Front cover image for Gulp : adventures on the alimentary canal

Gulp : adventures on the alimentary canal

Mary Roach
This book is an exploration of human digestion. Few of us realize what strange wet miracles of science operate inside us after every meal. In her trademark style, the author investigates the beginning, and end, of our food, addressing such questions as: why crunchy food is so appealing, why it is hard to find words for flavors and smells, why the stomach doesn't digest itself, how much we can eat before our stomachs burst, and whether constipation killed Elvis. Here we meet scientists who tackle the questions no one else thinks of, or has the courage to ask. We go on location to a pet-food taste-test lab, a fecal transplant, and into a live stomach to observe the fate of a meal
Print Book, English, 2013
First edition View all formats and editions
W.W. Norton & Company, New York, 2013
Popular Work
348 pages ; 22 cm
9780393081572, 9780393348743, 0393081575, 0393348741
811599508
Nose job: tasting has little to do with taste
I'll have the putrescine: your pet is not like you
Liver and opinions: why we eat what we eat and despise the rest
The longest meal: can thorough chewing lower the national debt?
Hard to stomach: the acid relationship of William Beaumont and Alexis St. Martin
Spit gets a polish: someone ought to bottle the stuff
A bolus of cherries: life at the oral processing lab
Big gulp: how to survive being swallowed alive
Dinner's revenge: can the eaten eat back?
Stuffed: the science of eating yourself to death
Up theirs: the alimentary canal as criminal accomplice
Inflammable you: fun with hydrogen and methane
Dead man's bloat: and other diverting tales from the history of flatulence research
Smelling a rat: does noxious flatus do more than clear a room?
Eating backward: is the digestive tract a two-way street?
I'm all stopped up: Elvis Presley's megacolon, and other ruminations on death by constipation
The ick factor: we can cure you, but there's just one thing