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If saliva is full of bacteria, why do animals lick their wounds?
Why don’t suicide bombers smuggle bombs in their rectums?
Flavour 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)
Pyrophosphates have been described to me as ‘cat crack’.
The study animal of choice for taste researchers is the catfish,12 simply because it has so many receptors. They are all over its skin. ‘Catfish are basically swimming tongues’, says Rawson. It is a useful adaptation for a limbless creature that locates food by brushing up against it; many catfish species feed by scavenging debris on the bottom of rivers.
Organs in general are among the most nutritionally giving foods on Earth. Lamb spleen has almost as much vitamin C as a tangerine.
People were unlikely to warm to a dinner of ‘offal’ or ‘glandular meats’, as organs were called in the industry.20 ‘Tidbits’ turned up here and there – as in Life’s poetic ‘Plentiful are these meats called “tidbits”’ – but ‘variety meats’ was the standout winner. It had a satisfactorily vague and cheery air,
Enough to merit debate among scholars of Jewish dietary law, or kashrut. ‘Human hair, while not particularly appetizing, is Kosher’, states Rabbi Zushe Blech,
HUMANS SECRETE TWO kinds of saliva, stimulated and unstimulated,
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).
For more typical cleaning jobs, painting conservators, like laundry formulators, turn to commercially produced digestive enzymes. Protease, the protein digester, is used to dissolve washes made from egg white or hide glues. (Less enlightened conservators of yore used to spread glue made from rabbit hides onto canvases to consolidate flaking paint.) Lipase, the fat digester, is used to eat through the layers of linseed oil that eighteenth- and nineteenth-century painters applied to improve light refraction and ‘feed the surface’ of their artworks.
Saliva has anti-clumping properties, which discourage bacteria from forming colonies on the teeth and gums. There are salivary proteins that retain their antimicrobial abilities even when they themselves are broken down. ‘And they may be even more effective than the whole protein of origin’,
Phillip Clapham, the whale biologist I pestered at the start of this chapter, related the story of Gracie, a Doberman mix who once vomited a two-foot garter snake onto Clapham’s dining room floor during a dinner party. As he tells it, his wife at the time, assuming the snake was dead, picked it up in a wad of paper towels and then ‘nearly dropped it when its little forked tongue came out’. Clapham insists Gracie hadn’t been outside for at least two hours. ‘It had been in there quite a while.’
No recorded instance exists of a suicide bomb being concealed inside a terrorist’s digestive tract. Swallowing or hooping explosives, as opposed to wearing them in a vest, would reduce the destructive potential by a factor of five or ten, Crump says, because the bomber’s body absorbs most of the blast.
Crump says a rectal bomb wouldn’t bring down a plane either. ‘At most, you’d blow the seat apart.’
‘For males, dilation of the rectum... causes increasing pressure on the prostate gland and seminal vesicles, thus producing sensations that may be interpreted as sexual by some individuals’.
Up to 80 percent of flatus is hydrogen. About a third of us also harbour bacteria that produce methane – a key component in the ‘natural gas’ supplied by utility companies.
Many plant-eating animals lack rumens, so some fermenting takes place in the cecum, an anatomical pouch at the junction of the small intestine and the colon.
About 75 percent of Asians, Africans, and Native Americans are deficient in lactase, an enzyme secreted in the small intestine that breaks down lactose, a sugar found in milk products. In Caucasians the rate is around 25 percent.
The concentration of hydrogen sulphide 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. Workers die this way often enough that a pair of doctors, writing in a medical journal, coined a name for it: dung lung.
Noe related that she’d been standing by the megacolon exhibit one day and a visitor told her that Elvis had had one too. The man added that Presley had struggled with constipation his whole life and that as a child his mother Gladys had had to ‘manually disimpact’ him. ‘He said that’s why Elvis was so close to his mother.’
Anaerobic bacteria outside the colon have a limited life span. No one knows how many hours they can survive.
There is a heartbreaking vulnerability to people having hospital procedures.
Pharmaceutical companies make money by treating diseases, not by curing them.
‘We’re basically a highly evolved earthworm surrounding the intestinal tract’, Khoruts
