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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?

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