Bill Bryson has made quite the career out of funny, informative, light reading books and The Body is no exception. Each chapter covers some portion of the human body, like discussions about blood, brain, nerves, sex organs, death and cancer. Here are a few tidbits of info for your perusal:

+ If you blew [a virus] up to the size of a tennis ball, a human would be five hundred miles high. A bacterium on the same scale would be about the size of a beach ball.

+ researchers infected the metal door handle to an office building and found it took only about four hours for the “virus” to spread through the entire building, infecting over half of employees and turning up on virtually every shared device like photocopiers and coffee machines.

+ Giraffes, oddly, sometimes have gallbladders and sometimes don’t.

+ To power our forward motion, we have a distinctively gigantic muscle in our buttocks, the gluteus maximus, and an Achilles tendon, something no ape has.

+ If you are deprived of it for long enough, you will die—though what exactly it is that kills you from lack of sleep is a mystery, too.

+ The prostate, it might be said, produces seminal fluid throughout a man’s adulthood and anxiety in his later years.

+ It has been suggested, in fact, that if all men lived long enough, they would all get prostate cancer.

+ That’s why you are constantly told to eat more fiber: because it keeps your gut microbes happy and at the same time, for reasons not well understood, reduces the risk of heart disease, diabetes, bowel cancer, and indeed death of all types.

But the most amazing one to me was in the chapter on the brain. In discussing how long it takes an image to get from your eye to the brain (about a fifth of a second) :

+ To help us deal better with this fractional lag, the brain does a truly extraordinary thing: it continuously forecasts what the world will be like a fifth of a second from now, and that is what it gives us as the present.

Mind blowing. It was also amazing just how little we still know about the body, especially the "Whys". My wife is probably glad I am finally finished reading the book so I will stop interrupting her reading by narrating another wild fact from the book!

My two biggest take aways from the book are that while there are indeed plenty of disagreements about what we need and don't need, the scientific community is solidly behind the need for both exercise and, believe it or not, fiber. Exercise continually showed up in the book, as it reduces the odds of everything from cancer to Alzheimer's. And while there might be some disagreement on how much of both exercise and fiber, both are essential to a healthy life. As one of fibers biggest boosters (again, much to my wife's chagrin), I felt vindicated!

So while this isn't any kind of text book, it sure is an informative and interesting read. You will learn a lot of things you just didn't know before. And he also name drops a lot of other books for more in depth study, which I have added to my Want To Read list, like [b:Clean: The New Science of Skin and the Beauty of Doing Less|48984802|Clean The New Science of Skin and the Beauty of Doing Less|James Hamblin|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1585632554l/48984802.SY75.jpg|74399656], [b:Bonk: The Curious Coupling of Science and Sex|5981308|Bonk The Curious Coupling of Science and Sex|Mary Roach|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1335719323l/5981308.SX50.jpg|2398516] and [b:Microcosm: E. Coli and the New Science of Life|2051708|Microcosm E. Coli and the New Science of Life|Carl Zimmer|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1435335989l/2051708.SY75.jpg|2056731]. Gotta get to reading!