The Body: A Guide for Occupants - THE SUNDAY TIMES NO.1 BESTSELLER

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Bryson’s style is also well-suited to popular science. His jokes, comments, and asides can be distracting in other contexts; but when reporting potentially dry scientific information, the humor helps. And it must be said that Bryson’s two biggest preoccupations—things we do not know, and things that can kill us (or ideally both)—have ample material in a book about the human body. Indeed, this book gave me a bit of death anxiety, since Bryson dwells on all of the things that can go seriously wrong and how little we know about the why. The scariest thing, for me, was the section on antibiotics. The rate at which bacteria adapt to antibiotics is far outpacing the rate at which we are discovering new medicines. (And our flagrant overuse of antibiotics is certainly not helping.) If we do not somehow reverse this trend, we can have a real crisis in the near future. Every gram of feces you produce contains 40 billion bacteria and 100 million archaea." (Now that's something you can impress your co-workers with at your Christmas party!) There is disagreement over what precisely we do need. In America, the daily recommended dose of vitamin E is 15 milligrams, but in the UK it is 3 to 4 milligrams – a very considerable difference.

The 18th & 19th centuries were very bad....medicine sank into a kind of dark age. You could hardly imagine more misguided and counterproductive practices than those to which physicians became attached in the eighteenth century, and even much of the nineteenth. Funk didn't discover vitamins but merely speculated, correctly, as to their existence. But since no one could produce these strange elements, many authorities refused to accept their reality. Sir James Barr, president of the British Medical Association, dismissed them as ‘a figment of the imagination’If you’ve ever wondered why no one wants to kiss you first thing in the morning, it is possibly because your exhalations may contain up to 150 different chemical compounds” including “methyl mercaptan (which smells like very old cabbage), hydrogen sulphide (like rotten eggs), dimethyl sulphide (slimy seaweed)”, etc.

In one of the studies he talks about, a man was given an injection of a harmless liquid to mimic snot. It couldn’t be seen by the naked eye, but under those blue lights detectives use. The test subject went into a room with other folks, and when they turned the overhead lights off and the blue lights on, every single person, doorknob, and bowl of nuts had the pretend snot on it, which is how the common cold passes from person to person so easily—through touch, apparently not by making out with someone (although presumably at some point you might touch that person). A lot of myths I grew up with are not true. Like the fact we only use ten percent of our brain--false. I was taught as a kid that different parts of the tongue were attuned to different tastes like salty, sweet, sour. Nope. Also, like the movie the Matrix, apparently when I eat a brownie straight from the oven, it doesn’t actually taste good, my brain just reads these scentless, flavorless molecules and makes me think they’re pleasurable. Especially because of the tininess we still have to explore and to discover areas of nano and quanta. Take physics, we don´t know anything, so what could this say about a system as complex as the human body in a world we hardly understand? Photosynthesis in plants seems to do it´s work with something creepy that just can be explained with some kind of not understood quanta phenomena teleportation stuff and, in some rare cases, we are more complex than vegetables.

Antibiotics are about as nuanced as a hand grenade. They wipe out good microbes as well as bad. Increasing evidence shows that some of the good ones may never recover, to our permanent cost. Most people in the Western world, by the time they reach adulthood, have received between five and twenty courses of antibiotics. The effects, it is feared, may be cumulative, with each generation passing on fewer microorganisms than the one before. Many myths about the body are shown and design flaws described, but after billion years of evolution, that´s no wonder. We deliberately build in design flaws in everything we create and call it planned obsolescence and what is an appendix or other useless extra bonus parts compared to that. Or did you know how many things we still cannot explain? One such thing are emotional responses like crying when sad - it has no physiological benefit AND is the same response as for joy so why are we doing it? The appendix, has no certain purpose but kills about 80,000 people around the world every year when it ruptures or grows infected..... Now the best thinking is that the appendix serves as a reservoir for gut bacteria. A truly amazing compendium on the human body aka "a warm wobble of flesh!" Truly engaging and enlightening. Occasionally I wanted to fast forward to avoid the details, but mainly I was truly engaged, appalled or enthralled!