That’s what killed Elvis, said Adrianne Noe. Noe is the director of the National Museum of Health and Medicine, which has its own megacolon, from an unknown party. As we were about to get off the phon...
THE MOST EFFECTIVE agent of dietary change is the adulated eater—the king who embraces whelks, the revolutionary hero with a passion for skewered hearts. Normally disgusting substances or objects that...
So powerful are race- and status-based disgusts that explorers have starved to death rather than eat like the locals. British polar exploration suffered heavily for its mealtime snobbery.
Rodents, on the other hand, are slaves to sweetness. They have been known to die of malnutrition rather than step away from a sugar-water drip. In an obesity study from the 1970s, rats fed an all-you-...
People like what they eat, rather than eat what they like. The phenomenon starts early. Breast milk and amniotic fluid carry the flavors of the mother’s foods, and studies consistently show that babie...
Nancy Rawson, seated across from me, is AFB’s director of basic research and an expert in animal taste and smell. She volunteers that cats are more or less monoguesic, meaning they stick to one food....
Meaning by way of the anus. Per annum, with two n’s, means yearly. The correct answer to the question, What is the birth rate per anum? is zero (one hopes). The Internet provides many fine examples of...
It starts as an appetizer typically. That’s low risk. Then it migrates to an entrée dish. Then it becomes a food that you can buy and take home and fix for your family.
I'd called Stanley Garn because I was looking for anthropologists who had done a nutritional analysis of human flesh and/or organ meats. Just, you know, curious. Garn hadn't exactly done this but he h...
I think that at the moment of death that little window opens up. I think that maybe we're all connected to something bigger than we are.
I like the term decedent. It's as though the man weren't dead but merely involved in some sort of protracted legal dispute.
He'll always make time to talk to you if you call, but it becomes quickly clear in the course of the conversation that spare time is something Zugibe has very little of. He'll be halfway through an ex...
Frequent bowel movements were associated with an increased risk of rectal cancer in men, and constipation was associated with a decreased risk. Mike Jones wasn’t surprised. The medical community was n...
Entomologists have a name for young flies, but it is an ugly name, an insult. Let's not use the word maggot. Let's use a pretty word. Let's use hacienda.
By the end of the conference, there was a sense that removing the junk is actually possible. I've gone from being totally skeptical to thinking maybe something will work, Kessler says. We can bring th...
But peanuts are hardly representative of the average food. Everyone knows—via visual observation of stool samples, to use the New England Journal of Medicine’s way of saying a glance before flushing—t...
But gross anatomy lab is not just about learning anatomy. It is about confronting death.
Because it’s hard for people to gauge quality by flavor, they tend to gauge it by price. That’s a mistake. Langstaff has evaluated wine professionally for twenty years. In her opinion, the difference...
Bad enough that some ham-handed fop in a waistcoat and bowtie was up to his wrists in your urinary tract, but on top of that you had an audience
At an Italian deli counter, a whiff of butyric acid reads as parmesan cheese; elsewhere, vomit.