The Body: A Guide for Occupants

by Bill Bryson

Every bit of penicillin made since that day is descended from that single random cantaloupe.

To say that your body is your long-suffering servant is to put it mildly.

Your brownie is sheet music. It is your brain that makes it a symphony.

Just because you exercise regularly and eat a lot of salad doesn’t mean you have bought yourself a better life span. What you have bought is a better chance of having a better life span.

Medical science has never produced a more noble and selfless group of investigators than the pathologists and parasitologists who risked and all too often lost their lives in trying to conquer the most pernicious of the world’s diseases

In the United States, there is the additional, rather extraordinary consideration that the Food and Drug Administration exercises practically no oversight on supplements. As long as supplements don’t contain any prescription medications and don’t obviously kill or seriously harm anybody, manufacturers can sell pretty much whatever they want, with “no guarantees of purity or potency, no established guidelines on dosage, and often no warnings about side effects that may result when the products are taken along with approved medications,”