Secrets of a Good Digestion [antikvár]

CHAPTER 1 Off the table and into the body What the stomach does The man with a lid on his stomach Why you need a liver Capturing the most nnportant mgredient: water A colony of busy, benign bacteria To the rescue: new drugs, new instruments Imagine the discomfort of poor Mr. Polly. The rotund hero of a 1909 comic romance by the English novelist H. G. Wells, he was a compulsive trencherman. At one memorable sitting, Mr. Polly managed to work through a heaping platter of cold pork, a dish of cold potatoes mixed with pickles, onions, cauliflower and capers, a cold suet pudding with treacle, along with hard cheese and several slabs of leaden, grayish bread—the whole washed down with a mighty jugful of beer. This huge repast, said Wells, caused "wonderful things "to occur in Mr. Polly'sbody. "It must have been like a badly managed industrial city during a period of depression," Wells wrote, "agitators, acts of violence, strikes, the forces of law and order doing their best, rushings to and fro, upheavals, the Marseillaise, tumbrils, the rumble and the thunder of the tumbrils." Mr. Polly survived the tumult, and so do most people who indulge themselves, however extravagant the menu. The ability of human beings to cope with the most outrageous demands of appetite is wonderful indeed. Homo sapiens is omnivorous. Unlike the cow munching its cud, or the hummingbird sipping nectar, people can eat almost anything, and commonly do—grains, roots, leaves, berries, fish, meat and milk, all containing complex mixtures of potential nutrients. Only such woody fare as grass stems and tree bark are truly inedible: The human system lacks the chemicals needed to process cellulose. All other foodstuffs—the gallimaufry of starches, sugars, fats and proteins that makes up diet—are regularly consumed and converted into energy and tissue within the body. The first stage in this conversion is digestion . Each mouthful of food must be pulverized, dissolved or emulsified, and broken down chemically into submicro-scopic units that can be taken into the bloodstream. As food makes its way down the gullet, or esophagus, and through the 30-foot length of the alimentary canal, it is churned and bombarded with a well-timed sequence of agents that change it into one form after another—usually for good purpose, sometimes for ill. Glands in the mouth pour in saliva; cells in the linings of the stomach and intestines add potent digestive juices. Two of the body's largest organs, the liver and pancreas, add other essential secretions. Then, when the nutrients have been extracted and absorbed into the blood for distribution throughout the body, the residue is expelled. The process goes on, day in and day out, year after year, for a lifetime, with very little conscious effort. For all its complexity, it is astonishing how smoothly the process goes—usually. But every now and again something goes awry, and the results are never pleasant. Under the impact of foods that are too rich or exotic, or of meals taken too fast or too gluttonously, the system rebels. Any number of viruses or bacteria—some ordinarily friendly—can attack the gut to bring sudden misery. A quairel or a bad day at work can cause upset; No system of the body is so immediately sensitive to emotional stress as the digestive tract. The results may be as minor and brief as a mild stomachache, generally curable by a simplified diet. But they can also be brutally severe, with devastating bouts of nausea and