Book review: the body, an operators guide
“We pass our existence within this wobble of flesh and yet take it almost entirely for granted.”
In his latest book, Bill Bryson is tackling all the mysteries (and there are many) of the human body - a journey that each and everyone should embark on to understand our bodies better. While he takes us from head to toe thru each system and level, it’s his description of the role we have in keeping our body healthy and specifically the digestive system that I loved most.
Bryson describes the digestive system of the human body as working primarily to kill all the harmful bacteria we ingest.
The hydrochloric acid in the stomach kills microbes and helps in further softening the cooked food that is chewed.
The food then progresses down to the intestines, where nutrients are absorbed, and bacteria break down fibre (and what isn’t useful comes out of the body as faeces).
The body is adept at using everything else.
Eating, today, is considered more as a way of satisfying our gastronomic pleasures; however, the primary function of eating is to attain energy. Cooking food helps in extracting more energy from the food we eat. Additionally, we need to eat to ensure the body gets its nutrients such as vitamins and minerals from outside sources, as it cannot make these itself.
The body needs the essential five – carbs, proteins, vitamins, minerals and fibre, and it is impossible to ascertain who needs how much of these as every person has a different body make and lifestyle. Dieting, processed foods and nutrition science make this concept incredibly difficult to navigate! The problem lies not only in the fast-food culture that has taken the world by storm. Even the average fruit has been enhanced and produced to taste sweeter. The odds are certainly stacked against humans, and habits are to blame!
I think the part I like the absolutes best is his discussion where science has not yet been able to specify where life actually begins: while science has pegged the cell as the essential unit of life, it still cannot explain how they coordinate to make the body function, how the genes and chromosomes in the body have been transmitted from generation to generation in the DNA, how the body survives – like a machine – without needing many repairs for decades and how it runs only on water and food?
“Yet somehow when all of these things are brought together, you have life. That is the part that eludes science. I kind of hope it always will.”
Perhaps that scares people? But I wholeheartedly agree. And maybe that’s cos I’ve been at the end of one of my lives (you only realise you get two when you’re on your second!) and I cannot take all this for granted ever again! I think each of us has the most amazing superpowers and while we’re 99% the same in our DNA, no two humans are the same. Go figure it out for yourself - turns out you’re the most equipped at you!
