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Fletcher was the instigator of a fad for extremely thorough chewing. We are not talking about British Prime Minister William Gladstone's thirty-two chews per bite. We are talking about this: "One-fifth of an ounce of the midway section of the young garden onion, sometimes called 'challot,' has required seven hundred and twenty-two mastications before disappearing through involuntary swallowing." (More on chewing and the "oral device" in cha..
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Mary Roach |
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Why don't suicide bombers smuggle bombs in their rectums?
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Mary Roach |
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phalloplasty--crafting a working penis from other parts of a patient's body--has
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Mary Roach |
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Bacteria don't have mouths or fingers or Wolf Ranges, but they eat.
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Mary Roach |
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To meet pets' nutrition requirements while also giving humans the cheap, handy, cleanly product they demand, mainstream pet-food manufacturers blend animal fats and meals with soy and wheat grains and add vitamins and minerals. This yields a cheap, nutritious pellet that no one wants to eat. Cats and dogs are not grain-eaters by choice, Moeller is saying. "So our task is to find ways to entice them to eat enough for it to be nutritionally s..
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Mary Roach |
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Irritable bowel syndrome is a well-documented, little-publicized aftermath of diarrheal infections--especially severe or repeated bouts. If you talk to people who've recently been diagnosed with IBS, about a third of them will say that their symptoms began after a bad attack of food poisoning. Defense Department databases reveal a five-fold higher risk of IBS among men and women who suffered an acute diarrheal infection while deployed in th..
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Mary Roach |
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Squatting upon the floor of the room, without any perceptible effort he passed into the hollow of his hand the contents of the rectum . . . ," wrote the anonymous writer's physician in a letter printed in one of Fletcher's books. "The excreta were in the form of nearly round balls," and left no stain on the hand. "There was no more odour to it than there is to a hot biscuit." So impressive, so clean, was the man's residue that his physician..
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Mary Roach |
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People blanch to see "fish meal" or "meat meal" on a pet-food ingredient panel, but meal--which variously includes organs, heads, skin, and bones--most closely resembles the diet of dogs and cats in the wild. Muscle meat is a grand source of protein, but comparatively little else."
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Mary Roach |
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Because my readers, perhaps more than anyone else's, might be inspired to head out to the pasture with a lighter in their pocket and bovine malfeasance in their heart,
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Mary Roach |
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freshly dead popes are struck thrice on the forehead with a special silver hammer.
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Mary Roach |
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it is the Mediterranean, specifically Italy, that gave us the poet Ovid, who in the Metamorphoses deplored the eating of animals, and the vegetarian Leonardo da Vinci, who envisioned a day when the life of an animal would be valued as highly as that of a person, and Saint Francis, who once petitioned the Holy Roman Emperor to scatter grain on fields on Christmas Day and give the crested larks a feast.
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Mary Roach |
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Nartok shows me an example of Arctic "greens": cutout number 13, Caribou Stomach Contents. Moss and lichen are tough to digest, unless, like caribou, you have a multichambered stomach in which to ferment them. So the Inuit let the caribou have a go at it first. I thought of Pat Moeller and what he'd said about wild dogs and other predators eating the stomachs and stomach contents of their prey first. "And wouldn't we all," he'd said, "be be..
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Mary Roach |
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compressed into boxes, packed in sawdust,... trussed up in sacks, roped up like hams...
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cadavers
dead-people
dead
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Mary Roach |
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Death doesn't have to be boring.
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Mary Roach |
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And finally, my gratitude to UM 006, H, Mr. Blank, Ben, the big guy in the sweatpants, and the owners of the forty heads. You are dead, but you're not forgotten.
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Mary Roach |
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b7cd7c3
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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."
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Mary Roach |
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cadavers' intestines hanging like a parade streamers off the sides of tables, skulls bobbing in boiling pots, organs strewn on the floor being eaten by dogs.....
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dead-people
dead
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Mary Roach |
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It's called the FATLOSE trail. FATLOSE stands for 'Fecal Administration To LOSE weight,' an example of PLEASE-- Pretty Lame Excuse for an Acronym, Scientists and Experimenters.
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science
humor
footnotes
weight-loss
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Mary Roach |
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Because it's hard for people to gauge quality by flavor, they tend to gauge it by price. That's a mistake. Langstaff
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Mary Roach |
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to find. He was trying to requisition some gas-powered leaf blowers to blow the new sand off the old. Nothing was happening
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Mary Roach |
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Seriously hairy shit was going down on a regular basis.
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astronauts
early-astronauts
mercury-missions
space-cowboys
space-science
nasa
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Mary Roach |
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Crispy foods carry a uniquely powerful appeal. I asked Chen what might lie behind this seemingly universal drive to crunch things in our mouths. "I believe human being has a destructive nature in its genes," he answered. "Human has a strange way of stress-release by punching, kicking, smashing, or other forms of destructive actions. Eating could be one of them. The action of teeth crushing food is a destructive process, and we receive pleas..
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Mary Roach |
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Pus can be distinguished from mucus, wrote Dr. Samuel Cooper in his 1823 Dictionary of Practical Surgery, by its "sweetish mawkish" taste and a "smell peculiar to itself." To the doctor who is still struggling with the distinction, perhaps because he has endeavored to learn surgery from a dictionary, Cooper offers this: "Pus sinks in water; mucus floats." --
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Mary Roach |
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Ear cartilage is similarly underserved by the vascular system, so if you plan on picking a fight with Mike Tyson, do practice good wound toilet.)
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Mary Roach |
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Most of them students from the nearby University of Dayton...
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Mary Roach |
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My bias is that it does exist. But I would never say that I know that. Until I prove it.
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Mary Roach |
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The bacteria species in your colon today are more or less the same ones you had when you were six months old. 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."
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Mary Roach |
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Humans have taste receptor cells in the gut, the voice box, the upper esophagus, but only the tongue's receptors report to the brain.
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Mary Roach |
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even in death, men couldn't be trusted to comport themselves respectably in the presence of a lady.
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Mary Roach |
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How is it that we find Christina Aguilera more interesting than the inside of our own bodies? It is, of course, possible that I seem strange. You may be thinking, Wow, that Mary Roach has her head up her ass. To which I say: Only briefly, and with the utmost respect.
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Mary Roach |
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Which is something to be thankful for," says Danielle Reed, Rawson's former colleague at Monell. Otherwise you'd be tasting things like bile and pancreatic enzymes. (Intestinal taste receptors are thought to trigger hormonal responses to molecules, such as salt and sugar, and defensive reactions--vomiting, diarrhea--to dangerous bitter items.)"
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Mary Roach |
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As the number of Inuit who hunt has dwindled, so has the consumption of organs (and other anatomy not available for purchase at the Igloolik Co-op: tendons, blubber, blood, head). I picked up the card labeled Caribou Kidney, Raw. "Who actually eats this?" "I do," said Nirlungayuk."
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Mary Roach |
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Men and women . . . do not ingest nutrients, they consume food. More than that, they . . . eat meals. Although to the single-minded biochemist or physiologist, this aspect of human behavior may appear to be irrelevant or even frivolous, it is nevertheless a deeply ingrained part of the human situation." The"
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Mary Roach |
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Amniotic fluid contains fetal urine (from swallowed amniotic fluid) and occasionally meconium: baby's first feces, composed of mucus, bile, epithelial cells, shed fetal hair, and other amniotic detritus. The Wikipedia entry helpfully contrasts the tarry, olive-brown smear of meconium--photographed in a tiny disposable diaper--with the similarly posed yellowish excretion of a breast-fed newborn, both with an option for viewing in the magnifi..
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Mary Roach |
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Yes, men and women eat meals. But they also ingest nutrients. 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. M
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Mary Roach |
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Vinegar, cola, citrus juice, wine, all are in the acid range of the pH scale: from around pH 2 to 3. Anything under pH 4 will dissolve calcium phosphate, a key component of tooth enamel. The process is called demineralization. Take a drink of anything acid, and if you are paying attention, you will notice a sudden warm slosh: parotid saliva arriving like the cavalry to bring the pH back up to the safe zone.
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Mary Roach |
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Time to try the palatant. I raise the cup to my nose. It has no smell. I roll some over my tongue. All five kinds of taste receptors stand idle. It tastes like water spiked with strange. Not bad, just other. Not food.
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Mary Roach |
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Sugar contributes to tooth decay only indirectly. Like humans, bacteria are fond of it. "Bacteria get all crazy--party, party--they metabolize the sugar, break it down, and they release their metabolites, and these are acid" (though not as acid as cola or wine). In"
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Mary Roach |
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Most of us pass our lives never once laying eyes on our organs, the most precious and amazing things we own. Until something goes wrong, we barely give them thought. This seems strange to me. How is it that we find Christina Aguilera more interesting than the inside of our own bodies? It is, of course, possible that I seem strange. You may be thinking, Wow, that Mary Roach has her head up her ass. To which I say: Only briefly, and with the ..
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Mary Roach |
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b3e42fb
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The public filed past Elmer in his casket, looking every bit the soldier and nothing at all the decomposing body.
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Mary Roach |
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Which ones, in short, make the difference in the consumer's mouth and mind? "And you can't ask the consumer," says Langstaff. "You ask the consumer, 'Why does it taste better?' They say, 'Because I like it better.'" The consumer's flavor lexicon is tiny: yum and yuck." --
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Mary Roach |
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a7de562
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THE MOST EFFECTIVE agent of dietary change is the adulated eater--the king who embraces whelks, the revolutionary hero with a passion for skewered hearts. "Normally disgusting substances or objects that are associated with admired . . . persons cease to be disgusting and may become pleasant,"
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Mary Roach |
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On the Iron Chef episode "Battle Offal," judges swooned over raw heart tartar, lamb's liver truffles, tripe, sweetbreads, and gizzard."
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Mary Roach |
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The goal is to be as neutral, as analytical--as "Mr. Spock"--as possible. This perhaps explains how it was possible for a team of Canadian researchers to find nine men and women willing to create a canned-cat-food flavor lexicon and a set of tasting protocols. For humans. Tasting cat food. And they couldn't be shy about it. The protocol for evaluating the "meat chunk" portion ("gravy gel" having its own distinct protocol) stipulated that th..
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Mary Roach |