Gulp Quotes

“People are messy, unpredictable things.”
― Mary Roach, Gulp: Adventures on the Alimentary Canal

“I challenge you to find a more innocuous sentence containing the words sperm, suction, swallow, and any homophone of seaman. And then call me up on the homophone and read it to me.”
― Mary Roach, Gulp: Adventures on the Alimentary Canal

“Meaning 'by way of the anus'. 'Per Annum', with two n's, means 'yearly'. The correct answer to the question, 'What is the birthrate per anum?' is zero (one hopes).”
― Mary Roach, Gulp: Adventures on the Alimentary Canal

“Where do you find a stomach on a Thursday afternoon in Reno? "Chinatown?" suggests someone. "Costco?" "Butcher Boys." Tracy pulls his phone from a pocket. "Hello, I'm from the university" - the catchall preamble for unorthodox inquiries.”
― Mary Roach, Gulp: Adventures on the Alimentary Canal

“The slang for the rectum is "prison wallet".”
― Mary Roach, Gulp: Adventures on the Alimentary Canal

“Khoruts gave me a memorable example of how behavior can be covertly manipulated by microorganisms. The parasite Toxoplasma infects rats but needs to make its way into a cat’s gut to reproduce. The parasite’s strategy for achieving this goal is to alter the rat brain such that the rodent is now attracted to cat urine. Rat walks right up to cat, gets killed, eaten. If you saw the events unfold, Khoruts continued, you’d scratch your head and go, What is wrong with that rat? Then he smiled. “Do you think Republicans have different flora?”
― Mary Roach, Gulp: Adventures on the Alimentary Canal

“think of it.' said Robert Rosenbluth, a doctor whose acquaintance i made at the start of this book. 'no engineer could design something as multifunctional and fine tuned as an anus. to call someone an asshole is really bragging him up.”
― Mary Roach, Gulp: Adventures on the Alimentary Canal

“In a wartime survey conducted by a team of food-habits researchers, only 14 percent of the students at a women’s college said they liked evaporated milk. After serving it to the students sixteen times over the course of a month, the researchers asked again. Now 51 percent liked it. As Kurt Lewin put it, “People like what they eat, rather than eat what they like.”
― Mary Roach, Gulp: Adventures on the Alimentary Canal

“Penguins can shut down digestion by lowering the temperature inside their stomach to the point where the gastric juices are no longer active. The stomach becomes a kind of cooler to carry home the fish they’ve caught for their young.”
― Mary Roach, Gulp: Adventures on the Alimentary Canal

“Aspirin and ibuprofen combat inflammation everywhere but the stomach and bowel; there they create inflammation.”
― Mary Roach, Gulp: Adventures on the Alimentary Canal

“Breast milk and amniotic fluid carry the flavors of the mother’s foods, and studies consistently show that babies grow up to be more accepting of flavors they’ve sampled while in the womb and while breastfeeding.”
― Mary Roach, Gulp: Adventures on the Alimentary Canal

“It tastes like water spiked with strange.”
― Mary Roach, Gulp: Adventures on the Alimentary Canal

“You may be thinking, Wow, that Mary Roach has her head up her ass. To which I say: Only briefly, and with the utmost respect.”
― Mary Roach, Gulp: Adventures on the Alimentary Canal

“There is a famous study from the 1930s involving a group of orphanage babies who, at mealtimes, were presented with a smorgasbord of thirty-four whole, healthy foods. Nothing was processed or prepared beyond mincing or mashing. Among the more standard offerings—fresh fruits and vegetables, eggs, milk, chicken, beef—the researcher, Clara Davis, included liver, kidney, brains, sweetbreads, and bone marrow. The babies shunned liver and kidney (as well as all ten vegetables, haddock, and pineapple), but brains and sweetbreads did not turn up among the low-preference foods she listed. And the most popular item of all? Bone marrow.”
― Mary Roach, Gulp: Adventures on the Alimentary Canal

“* Kissing is a less aggressive form of bacterial transplant. Studies of three different gingivitis-causing bacteria have documented migration from spouse to spouse. Periodontically speaking, an affair might be viewed as a form of bacteriotherapy.”
― Mary Roach, Gulp: Adventures on the Alimentary Canal

“Any discussion of the sexuality of the digestive tract must inevitably touch on the anus. Anal tissue is among the most densely innervated on the human body. It has to be. It requires a lot of information to do its job. The anus has to be able to tell what’s knocking at its door: Is it solid, liquid, or gas? And then selectively release either all of it or one part of it. The consequences of a misread are dire. As Mike Jones put it, “You don’t want to choose poorly.” People who understand anatomy are often cowed by the feats of the lowly anus. “Think of it,” said Robert Rosenbluth, a physician whose acquaintance I made at the start of this book. “No engineer could design something as multifunctional and fine-tuned as an anus. To call someone an asshole is really bragging him up.”
― Mary Roach, Gulp: Adventures on the Alimentary Canal

“…he was doing a breath hydrogen test. If you know the amount of hydrogen someone is exhaling orally, it's a simple matter to extrapolate the amount they're exhaling rectally. This is because a fixed percentage of hydrogen produced in the colon is absorbed into the blood and, and when it reaches the lungs, exhaled. The breath hydrogen test has given flatus researchers a simple, consistent measure of gas production that does not require the subject to fart into a balloon.”
― Mary Roach, Gulp: Adventures on the Alimentary Canal

“The human digestive tract is like the Amtrak line from Seattle to Los Angeles: transit time is about thirty hours, and the scenery on the last leg is pretty monotonous.”
― Mary Roach, Gulp: Adventures on the Alimentary Canal

“The simplest strategy for bouts of noxious flatus is to not care. Or perhaps to take advantage of a gastroenterologist I know: get a dog. (To blame.)”
― Mary Roach, Gulp: Adventures on the Alimentary Canal

“How is it that we find Christina Aguilera more interesting than the inside of our own bodies?”
― Mary Roach, Gulp: Adventures on the Alimentary Canal

“Moeller, who has tasted a naked Cheeto, likens it to a piece of unsweetened puffed corn cereal”
― Mary Roach, Gulp: Adventures on the Alimentary Canal

“Silletti and I, for instance, chewed out cotton wads for the same amount of time. I produced .78 milliliters of stimulated saliva; she produced 1.4. She tried to reassure me. "It doesn't say anything about how good you are or how good I am with saliva."

"Erika, I'm a dried up husk."

"Don't say that, Mary.”
― Mary Roach, Gulp: Adventures on the Alimentary Canal

“During World War II, when combat rations were tinned, meat hashes were a common entrée because they worked well with the filling machines. “But the men wanted something they could chew, something into which they could ‘sink their teeth,’” wrote food scientist Samuel Lepkovsky in a 1964 paper making the case against a liquid diet for the Gemini astronauts. He summed up the soldiers’ take on potted meat: “We could undoubtedly survive on these rations a lot longer than we’d care to live.” (NASA went ahead and tested an all-milkshake meal plan on groups of college students living in a simulated space capsule at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base in 1964. A significant portion of it ended up beneath the floorboards.)”
― Mary Roach, Gulp: Adventures on the Alimentary Canal

“It's this mood, these sentiments - the excitement of exploration and the surprises and delights of travel to foreign locales - that I hope to inspire with this book.”
― Mary Roach, Gulp: Adventures on the Alimentary Canal

“Constipation ran Presley's life. Even his famous motto TCB— 'Taking Care of Business'— sounds like a reference to bathroom matters.”
― Mary Roach, Gulp: Adventures on the Alimentary Canal

“Back in the 1980s when everyone looked a bit off, my friend Tim and his brothers had some publicity shots taken of their band. Eventually they sold the rights to a stock photo agency. Years later, one of the images turned up on a greeting card. The inside said, "Greetings from the Dork Club.”
― Mary Roach, Gulp: Adventures on the Alimentary Canal

“To eat liver, knowing that you, too, have a liver, brushes up against the cannibalism taboo. The closer we are to a species, emotionally or phylogenetically, the more potent our horror at the prospect of tucking in, the more butchery feels like murder. Pets and primates, wrote Mead, come under the category “unthinkable to eat.” The same cultures that eat monkey meat have traditionally drawn the line at apes.”
― Mary Roach, Gulp: Adventures on the Alimentary Canal

“Animals’ taste systems are specialized for the niche they occupy in the environment. “That’s driven their sensory systems down a certain path,” Rawson says. This includes the animal known as us.”
― Mary Roach, Gulp: Adventures on the Alimentary Canal

“Verbal facility with smells and flavors doesn’t come naturally. As babies, we learn to talk by naming what we see. “Baby points to a lamp, mother says, ‘Yes, a lamp,’” says Johan Lundström, a biological psychologist with the Monell Chemical Senses Center in Philadelphia. “Baby smells an odor, mother says nothing.” All our lives, we communicate through visuals. No one, with a possible exception made for Sue Langstaff, would say, “Go left at the smell of simmering hotdogs.”
― Mary Roach, Gulp: Adventures on the Alimentary Canal

“Obsession is a pair of blinders, and Beaumont wore his tightly. He far overstated the role of gastric acid, ignoring the digestive contributions of pepsin and of pancreatic enzymes introduced in the small intestine. As is regularly evidenced by tens of thousands of gastric reflux sufferers—their acid production pharmaceutically curtailed—humans can get by with very little gastric acid. The acid’s main duty, in fact, is to kill bacteria—a fact that never occurred to Beaumont. What, for all his decades of experimenting, did he teach us? That digestion is chemical, not mechanical—but European experimenters, using animals, had shown this to be true two centuries earlier. That protein is easier to digest than vegetable matter. That gastric juices don’t require the “vital forces” of the body. Not, in short, all that much.”
― Mary Roach, Gulp: Adventures on the Alimentary Canal