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41 " Even more appallingly, in the United States 80 percent of antibiotics are fed to farm animals, mostly to fatten them. Fruit growers can also use antibiotics to combat bacterial infections in their crops. In consequence, most Americans consume secondhand antibiotics in their food (including even some foods labeled as organic) without knowing it. Sweden banned the agricultural use of antibiotics in 1986. The European Union followed in 1999. In 1977, the Food and Drug Administration ordered a halt to the use of antibiotics for purposes of fattening farm animals, but backed off when there was an outcry from agricultural interests and the congressional leaders who supported them. "
― Bill Bryson , The Body: A Guide for Occupants
42 " The fact is that odors and flavors are created entirely inside our heads. Think of something delicious—a moist, gooey, warm chocolate brownie fresh from the oven, say. Take a bite and savor the velvety smoothness, the rich heady waft of chocolate that fills your head. Now consider the fact that none of those flavors or aromas actually exist. All that is really going in your mouth is texture and chemicals. It is your brain that reads these scentless, flavorless molecules and vivifies them for your pleasure. Your brownie is sheet music. It is your brain that makes it a symphony. "
43 " In another widely reported study, the Belly Button Biodiversity Project, conducted by researchers at North Carolina State University, sixty random Americans had their belly buttons swabbed to see what was lurking there microbially. The study found 2,368 species of bacteria, 1,458 of which were unknown to science. "
44 " Capgras syndrome is a condition in which sufferers become convinced that those they know well are imposters. In Klüver-Bucy syndrome the victim develops urges to eat and fornicate indiscriminately (to the understandable dismay of loved ones).46 Perhaps the most bizarre of all is Cotard delusion, in which the sufferer believes he is dead and cannot be convinced otherwise.47 "
45 " the adoption of a narrower pelvis to accommodate our new gait brought a huge amount of pain and danger to women in childbirth. Until recent times, no other animal on Earth was more likely to die in childbirth than a human, and perhaps none even now suffers as much. "
46 " The one known cure for baldness is castration. "
47 " We exist within extraordinarily fine tolerances. Although our body temperature varies slightly through the day (it is lowest in the morning, highest in the late afternoon or evening), it normally doesn’t stray more than a degree or so from 98.6 degrees Fahrenheit. (That’s in adults. Children tend to run about one degree higher.) To move more than a very few degrees in either direction is to invite a lot of trouble. A fall of just two degrees below normal, or a rise of four degrees above, can tip the brain into a crisis that can swiftly lead to irreversible damage or death. To avoid catastrophe, the brain has its trusty control center, the hypothalamus, which tells the body to cool itself by sweating or to warm itself by shivering and diverting blood flow away from the skin and into the more vulnerable organs. "
48 " Passionate kissing alone, according to one study, results in the transfer of up to one billion bacteria from one mouth to another, along with about 0.7 milligrams of protein, 0.45 milligrams of salt, 0.7 micrograms of fat, and 0.2 micrograms of “miscellaneous organic compounds” (that is, bits of food) "
49 " Beauty is only skin deep, but ugly goes clean to the bone. —DOROTHY PARKER "
50 " In a similar study at the University of Arizona, researchers infected the metal door handle to an office building and found it took only about four hours for the “virus” to spread through the entire building, infecting over half of employees and turning up on virtually every shared device like photocopiers and coffee machines. In the real world, such infestations can stay active for up to three days. "
51 " We are incapable of deriving nutrition from most parts of most plants. In particular we cannot make use of cellulose, which is what plants primarily consist of. The few plants that we can eat are the ones we know as vegetables. Otherwise we are limited to eating a few botanical end products, such as seeds and fruits, and even many of those are poisonous to us. But we can benefit from a lot more foods by cooking them. A cooked potato, for instance, is about twenty times more digestible than a raw one.Cooking frees up a lot of time for us. Other primates spend as many as seven hours a day just chewing. We don’t need to eat constantly to ensure our survival. Our tragedy, of course, is that we eat more or less constantly anyway. "
52 " Our seams don’t burst, we don’t spontaneously sprout leaks,” says Nina Jablonski, professor of anthropology at Penn State University, who is the doyenne of all things cutaneous. "
53 " The richer the country, the more allergies its citizens get. "
54 " If ever there was an event that challenges the concept of intelligent design, it is the act of childbirth. No woman, however devout, has ever in childbirth said, “Thank you, Lord, for thinking this through for me. "
55 " color isn’t a fixed reality but a perception. "
56 " Davis’s fundamental ambition was to prove that dark-skinned people were created separately from light-skinned people. He was convinced that a person’s intellect and moral compass were indelibly written in the curves and apertures of the skull and that these were exclusively products of race and class. People with “cephalic peculiarities” should be treated “not as criminals but as dangerous idiots,” he suggested. In 1878, at the age of seventy-seven, he married a woman fifty years his junior. What her cranium was like is unknown. "
57 " It’s a slightly humbling thought that the genes you carry are immensely ancient and possibly—so far anyway—eternal. You will die and fade away, but your genes will go on and on so long as you and your descendants continue to produce offspring. "
58 " (Thin people have more gut microbes than fat people; having hungry microbes may at least partly account for their thinness.) "
59 " Getting old is the surest route to dying. "
60 " Mouritsen and Klavs Styrbaek in their fascinating study, Umami: Unlocking the Secrets of the Fifth Taste, “MSG is the food additive that has been subjected to the most thorough scrutiny of all time,” and no scientist has ever found any reason to condemn it, yet its reputation in the West as a source of headaches and low-grade malaise now appears to be undimmed and permanent. "