Skip to main content

Review 40: Gut: The Inside Story of Our Body’s Most Underrated Organ by Giulia Enders

Gut: The Inside Story of Our Body’s Most Underrated Organ
Earlier in the year, I read Mary Roach’s Gulp - a fascinating and hilarious journey down the alimentary canal. When picking up Giulia Enders’ Gut, I worried that I might be over-gutted. What more could I possibly have to learn, having already read one other book?

Fortunately, Ender’s bestseller couldn’t be a better companion piece to Roach’s. Where Gulp is a light-hearted set of the facts that she found most interesting, Gut goes and fills in more of the hard detail. Both are immensely readable, but the former is set to entertain, and the latter to inform. They complement perfectly.

Enders (and let’s not forgo the cheap mention of nominative determinism here) makes you fall in love with the gut by being in love with it herself. Her passion and joy blast out of every sentence, and like so many things discussed within the book, that’s infectious. Sometimes the writing style feels slightly young, but I think that’s to make it engaging to a wide audience, and is easily overcome.

As with many books in this style, one of the best things is that you come away with a panoply of interesting facts, such as:

Only 10% of our cells are human; the rest are bacteria.

Whether or not you’re sensitive to weight gain or depression may depend largely on which bacteria are present in your gut.

Bees are vegetarian because they picked up a microbe that lets them get energy from plant pollen – otherwise they’d still be carnivorous wasps.

A third of Germans are intolerant to fructose sugar, to the point where they have a nursery rhyme about eating cherries and then having to go to hospital.

The man who invented Vaseline ate a spoonful of it a day (legal disclaimer: you shouldn’t; stick to real jelly, you maniac).

All of these are set alongside a thorough and fascinating description of each stage of your food’s journey, from top to bottom, so to speak, with special focus on the bacteria that live within us, since one of the biggest jobs we have is to maintain our individual microbial farms.

The big takeaway for me came in relation to cleaning. Obviously, we don’t live in a sterile environment, but Enders makes it really clear how the vast majority of bacteria are neutral towards us, and many have beneficial effects. So using cleaning products that sterilise an environment can really do more harm than good – you remove the good things, and then there’s potentially a free space that more harmful bacteria could colonise. The best thing is to reduce the overall number of bacteria but not to destroy them all. You can do this very effectively with plenty of water: by diluting the number of bacteria in any one place, you can render them ineffective, since each needs a critical mass to have an effect.

Overall, another joyous romp through the bowels. Who could want anything more?

--

This is my fortieth book review of 100 to raise money for Refuge, the domestic abuse charity. If you liked this review, or just want to help out, please donate on the link below!

JustGiving - Sponsor me now!

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Review 1: Stasiland: Stories from Behind the Berlin Wall, by Anna Funder

My rating: 5 of 5 stars I am hungover and steer myself like a car through the crowds at Alexanderplatz station. How could you not love a book that begins like that? Early on in Stasiland , Anna Funder discusses the ‘puzzle women of Nuremberg’. This is a group of underfunded people (both men and women, oddly) who spend their days piecing together the scraps of documents the Stasi hurriedly shredded at the end of their regime. It feels like an apt analogy for Funder’s book itself – she carefully and brilliantly pieces together a view of what it was like to live in East Germany, and the effect it’s had on its citizens decades after the Berlin Wall was wrenched down, from snapshot interviews, research and her own experiences… despite the fact that most people she encounters would rather sweep it under the rug and pretend it never happened. I came to this book knowing that East Germany was run as a Communist surveillance state, but little else. That was no problem. ...
1 comment
Read more

Review 34: The Long Song by Andrea Levy

I’ve read a few books dealing with black slavery as part of this challenge. It’s interesting how each one looks at it through a slightly different lens, adding slightly different perspectives to the whole picture. In The Long Song , the thing that rings as much through the book as the horror and inhumanity of slavery is the sense of humour between the slaves themselves. It felt odd to laugh out loud while reading this, but there are plenty of times I did. I guess that this in itself is important – humour is an essential and universal human trait, so if we deny the slaves’ humour in recounting their stories, maybe it’s another way of denying their humanity all over again. I tried rewriting this about five times to make me sound less like a pseudo-intellectual jerksack, but this is the best I could do, I’m afraid. Anyway, TLS is set in a Jamaican sugar plantation in the early 19th century, and spans the periods just before and after slavery was abolished in the British Empir...
Post a Comment
Read more

Review 8: Eileen by Ottessa Moshfegh

I sincerely believed that if there were less of me, I would have fewer problems. This pretty much sums up Ottessa Moshfegh’s Eileen . The titular protagonist is a sort of anti-heroine, but without the swagger that word tends to conjure. Instead, she has been raised in a loveless home, and has never had friends. She hates her town, her family and most of all, herself. Her misanthropy springs from the world’s rejection of her, rather than the other way around. Moshfegh says that she wrote Eileen as an experiment, following a paint-by-numbers guide to commercial fiction. But the Man Booker shortlisted novel comes out as anything but conventional. It’s more a masterclass in characterisation – light on plot, but heavy on unreliable narration, building Eileen’s miserable day-to-day existence up until the character slouches fully off the page. It’s a really sad and well-observed depiction of how women can internalise hatred. Eileen is disgusted by her own body. She refuses to w...
Post a Comment
Read more