Fast, but not furious

For the most part we willfully ignore what goes on beneath the membrane of the skin When we do consider that hidden realm it is with disgust For at least four thousand years our guts have been labeled the corrupt baggage we lug around on lifersquos journey In ancient Egypt only souls whose corpses had been rid of impurities by having their insides scooped out could submit themselves to the judgment of the godsOnce a person died Anubis the jackalheaded lord of the dead weighed the soul against a feather Then Thoth the birdgod of intelligence thinking and the creator of language decided whether the petitioner might enter the afterlifeIn Europe the notion of the tricky unknowable body gathered momentum with the teachings of the Hippocratic Corpus a collection of writings from the late fifth to the early fourth century BCE As people came to identify the human body as the locus for undermining forces anxiety increased about the lurking chaos withinCenturies later emptiness was equated with cleansing and health by Aelius Aristides who in extensive writings about his own ailments linked selferasure with growth Fasting dieting and purgatives of all sorts became his prescription for contending with what classics scholar Brooke Holmes elegantly terms the ldquoOdyssean slipperiness of the bodyrdquo With absence came regenerationOur rejection of our ldquodirtyrdquo interior selves and our focus on clean exteriors continues in the twentyfirst century No horror film is complete without a generous expenditure of blood and guts the revelation of things more customarily concealed particularly where waste and genitalia are concerned shocks most of usDay after day we charge ahead shoveling calories in one end and expelling waste from the other If the process comes to a halt the remarkable intricate machine that is our body swings into action The organism reacts first by sending out alarms that rapidly increase in intensity At the most elemental level our stomach growls You canrsquot control borborygmi as Hippocrates called stomach growling unless you eat something Borborygmi occur as a consequence of the migrating myoelectric complex or MMC which in turn is triggered by an empty stomach MMC stimulates wavelike contractions in gastrointestinal muscles known as peristalsismdashand if there is nothing in the stomach the borborygmi result Peristaltic contractions move fluid and gas through the gastrointestinal tract The stomach acts as an amplifier and as we all know the results can be disconcertingly loudFor millennia the stomach was seen as the source of courage and animal appetite That the gut plays a role in our sleeping and waking cycles was identified in the postwar period by a microbiologist working at the Argonne National Laboratory in IllinoisIn the 1960s as longdistance jet travel became widespread humanity encountered a new opponent jet lag Gut science played its part through the persona of Dr Charles F Ehret Ehretrsquos initial area of scholarly focus was the mating habits of paramecia leading a colleague to christen him ldquothe Kinsey of the protozoardquo At Argonne Ehret shifted to chronobiology or the science of circadian rhythms and in 1982 he released the ldquoArgonne AntiJetLag Dietrdquo suggesting an optimum fastfeast eating schedule for jetset travelers It was quickly adopted by everyone from the Canadian national swim team to the US Secret Service A US militarystudy conducted in 2002 that involved 238 soldiers confirmed the dietrsquos effectiveness as an antindashjet lag toolWhile the Argonne diet is still widely recommended more recently the simple act of fasting before a flight has proven to be just as useful and easier to implementA 2008 study conducted by doctors at Harvard Medical School and the Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston found that the rhythm of eating can override the bodyrsquos internal sleep monitor normally ruled by the presence or absence of light ldquoWe discovered that a single cycle of starvation followed by refeeding turns on the clockrdquo Dr Clifford Saper a Harvard Medical School professor said at the time The fastfeast jolt ldquohijacks all of the circadian rhythms onto a new time zone that corresponds with food availabilityrdquo according to Saper A human has about 16 billion cortical neurons and in the tip of a womanrsquos clitoris alone are 8000 neuronsmdasha manrsquos penis has a pitiable 4000 More than 100 million neurons nerve cells are in our stomach and more than 500 million pack the enteric nervous system which is sometimes called the ldquobrain in the gutrdquo This number is slightly fewer than the neurons in a dogrsquos cerebral cortexThe stomachrsquos cells and nerves translate what we eat or donrsquot eat into neural signals that become the sensations that help define our existence If the cries of the digestive network go unanswered an amazing internal concatenation of biochemical machinery activatesExtracted with permission from The Fast The History Science Philosophy and Promise of Doing Without by John Oakes published by Bloomsbury