![]() ![]() In a lifetime, you eat 60 tons of food, extracting the nutritional necessities and then producing seven tons of poop. ![]() ![]() While that statistic might not enhance the mood, the special sharing is thought to be helpful in sampling the partner’s histocompatibility genes involved in immune response. You host 40,000 species of microbes, and when you kiss you transfer some 1 billion bacteria to your beloved. Then again, there are exceptions, such as Jeanne Louise Calment, who ate two pounds of chocolate a week, smoked until she was 117 and died at 122. We occupy them - although the more you read, the less clear it is how to define these roving, rickety, skin-slathered bone towers of electric impulses, chemical cocktails and micro-organismic colonies as “we.” And, as you know, we take pitiful care of these fleshly loaners, filling them with crud, parking them in chairs and laying them out on sofas to the point of reversing the mortality gains modern science has enabled. No, because, as Bryson makes clear, we don’t own our bodies. Why didn’t Bryson subtitle The Body: A Guide for Occupants as “An Owner’s Manual” instead? Wouldn’t that have been terribly clever? ![]() “Part of the problem,” Bryson explains, “was that he believed that the human body contains about twice as much blood as it actually does and that one can remove up to 80% of that notional amount without ill effect.” ![]()
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