The Body: A Guide for Occupants
By Bill Bryson
Doubleday, 454pp
Over the next few days, your eyes will create enough tears to fill a wine bottle -- even if you're not feeling sad. According to "The Body: A Guide for Occupants" by best-selling nonfiction author Bill Bryson, the average person secretes 150 to 300 milliliters of tears every day.
That's one of many fun facts you'll learn about yourself in this long, enjoyable book. Another is that you could fill the bottle much more quickly with saliva, as the average person produces almost 1.5 liters each day.
If you prefer really big numbers, here's one: "In the second or so since you started this sentence, your body has made a million red blood cells."
"A teaspoon of human blood contains about 25 billion red blood cells," Bryson writes, "and each one of those 25 billion contains 250,000 molecules of haemoglobin, the protein to which oxygen willingly clings."
A red blood cell has none of the major structures usually found inside other cells (such as a nucleus), enabling it to function as "essentially a shipping container."
You may already know that those shipping containers are manufactured in your bones. But did you know your bones also produce a hormone called osteocalcin? According to Bryson, this hormone's various roles include "keeping our memory in working order," which may partly explain "how regular excercise helps stave off Alzheimer's disease: exercise builds stronger bones, and stronger bones produce more osteocalcin."
In case you doubt that exercise really builds bones, Bryson quotes an anatomy professor as saying, "The bone in a professional tennis player's serving arm may be 30 percent thicker than in his other arm."
The anatomy professor is presumably a reliable source, and Bryson's other assertions are backed up by 30 pages of wide-ranging footnotes. My favorite among his sources is a research paper titled "Bacterial Transfer Associated with Blowing Out Candles on a Birthday Cake." (Bacteria on a cake were found to be about 14 times more numerous after the candles were blown out.)
Despite such omnivorous fact-finding, there is one little goof likely to stand out for readers in Japan. In a section on the sense of taste, "dried fish scales" are mentioned as a key ingredient in dashi broth. It would be more accurate, if less exotic, to simply say "dried fish."
Also in the taste section is the surprising story behind Scoville units, which spicy-food aficionados know are used to measure just how hot a hot pepper can be. They are named for Wilbur Scoville (1865-1942), who was neither a pepper farmer nor a hot-handed chef. He was an industrial pharmacist in Detroit who needed a way to calibrate the potency of chili peppers because they were a key ingredient in "a popular muscle salve called Heet."
Despite having the word "guide" in its title, "The Body" contains little advice beyond getting plenty of exercise and eating less sugar and more vegetables. As another professor tells Bryson, "You don't need a PhD for that."
Instead, this is more like a "guide" to a fascinating museum filled with amazing things. In that sense, it would make a great Christmas present. Give it to someone who lives in a body.
-- By Tom Baker
Japan News Staff Writer
Maruzen price: 4,500 yen plus tax
Read more from The Japan News at https://japannews.yomiuri.co.jp/
