The Body: A Guide for Occupants QUOTES

101 " it became fixed in many people’s minds that MSG was a kind of toxin. In fact, it isn’t. "

― Bill Bryson , The Body: A Guide for Occupants

102 " If we want to be healthy, we need to eat and move about a little more like our ancient ancestors did. That doesn’t mean we have to eat tubers and hunt wildebeest. It means we should consume a lot less processed and sugary foods and get more exercise. Failure to do that, however, is what is giving us the disorders like type 2 diabetes and cardiovascular disease that are killing us in great numbers. Indeed, as Lieberman notes, medical care is actually making things worse by treating the symptoms of mismatch diseases so effectively that we “unwittingly perpetuate their causes.” As Lieberman puts it with chilling bluntness, “You are most likely going to die from a mismatch disease.” Even more chillingly, he believes that 70 percent of the diseases that kill us could easily be preventable if we would just live more sensibly. "

― Bill Bryson , The Body: A Guide for Occupants

103 " In the United States alone, more than eighty million people suffer from cardiovascular disease, and the cost to the nation of treating heart disease has been put as high as $300 billion a year. "

― Bill Bryson , The Body: A Guide for Occupants

104 " throw down your throat and how much of your life is spent sprawled in a near-vegetative state in front of a glowing screen. Yet in some kind and miraculous way our bodies look after us, extract nutrients from the miscellaneous foodstuffs we push into our faces, and somehow hold us together, generally at a pretty high level, for decades. Suicide by lifestyle takes ages. "

― Bill Bryson , The Body: A Guide for Occupants

105 " One reason chimps can’t talk is that they appear to lack the ability to make subtle shapes with tongue and lips to form complex sounds. "

― Bill Bryson , The Body: A Guide for Occupants

106 " A morsel of cortex one cubic millimeter in size—about the size of a grain of sand—could hold two thousand terabytes of information, enough to store all the movies ever made, trailers included, or about 1.2 billion copies of this book. Altogether, the human brain is estimated to hold something on the order of two hundred exabytes of information, roughly equal to “the entire digital content of today’s world, "

― Bill Bryson , The Body: A Guide for Occupants

107 " The conviction that we should all drink eight glasses of water a day is the most enduring of dietary misunderstandings. "

― Bill Bryson , The Body: A Guide for Occupants

108 " borborygmi. "

― Bill Bryson , The Body: A Guide for Occupants

109 " Last Breath: Cautionary Tales from the Limits of Human Endurance, "

― Bill Bryson , The Body: A Guide for Occupants

110 " Just sitting quietly, doing nothing at all, your brain churns through more information in thirty seconds than the Hubble Space Telescope has processed in thirty years. "

― Bill Bryson , The Body: A Guide for Occupants

111 " Altogether it takes 7 billion billion billion (that’s 7,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000, or 7 octillion) atoms to make you. "

― Bill Bryson , The Body: A Guide for Occupants

112 " It has long been known that heart attacks are more common in the dead of night, and some authorities think the nightly change in blood pressure may somehow act as a trigger. "

― Bill Bryson , The Body: A Guide for Occupants

113 " One other enduring myth concerning water intake is the belief that caffeinated drinks are diuretics and make you pee out more than you have taken in. They may not be the most wholesome of options for liquid refreshment, but they do make a net contribution to your personal water balance. "

― Bill Bryson , The Body: A Guide for Occupants

114 " If everybody else in the world became the size of Americans, it would be equivalent to adding one billion people to the world’s population. "

― Bill Bryson , The Body: A Guide for Occupants

115 " To help us deal better with this fractional lag, the brain does a truly extraordinary thing: it continuously forecasts what the world will be like a fifth of a second from now, and that is what it gives us as the present. That means that we never see the world as it is at this very instant, but rather as it will be a fraction of a moment in the future. We spend our whole lives, in other words, living in a world that doesn’t quite exist yet. "

― Bill Bryson , The Body: A Guide for Occupants

116 " more than half of all first heart attacks (fatal or otherwise) occur in people who are fit and healthy and have no known obvious risks. They don’t smoke or drink to excess, are not seriously overweight, and do not have chronically high blood pressure or even bad cholesterol readings, but they get a heart attack anyway. Living a virtuous life doesn’t guarantee that you will escape heart problems; it just improves your chances. "

― Bill Bryson , The Body: A Guide for Occupants

117 " Theobald Smith, yet another of those forgotten heroes of medical history. Smith, born in 1859, was the son of German immigrants (the family name was Schmitt) in upstate New York and grew up speaking German, so was able to follow and appreciate the experiments of Robert Koch more quickly than most of his American contemporaries. He taught himself Koch’s methods for culturing bacteria and was thus able to isolate salmonella in 1885, long before any other American could do so. Daniel Salmon was head of the Bureau of Animal Husbandry at the U.S. Department of Agriculture and was primarily an administrator, but the convention of the day was to list the bureau head as lead author on the department’s papers, and that was the name that got attached to the microbe. Smith was also robbed of credit for the discovery of the infectious protozoa Babesia, which is wrongly named for a Romanian bacteriologist, Victor Babeş. In a long and distinguished career, Smith also did important work on yellow fever, diphtheria, African sleeping sickness, and fecal contamination of drinking water, and showed that tuberculosis in humans and in livestock was caused by different microorganisms, proving Koch wrong on two vital points. Koch also believed that TB could not jump from animals to humans, and Smith showed that that was wrong, too. It was thanks to this discovery that pasteurization of milk became a standard practice. Smith was, in short, the most important American bacteriologist during what was the golden age of bacteriology and yet is almost completely forgotten now. "

― Bill Bryson , The Body: A Guide for Occupants

118 " certainly have some wonders yet to find. "

― Bill Bryson , The Body: A Guide for Occupants

119 " as horripilation but more commonly as getting goose bumps. In furry mammals, it adds a useful layer of insulating air between the hair and the skin, but in humans it has absolutely no physiological benefit and merely reminds us how comparatively bald we are. Horripilation also makes mammalian hair stand up (to make animals look bigger and more ferocious), which is why we get goose bumps when we are frightened or on edge, but of course that doesn’t work very well for humans either. "

― Bill Bryson , The Body: A Guide for Occupants

120 " Run a finger along a dusty shelf, and you are in large part clearing a path through fragments of your former self. "

― Bill Bryson , The Body: A Guide for Occupants