Word: bowel
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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American physicians have contended for decades that it does not matter whether a person has one or two bowel movements a day or only two or three a week. Now that view has been challenged by British and South African medical scientists who suggest that what commercials call "regularity" may be a matter of life and death. Too few bowel movements and too little bulk in the stools, they write in the Journal of the A.M.A., may partly explain the occurrence of such varied disorders as heart and gall-bladder disease, appendicitis, diverticulosis, varicose veins, clotting in the deep veins...
Medical statistics are admittedly imprecise, and are distorted by improvements in diagnosis. Nevertheless, Burkitt and his colleagues believe that the increases in these diseases are real, and were caused by a change in the type of food eaten in developed countries, particularly in food that reaches the large bowel with the least change: indigestible fiber, the roughest of roughage. Until about 1890, they say, the pound of bread that average Britons and Americans ate every day contained much indigestible fiber; because of more elaborate milling techniques, bread now contains less fiber and people are eating less of it. This...
...scientists conducted elaborate experiments in which volunteers in England, India and Africa had their bowel movements clocked and their feces weighed. Among the results of the study: peoples living under primitive conditions, on diets high in indigestible fibers, passed from 2½ to 4½ times as much feces as sailors in the Royal Navy, and were relatively free of many of the diseases studied...
What makes the prospect especially hazardous is that one of the molecular biologists' favorite tools is the bacterium Escherichia coli, which inhabits every human bowel, is present in normal excrement and is highly amenable to laboratory manipulation. Its natural form is dangerous only when it runs rampant in an accidental or surgical wound or in organs other than the gastrointestinal tract. But a laboratory mutant might cause a plague of infectious disease resistant to available antibiotics. Altered DNA can be dynamite...
...political leaders because we know them so well. We have a kind of Naderism in politics. For the first time since man came down out of the trees, government no longer operates in a cocoon of mystery. I suppose the world changed a lot when Eisenhower's bowel movements were described by Paul Dudley White...