Gulp: Adventures on the Alimentary Canal

Mary Roach

What really happens to food on its trip from your nose to your colon, and what odd questions do the scientists who study it ask?

At a glance

You will learn why most of what you call taste is really smell, and taste your next meal differently
You will be able to explain why people love some foods and despise others
You will find answers to odd questions you never thought to ask, such as whether the digestive tract can run backward

Introduction
1 • Nose Job: Tasting has little to do with taste
2 • I’ll Have the Putrescine: Your pet is not like you
3 • Liver and Opinions: Why we eat what we eat and despise the rest
4 • The Longest Meal: Can thorough chewing lower the national debt?
5 • Hard to Stomach: The acid relationship of William Beaumont and Alexis St. Martin
6 • Spit Gets a Polish: Someone ought to bottle the stuff
7 • A Bolus of Cherries: Life at the oral processing lab
8 • Big Gulp: How to survive being swallowed alive
9 • Dinner’s Revenge: Can the eaten eat back?
10 • Stuffed: The science of eating yourself to death
11 • Up Theirs: The alimentary canal as criminal accomplice
12 • Inflammable You: Fun with hydrogen and methane
13 • Dead Man’s Bloat: And other diverting tales from the history of flatulence research
14 • Smelling a Rat: Does noxious flatus do more than clear a room?
15 • Eating Backward: Is the digestive tract a two-way street?
16 • I’m All Stopped Up: Elvis Presley’s megacolon, and other ruminations on death by constipation
17 • The Ick Factor: We can cure you, but there’s just one thing