Quotes from Mary Roach

Morning breath" is hydrogen sulfide released by bacteria consuming shed tongue cells while you mouth-breathe for eight hours; saliva normally washes the debris away.

Space exploration is in some ways an exploration of what it means to be human. How much normalcy can people forgo? For how long, and what does it do to them?

This book is a tribute to the men and women who dared. Who, to this day, endure ignorance, closed minds, righteousness, and prudery. Their lives are not easy. But their cocktail parties are the best. p

Denis Burkitt, fueled a decade-long fiber craze. Americans were forcing down unprecedented amounts of bran muffins, oatmeal, and high-fiber breakfast cereals. Whorton cited a 1984 survey that found a third of Americans eating more fiber to stay healthy. You don't hear so much about fiber these days.

cadavers' intestines hanging like a parade streamers off the sides of tables, skulls bobbing in boiling pots, organs strewn on the floor being eaten by dogs.....

Most of these seemingly collected by Keith's mother: "Some of the pleasantest recollections of my boyhood are of fried jackrabbit, baked jackrabbit, jackrabbit stew, and jackrabbit pie.")

there is a point at which efficiency crosses over into lunacy, and the savings in money or resources cease to be worthwhile in light of the price paid in other ways.

The moral of the story is this: It takes an ill-advised mix of ignorance, arrogance, and profit motive to dismiss the wisdom of the human body in favor of some random notion you've hatched or heard and branded as true. By wisdom I mean the collective improvements of millions of years of evolution. The mind objects strongly to shit, but the body has no idea what we're on about.

THE GREAT IRONY is that in the beginning, the gut was all there was. "We're basically a highly evolved earthworm surrounding the intestinal tract," Khoruts commented as we drove away from his clinic the last day I was there. Eventually, the food processor had to have a brain attached to help it look for food, and limbs to reach that food. That increased its size, so it needed a circulatory system to distribute the fuel that powered the limbs.

Fletcher was the instigator of a fad for extremely thorough chewing. We are not talking about British Prime Minister William Gladstone's thirty-two chews per bite. We are talking about this: "One-fifth of an ounce of the midway section of the young garden onion, sometimes called 'challot,' has required seven hundred and twenty-two mastications before disappearing through involuntary swallowing." (More on chewing and the "oral device" in chapter 7.)

You will hear no a lot. It's about not giving up and having the absurd belief that someone, somewhere will say yes. I don't go away easily.

It's called the FATLOSE trail. FATLOSE stands for 'Fecal Administration To LOSE weight,' an example of PLEASE— Pretty Lame Excuse for an Acronym, Scientists and Experimenters.

mainstream pet-food manufacturers blend animal fats and meals with soy and wheat grains and add vitamins and minerals. This yields a cheap, nutritious pellet that no one wants to eat.

on Aëtius of Amida] Women who came to him for contraceptive advice were told to wear a piece of cat liver in an ivory tube attached to their left foot. Thought I suppose this might well keep you from getting pregnant, in the same way that wearing Birkenstocks might.

Moeller came to AFB from Frito-Lay, where his job was to design, well, powdered flavor coatings for edible extruded shapes. "There are," he allows, "a lot of parallels." A Cheeto without its powdered coating has almost no flavor.* Likewise, the sauces on processed convenience meals are basically palatants for humans.

Pet foods come in a variety of flavors because that's what we humans like,† and we assume our pets like what we like. We have that wrong. "For cats especially," Moeller says, "change is often more difficult than monotony.

Fully half of all transplant patients, I found out, develop postoperative psychological problems of some sort.

cats are more or less "monoguesic," meaning they stick to one food. Outdoor cats tend to be either mousers or birders, not both. But don't worry, as most of the difference between Tuna Treat and Poultry Platter is in the name and the picture on the label. "They may have more fish meal in one and more poultry meal in another," says Moeller, "but the flavors may or may not change.

Albert King calculated that vehicle safety improvements that have come about as a result of cadaver research have saved an estimated 8,500 lives each year since 1987. For every cadaver that rode the crash sleds to test three-point seat belts, 61 lives per year have been saved. For every cadaver that took an air bag in the face, 147 people per year survive otherwise fatal head-ons. For every corpse whose head has hammered a windshield, 68 lives per year are saved.

Why don't suicide bombers smuggle bombs in their rectums?

The extent to which Americans project their own food qualms and biases onto their pets has lately veered off into the absurd. Some of AFB's clients have begun marketing 100 percent vegetarian kibble for cats. The cat is what's called a true carnivore; its natural diet contains no plants. Moeller tilts his head. A slight lift of the eyebrows. The look says, "Whatever the client wants.

I've had kids object to their dad's wishes (to donate), says Ronn Wade, director of the Anatomical Services Division of the University of Maryland School of Medicine. I tell them, 'Do what's best for you. You're the one who has to live with it.

short piece headlined "Elvis Died of Constipation" had run as the site's lead story (and its middle and last story) under the category Constipation News. Why didn't the colonic inertia theory come up earlier? Nichopoulos says that at the time, he had never heard of it. Nor had the gastroenterologist who treated Presley in the 1970s. "Nobody knew about it back then," Nichopoulos says.

I applied to be a subject in a simulated Mars mission. I made it past the first round of cuts and was told that someone from the European Space Agency would call me for a phone interview later in the month. The call came at 4:30 A.M., and I did not take care to hide my irritation. I realized later that it had probably been a test, and I had failed it.