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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.”
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.
Teeth and jaws are impressive not for their strength but for their sensitivity. Chew on this: 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. “If there’s some earth in your salad, for instance, you notice immediately. It warns you for the wrong things.”
Tom Little, an Irish American laborer who ate his meals by chewing food and spitting it into a funnel that fed into his stomach. When he was nine years old, in 1895, Tom swallowed a draught of clam chowder without letting it cool. The burn healed with strictures that fused the walls of his esophagus.
Here’s how badly people want to chew. Recall that dysphagia may knock out the reflex that repositions the larynx (voice box) to allow food into the esophagus. Jennifer Long told me these patients have on occasion asked to have their voice box surgically removed so they can swallow again. In other words, they would rather be mute than tube-fed.
As you bite down on a chip, energy builds and is stored. In a millisecond, the chip gives way and the stored energy is released, all at once.
(Crumbly foods, by contrast, break apart quietly because the energy isn’t released all at once.)
Cold-blooded animals in general have lower metabolic needs. Because they’re not using food energy to heat themselves, they manage with less. Some frogs all but shut down in winter. “I wouldn’t be surprised if live frogs were gutted out of bass in winter, by fisherman,”
Around 1850, in Germany, physiologist-zoologist Arnold Adolph Berthold, seeking to put an end to stomach-frog folly, put some northern European species of frogs and lizards in body-temperature water. The adults died, and the spawn putrefied.
University of Alabama snake digestion researcher Stephen Secor once watched a king snake regain consciousness after somewhere between ten and twenty-five minutes inside another king snake.
persons will sometimes relate these stories. . . . When the accounts come to us second hand, we can always make abundant allowance for the natural growth of wonders, in passing from mouth to mouth.
the giant kidney worm, a parasite that bores out the entire organ and then exits the body through the urethra.
“Think of the lion after the big meal, with its huge, distended belly. They can lie in the sun for the next few days, letting it all slowly get digested.” When you occupy the top spot on the food chain, you are free to lounge around with little concern over someone larger and stronger jumping you and eating you.
Mr. L.’s was the first stomach in Key-Åberg’s experience to have ruptured by overfilling. The case, he wrote, “stands on its own in the literature.”
Key-Åberg found that if the stomach’s emergency venting and emptying systems are out of commission—because the person is in a narcotic stupor, say, or dead—the organ will typically rupture at three to four liters, around a gallon.
Clearly some stomachs hold more than a gallon. The only human to have come close to the poundage record set by the Liverpudlian is Takeru Kobayashi, who consumed eighteen pounds of cow brains in an eating competition.
Here is what surprises me: people with capacious stomachs are no more likely to be obese.
About 6 percent of drug mules suffer bowel blockages
“Really, why bother with all that?” Crump said. “With a bit of prior observation, I can generally figure out a way to avoid going through a body scanner at most international airports.”
“To avoid anal laceration, dilation may have to be performed progressively over a period of several weeks or months.” This quote comes from a journal, but it is not a corrections industry journal or even an emergency medicine or proctology journal. It’s from the Journal of Homosexuality.
Any discussion of the sexuality of the digestive tract must inevitably touch on the anus. 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
“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.
Hydrogen sulfide is as lethal, molecule for molecule, as cyanide. This may explain why humans evolved such exquisite sensitivity to its smell. Repellent odors are unpleasant but often helpful in terms of not dying. As with any poison, dosage makes the killer. The concentration of hydrogen sulfide in offensive human flatus is around 1 to 3 parts per million. Harmless. Ramp it up to 1,000 parts per million—as can exist in manure pits and sewage tanks—and a couple breaths can cause respiratory paralysis and suffocation.
Hydrogen sulfide is a diabolical killer. Its telltale rotten-egg smell, screamingly obvious at 10 parts per million, disappears at concentrations above 150 parts per million; the olfactory nerves become paralyzed. Without the odor to warn them, coworkers and family members may rush into a manure pit to rescue the fallen.
One set of before and after photos seemed to imply that a high colonic could transform an unkempt, drooping moustache into a vigorous, curlicued handlebar.
THERE IS ONE class of substances that the rectum, even today, is occasionally called on to absorb. Drugs take effect faster this way than by mouth, partly because they bypass the stomach and liver. Opium, alcohol, tobacco, peyote, fermented agave sap, you name it—it’s been taken rectally.
advances in medical knowledge about the colon had, historically, been hobbled by the organ’s repulsiveness. Eighteenth- and nineteenth-century dissectors and anatomy instructors would, he claimed, promptly cut the lower bowel out of the cadaver and throw it away, “on account of its scent-bag propensities and nastiness.”
Like cervical cancer, anal cancer is caused by the human papillomavirus; people get it via sex with an infected person, and that seems like something they ought to know when making decisions about using a condom.
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.
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.
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.
And so on. Even now, the digestive tract has its own immune system and its own primitive brain, the so-called enteric nervous system. I recalled what Ton van Vliet had said at one point in our conversation: “People are surprised to learn: They are a big pipe with a little bit around it.”
