Word: bowels
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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...
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...
...with what Dr. Curt Ries diagnosed as agranulocytosis. The condition, characterized by the body's inability to produce white blood cells, had left Strom weak and feverish and with so severe an infection in his rectal area that doctors were forced to perform a colostomy, bypassing his lower bowel...