Gulp

Adventures on the Alimentary Canal

Mary Roach

• Publisher: Oneworld Publications
• Year: 2013
• Topic: Biological Sciences
• eBook ISBN:
  9781780742199
• Subtopic: Science General
• Index: Biological Sciences

In her fantastically disgusting international bestseller, Mary Roach dives into the strange wet miracles of science that operate inside us after every meal

SHORTLISTED FOR THE ROYAL SOCIETY WINTON PRIZE 2014

‘Almost every page made me laugh out loud.’ The Sunday Times, Best Science Books of 2013

Eating is the most pleasurable, gross, necessary, unspeakable biological process we undertake. But very few of us realise what strange wet miracles of science operate inside us after every meal – let alone have pondered the results (of the research). How have physicists made crisps crispier? What do laundry detergent and saliva have in common? Was self-styled ‘nutritional economist’ Horace Fletcher right to persuade millions of people that chewing a bite of shallot seven hundred times would yield double the vitamins?

In her trademark, laugh-out-loud style, Mary Roach breaks bread with spit connoisseurs, beer and pet-food tasters, stomach slugs, potato crisp engineers, enema exorcists, rectum-examining prison guards, competitive hot dog eaters, Elvis' doctor, and many more as she investigates the beginning, and the end, of our food.

‘A wonderful nonfiction read… The journalism is gripping and the writing is intensely funny. If biology had been like this at school, my life would have taken a different path.’ Observer, Hidden Gems of 2016

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title page
• Copyright page
• Dedication page
• Contents
• Introduction
• 1 • Nose Job: Tasting has little to do with taste
• 2 • I’ll Have the Putrescine: Your pet is not like you
• 3 • Liver and Opinions: Why we eat what we eat and despise the rest
• 4 • The Longest Meal: Can thorough chewing lower the national debt?
• 5 • Hard to Stomach: The acid relationship of William Beaumont and Alexis St Martin
• 6 • Spit Gets a Polish: Someone ought to bottle the stuff
• 7 • A Bolus of Cherries: Life at the oral processing lab
• 8 • Big Gulp: How to survive being swallowed alive
• 9 • Dinner’s Revenge: Can the eaten eat back?
• 10 • Stuffed: The science of eating yourself to death
• 11 • Up Theirs: The alimentary canal as criminal accomplice
• 12 • Inflammable You: Fun with hydrogen and methane
• 13 • Dead Man’s Bloat: And other diverting tales from the history of flatulence research
• 14 • Smelling a Rat: Does noxious flatus do more than clear a room?
• 15 • Eating Backwards: Is the digestive tract a two-way street?
• 16 • I’m All Stopped Up: Elvis Presley’s megacolon, and other ruminations on death by constipation
• 17 • The Ick Factor: We can cure you, but there’s just one thing
• Acknowledgements
• Bibliography
• Illustration Credits
• About the Author