Scan barcode
A review by lpm100
Gulp: Adventures on the Alimentary Canal by Mary Roach
adventurous
funny
informative
inspiring
fast-paced
5.0
Book Review
Gulp
5/5 stars
"Tons of neat factoids"
*******
Of the book:
-201 sources
-Almost entirely to peer-reviewed journal articles
-No index, nor glossary
Mary Roach has written at least a couple of other books like this, all of them published on WW Norton--which publishes something like 400 books per year. (It's an extremely difficult label to be published on, and only people who actually have something to say can be.)
She's a very skilled writer, as evidenced by the fact that she could even think of so many topics related to digestion--let alone staple them together into an easily readable (If sometimes gross) book.
One big question: Why no pictures of the people that are pertinent to this book?
There are plenty of pictures of other things, just none of the subjects of the book.
I would recommend reading this with another book: "Consider the Fork."
This book is chock full of information and, one can only hope to retain but a small fraction thereof.
And so it is one of those that is not worth a reread, because if the purpose was to retain all the information it would take another 8-9 readings after the initial one.
Just enjoy having some amount of brain candy and enjoyable factoids, that maybe you will remember having "read somewhere" at some point.
Verdict: Recommended
*******
This book being such a thoroughly reviewed one, I will just give a listing of the acquired vocabulary words as well as the neatest factoids.
Factoids:
(43)The average person eats no more than 30 foods on a regular basis.
(46) Creatures that swallow their food whole have limited to non-existent sense of taste.
(47) Cats can't taste sweetness and are monoguesic
(49) When people have their taste receptors destroyed, those people can die of starvation because they can't recognize things with no taste as food.
(53) The average dog's nose is 1,000 times more sensitive than the average human's.
(119)Cooter stink is caused by fishy amines. (Further research: this is measured by Nugent score. Scale 1 to 10.>7= frank bacterial vaginosis. Average black woman score: 8. Source: "Predicting risk of bacterial vaginosis: the role of race, smoking and corticotropin-releasing hormone-related genes.")
(144) Optimal crunch is around 90 to 100 decibels. (Some people think that eating crunchy food is a stress release.)
(152) Birds' gizzards exert 1,000 lb of force.
(156) A healthy adult has a new stomach lining every 3 days. (Pepsin and gastric acid digest it and it is rebuilt in an equilibrium state.) When a person dies, that machinery shuts down and the stomach digests itself.
(245) When people want to test underwear, adhesive back underwear pads, and chair cushions (these are things that help restrain the smell of flatulence), They don't have some large number of gas he volunteers. They actually reverse engineer the flatulence odor.
(272) 90% of nutrient absorption takes place in the small intestines.
(273) When dogs turn around and eat their scat, they are getting missing nutrients by running the meal through a second time. Rodents and rabbits also do this because their product is a "soft vitamin pellet" of nutrients synthesized in the lower intestine--nutrients that they would not otherwise get. They will lose weight without access to their scat.
(292) Elvis Presley struggled with constipation his entire life and his mother Gladys often had to "manually disimpact" him.
(296) Hirschsprung's disease is likely what killed Elvis. 25% of deaths from pulmonary embolism - - at least at one hospital - - were defecation associated.
(296) Elvis is Cole and had expanded so dramatically that it crowded his diaphragm and began to compromise his breath and singing.
(322) If the bacterial balance in your colon is upset, a fecal transplant can be an excellent way to readjust it. (This procedure was FDA approved in 2022--about 9 years after this book was published-- and there are about 48,000 of them done per annum.)
(324) Probiotics don't help with adjusting the microbiome because their bacteria are aerobic, but bacteria in the human gut are anaerobic. 95% of probiotics had not been tested as of this writing.
Vocabulary:
sensory analyst
chyme
pylorus
ravelment
olfactometer
cooperage
internal nostrils (nares)
prickle
sensory descriptor
flavor lexicon
tootle
knackers
monoguesic
plucks
melts
punch
slunks
trichobezoar/Rapunzel syndrome
variety meats
witchetty grub
Bugong mouth abdomen
farrow(ed)
welks
peckish
mucilagininous
cicatrize
histatin
gorte pap (Dutch food)
peristaltic wave
ptergoid walk
fistulated (stomach for experiment)
sash and sill
Transient lower esophageal sphincter relaxation (=burp)
flavor fatigue
gastrocolic reflex
hooping (a certain type of prison smuggling)
defecography
scybalous
alvine
codswallop
brachioproctic eroticism
sacral nerves
Janus-faced function (pain and pleasure on different sides of the same head)
angiodysplasia
grumous
glabrous
periblepsis
maculate
pronghorn
ungulates
Mylar pantaloon
autointoxication
"Internal bath" (=enema)
miasmas
ileococcal valve
pessary
rectal feeding (Yes, people once believed it)
rectal alimentation
autocoprophagia
egesta
clyster
tipple
cnidarian
vitrine
Hirschsprung's disease
colonic inertia
paralytic colon
defecography stills
lithotomy position
Bristol stool chart
fecal bacteriotherapy
fecal transplant
Quotes
(74) "..... The progression with ethnic cuisines: from upscale restaurant to local eatery to dinner table to the supermarket freezer section. (It starts as an appetizer typically. That's low risk.)"
(198) Should circumstances prevent a man from carrying his cigarettes and cell phone in his pants pocket, the rectum provides a workable alternative. So workable that well over a thousand pounds of tobacco and hundreds of cell phones are rectally smuggled into California state prisons each year.
(217) No engineer could design something as multifunctional and fine-tuned as an anus. To call someone an a$$hole is really bragging him up.
(235) The older you get, the slacker the muscles of your colon become in the more easily the organ balloons. As Len gaily remarked, "We get flavier all over, inside and out."
(256) Bogus diagnoses beget bogus cures.
Gulp
5/5 stars
"Tons of neat factoids"
*******
Of the book:
-201 sources
-Almost entirely to peer-reviewed journal articles
-No index, nor glossary
Mary Roach has written at least a couple of other books like this, all of them published on WW Norton--which publishes something like 400 books per year. (It's an extremely difficult label to be published on, and only people who actually have something to say can be.)
She's a very skilled writer, as evidenced by the fact that she could even think of so many topics related to digestion--let alone staple them together into an easily readable (If sometimes gross) book.
One big question: Why no pictures of the people that are pertinent to this book?
There are plenty of pictures of other things, just none of the subjects of the book.
I would recommend reading this with another book: "Consider the Fork."
This book is chock full of information and, one can only hope to retain but a small fraction thereof.
And so it is one of those that is not worth a reread, because if the purpose was to retain all the information it would take another 8-9 readings after the initial one.
Just enjoy having some amount of brain candy and enjoyable factoids, that maybe you will remember having "read somewhere" at some point.
Verdict: Recommended
*******
This book being such a thoroughly reviewed one, I will just give a listing of the acquired vocabulary words as well as the neatest factoids.
Factoids:
(43)The average person eats no more than 30 foods on a regular basis.
(46) Creatures that swallow their food whole have limited to non-existent sense of taste.
(47) Cats can't taste sweetness and are monoguesic
(49) When people have their taste receptors destroyed, those people can die of starvation because they can't recognize things with no taste as food.
(53) The average dog's nose is 1,000 times more sensitive than the average human's.
(119)Cooter stink is caused by fishy amines. (Further research: this is measured by Nugent score. Scale 1 to 10.>7= frank bacterial vaginosis. Average black woman score: 8. Source: "Predicting risk of bacterial vaginosis: the role of race, smoking and corticotropin-releasing hormone-related genes.")
(144) Optimal crunch is around 90 to 100 decibels. (Some people think that eating crunchy food is a stress release.)
(152) Birds' gizzards exert 1,000 lb of force.
(156) A healthy adult has a new stomach lining every 3 days. (Pepsin and gastric acid digest it and it is rebuilt in an equilibrium state.) When a person dies, that machinery shuts down and the stomach digests itself.
(245) When people want to test underwear, adhesive back underwear pads, and chair cushions (these are things that help restrain the smell of flatulence), They don't have some large number of gas he volunteers. They actually reverse engineer the flatulence odor.
(272) 90% of nutrient absorption takes place in the small intestines.
(273) When dogs turn around and eat their scat, they are getting missing nutrients by running the meal through a second time. Rodents and rabbits also do this because their product is a "soft vitamin pellet" of nutrients synthesized in the lower intestine--nutrients that they would not otherwise get. They will lose weight without access to their scat.
(292) Elvis Presley struggled with constipation his entire life and his mother Gladys often had to "manually disimpact" him.
(296) Hirschsprung's disease is likely what killed Elvis. 25% of deaths from pulmonary embolism - - at least at one hospital - - were defecation associated.
(296) Elvis is Cole and had expanded so dramatically that it crowded his diaphragm and began to compromise his breath and singing.
(322) If the bacterial balance in your colon is upset, a fecal transplant can be an excellent way to readjust it. (This procedure was FDA approved in 2022--about 9 years after this book was published-- and there are about 48,000 of them done per annum.)
(324) Probiotics don't help with adjusting the microbiome because their bacteria are aerobic, but bacteria in the human gut are anaerobic. 95% of probiotics had not been tested as of this writing.
Vocabulary:
sensory analyst
chyme
pylorus
ravelment
olfactometer
cooperage
internal nostrils (nares)
prickle
sensory descriptor
flavor lexicon
tootle
knackers
monoguesic
plucks
melts
punch
slunks
trichobezoar/Rapunzel syndrome
variety meats
witchetty grub
Bugong mouth abdomen
farrow(ed)
welks
peckish
mucilagininous
cicatrize
histatin
gorte pap (Dutch food)
peristaltic wave
ptergoid walk
fistulated (stomach for experiment)
sash and sill
Transient lower esophageal sphincter relaxation (=burp)
flavor fatigue
gastrocolic reflex
hooping (a certain type of prison smuggling)
defecography
scybalous
alvine
codswallop
brachioproctic eroticism
sacral nerves
Janus-faced function (pain and pleasure on different sides of the same head)
angiodysplasia
grumous
glabrous
periblepsis
maculate
pronghorn
ungulates
Mylar pantaloon
autointoxication
"Internal bath" (=enema)
miasmas
ileococcal valve
pessary
rectal feeding (Yes, people once believed it)
rectal alimentation
autocoprophagia
egesta
clyster
tipple
cnidarian
vitrine
Hirschsprung's disease
colonic inertia
paralytic colon
defecography stills
lithotomy position
Bristol stool chart
fecal bacteriotherapy
fecal transplant
Quotes
(74) "..... The progression with ethnic cuisines: from upscale restaurant to local eatery to dinner table to the supermarket freezer section. (It starts as an appetizer typically. That's low risk.)"
(198) Should circumstances prevent a man from carrying his cigarettes and cell phone in his pants pocket, the rectum provides a workable alternative. So workable that well over a thousand pounds of tobacco and hundreds of cell phones are rectally smuggled into California state prisons each year.
(217) No engineer could design something as multifunctional and fine-tuned as an anus. To call someone an a$$hole is really bragging him up.
(235) The older you get, the slacker the muscles of your colon become in the more easily the organ balloons. As Len gaily remarked, "We get flavier all over, inside and out."
(256) Bogus diagnoses beget bogus cures.