so important to know the difference between bitter and sour, skunky and yeasty, tarry and burnt. "Who cares. They're both terrible. Ew. But if you're a brewer, it's extremely important."
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Mary Roach |
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A quick word about chemicals and flavors. All flavors in nature are chemicals. That's what food is. Organic, vine-ripened, processed and unprocessed, vegetable and animal, all of it chemicals. The characteristic aroma of fresh pineapple? Ethyl 3-(methylthio)propanoate, with a supporting cast of lactones, hydrocarbons, and aldehydes. The delicate essence of just-sliced cucumber? 2E,6Z-Nonadienal. The telltale perfume of the ripe Bartlett pea..
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Mary Roach |