Quotes from Bill Bryson

The largest source of foodborne illness is not meat or eggs or mayonnaise, as commonly supposed, but green leafy vegetables. They account for one in five of all food illnesses.

Americans today consume about twenty five percent more calories than they did in 1970. And let's face it, they weren't exactly going without in 1970.

To an American shopper there are just three spans of time: now, tomorrow at the very latest, and we'll look elsewhere.

COMPLICATED molecules. About a fifth of our body weight is made up of them. In simplest terms, a protein is a chain of amino acids. About a million different proteins have been identified so far, and nobody knows how many more are to be found. They are all made from just twenty amino acids

I hung up again and looked at Katz. "What is it with this town? I've blown more intelligent life into a handkerchief.

Among skilled craftsmen—a category that included John Shakespeare—some 60 percent could read, a clearly respectable proportion.

By one estimate, about half the sugar we consume is lurking in foods where we are not even aware of it—in breads, salad dressings, spaghetti sauces, ketchup, and other processed foods that don't normally strike us as sugary. Altogether about 80 percent of the processed foods we eat contain added sugars. Heinz ketchup is almost one-quarter sugar. It has more sugar per unit of volume than Coca-Cola.

Por ejemplo, cuando hacemos ejercicio de forma vigorosa, la hipófisis segrega endorfinas en el torrente sanguíneo. Las endorfinas son las mismas sustancias químicas que se liberan cuando comemos o mantenemos relaciones sexuales. Están estrechamente emparentadas con los opiáceos; de ahí que a menudo se hable de la llamada «euforia del corredor

Interestingly, in the United States no one has died of old age since 1951, at least not officially, for in that year old age was banished as a cause from death certificates. In Britain, it is still allowed, though not much used.

It's a strange thing because nobody can say exactly where the Scottish Highlands begin and end, but there comes a moment when the world fills with clean, sparkling air and the mountains take on a kind of purply glory and you know you are there. That's what I was looking

Although Funk coined the term vitamines and is thus often given credit for their discovery, most of the real work of determining the chemical nature of vitamins was done by others, in particular Sir Frederick Hopkins, who was award the Nobel Prize for his work, a fact that left Funk permanently in one.

It also gives life a richness and unpredictability that endows even the simplest undertakings with an air of challenge and uncertainty.

The grouse were almost certainly released a few at a time from cages. For all the sport in it, Walsingham might just as well have fired into the cages and given himself more time for tea.)

More recently, during a debate in the House of Lords in 1978 one of the members said: "If there is a more hideous language on the face of the earth than the American form of English, I should like to know what it is.

I have often been struck in Britain by this sort of thing—by how mysteriously well educated people from unprivileged backgrounds so often are, how the most unlikely people will tell you plant names in Latin or turn out to be experts on the politics of ancient Thrace or irrigation techniques at Glanum.

By 1927, the average state was spending eight times more on enforcing fish and game laws than it spent on Prohibition.

Some years ago, Pearce made a curious discovery—that people who had had a cat early in life seemed to derive lifelong protection from getting asthma.

Now the best thinking is that the appendix serves as a reservoir for gut bacteria. About one person in every sixteen in the developed world will suffer appendicitis at some point, enough to make it the most common cause of emergency surgery. Without surgery, many appendicitis victims would die.

Male ignorance of female anatomy is quite arresting, it appears, particularly when you consider how keen they are to get to know it in other respects.

noticed on my city map that just up the road was the Musée International de la Croix-Rouge et du Croissant-Rouge (the International Museum of the Red Cross and Red Breakfast Roll), which sounded much more promising to me.

I had no idea that the Scottish so loathed the English that their favorite team in the world is whichever one is presently playing England.

had never really stopped to consider what an extraordinary thing the Royal National Lifeboat Institution is. Think about it. A troubled ship calls for help, and eight people—teachers, plumbers, the guy who runs the pub—drop everything and put to sea, whatever the weather, asking no questions, to try to help strangers. Is there anything more brave and noble than that?

Most of the best technology that exists on Earth is right here inside us. And everybody takes it almost completely for granted.

If you count proper nouns, the word in English with the most varied spellings is air with a remarkable thirty-eight: Aire, ayr, heir, e'er, ere, and so on.