Gulp: Adventures on the Alimentary Canal
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Read between October 3 - October 18, 2017
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They entered the human form like an unexplored continent. Parts were named like elements of geography: the isthmus of the thyroid, the isles of the pancreas, the straits and inlets of the pelvis.
Cheryl liked this
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No one, with a possible exception made for Sue Langstaff, would say, “Go left at the smell of simmering hotdogs.”
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“Wineries that sell their wines for $500 a bottle have the same problems as wineries that sell their wine for $10 a bottle.
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“The United States is a dumping ground for bad olive oil,” Langstaff told me. It’s no secret among European manufacturers that Americans have no palate for olive oils.
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Some of AFB’s clients have begun marketing 100 percent vegetarian kibble for cats. The cat is what’s called a true carnivore; its
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natural diet contains no plants.
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“Catfish are basically swimming tongues,” says Rawson.
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Theresa volunteers that a dog named Rover has lately had a stomach upset, and Porkchop likes to eat the vomit. “So that’s cutting into Porkchop’s appetite.” And probably yours.
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A serving of liver provides half the RDA for vitamin C, three times the RDA for riboflavin, nine times the vitamin A in the average carrot, plus good amounts of vitamins B12, B6, and D, folic acid, and potassium.
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Organs in general are among the most nutritionally giving foods on Earth.
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Not a Campbell’s product.
Aloke
In reference to "primordial soup". Cmon Campbells, get on that!
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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.”
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Organs are so vitamin-rich, and edible plants so scarce, that the former are classified, for purposes of Arctic health education, both as “meat” and as “fruits and vegetables.”
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It did not occur to my people to fix innards for supper, especially raw ones. Raw outards seemed even more unthinkable.
Aloke
On being offered narwhal skin
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culture writes the menu. And culture doesn’t take kindly to substitutions.
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“The Problem of Changing Food Habits: Report of the Committee on Food Habits,” and if ever a case were to be made for word-rationing, there it was.
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Until kids are around two, you can get them to try pretty much anything, and Rozin did.
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For organ meats today, that person has been taking the form of celebrity chefs at high-profile eateries, such as Los Angeles’s Animal and London’s St. John,
Aloke
St John also mentioned in A Cooks Tour
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Just as he believed in extracting the most nourishment possible from a mouthful of food, he sought to extract the maximum use from each sheet of stationery.
Aloke
Horace Fletcher
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Fletcher was the instigator of a fad for extremely thorough chewing.
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It was not mere charisma that landed him there. Fletcherism held a good deal of intuitive appeal. 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.
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Faulks was dismissive not only of extreme chewing, but also of the related fad for blenderizing to increase the accessibility of nutrients.
Aloke
Works at a company that makes a simulated digestive system
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The human digestive tract has evolved to extract the maximum it can from the food ingested, Faulks said, and that is probably all it needs.
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At age eighteen, he was accidently shot in the side. The wound healed as an open fistulated passage,
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Exactly when he realized the value of the St. Martin hole—and how assiduously he did or didn’t work to close it—remain matters of conjecture.
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St. Martin’s survivors sent a cable that must have given pause to the telegraph operator: “Don’t come for autopsy, will be killed.”
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I am honestly curious about saliva, but I am also curious about obsession and its role in scientific inquiry. I think it’s fair to say that some degree of obsession is a requisite for good science, and certainly for scientific breakthrough.
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“So somebody,” I observe, “could do a taste test with various salivas.” “If somebody would like to do that, yes.” Somebody—really everybody—wouldn’t.
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You can’t just have them spit in it, he explained, because then they won’t go near it. He had to collect samples of their saliva without telling them why, and then add it behind their backs, like a spiteful waitress.
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We are large, mobile vessels of the very substances we find most repulsive.
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As a germ killer, saliva puts mouthwash to shame.†
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(Colds and flus aren’t spread by drinking from a sick person’s glass. They’re spread by touching it. One person’s finger leaves virus particles on the glass; the next person’s picks them up and transfers them to the respiratory tract via an eye-rub or nose-pick.)*
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“The Dutch and their vla . . .” Silletti speaks it like a curse word. “For me it’s not food. You don’t need teeth or saliva!”
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The jaw is ever vigilant. It knows its own strength.
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“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.”
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A healthy adult has a new stomach lining every three days.
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Occasionally there was nothing wrong at all, just the ordinary grumbling and gurgling—the borborygmi—of the gut.
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It’s a nice toad, less warty than some. I tell him this, and he seems pleased. “You could be the first person to like this species.” Second, I’m pretty sure.
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Probably much like you at this moment, Secor was “sick of listening to people talk about pythons bursting.”
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The cow appears unmoved. I look like I’ve seen God.
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chronic belching splashes the esophagus with an excess of gastric acid, which sloshes out of the stomach along with the gas. If this happens too much or too often, the acid burns the esophagus. Now you have another reason to visit Dr. Jones: heartburn.
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A few inmates glance over as we cross the prison yard, but most ignore us. I am really, I think to myself, getting old.
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Milk products follow the same biological plot line as beans. An ornery carbohydrate makes it to the colon intact because the small intestine couldn’t break it down into something absorbable. Colon bacteria go to town on it, spewing clouds of hydrogen in the process.
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The breath hydrogen test has given flatus researchers a simple, consistent measure of gas production that does not require the subject to fart into a balloon.
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He reverse-engineered a fart.
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Bismuth pills, on the other hand—and Levitt has tested these too—reduce 100 percent of sulfur gas odor.
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I will buy that autocoprophagia is, as Barnes put it, “a normal practice for . . . rats, mice, rabbits, guinea pigs, dogs, swine, poultry, and undoubtedly many others.” But Richard: “Most nonruminant species”?
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Here’s the other reason: “After many days in which the priest tried to dispel the devil, he learned from the possessed mother superior that the devil had barricaded himself inside . . .” Here my translator stopped. She leaned closer to the photocopied pages and traced the words with her finger. “. . . il posteriore della superiora. Inside her butt!”
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“Bacteria represent a metabolically active organ in our bodies.” They are you. You are them. “It’s a philosophical question. Who owns who?”