I love the way the Italians park. You turn any street corner in Rome and it looks as if you’ve just missed a parking competition for blind people.
Incidentally, the idea that we use only 10 percent of our brains is a myth. No one knows where the idea came from, but it has never been true or close to true. You may not use it all terribly sensibly, but you employ all your brain in one way or another.
The one known cure for baldness is castration.
Well, you blink fourteen thousand times a day – so much that your eyes are shut for twenty-three minutes of every waking day.
Beauty is only skin deep, but ugly goes clean to the bone. – DOROTHY PARKER.
The richer the country, the more allergies its citizens get.
All that is required of you is a willingness to trudge. There is no point in hurrying because you are not actually going anywhere. However far or long you trod you are always in the same place – in the woods. It’s where you were yesterday, where you will be tomorrow.
And it is surely astounding to reflect that not once in the three billion years since life began has your personal line of descent been broken.
You discard about a hundred billion red blood cells every day. They are a big component of what makes your stools brown.
Altogether about 80 percent of the processed foods we eat contain added sugars. Heinz ketchup is almost one-quarter sugar. It has more sugar per unit of volume than Coca-Cola.
Where body meets air, we are all cadavers. These outer skin cells are replaced every month. We shed skin copiously, almost carelessly: some twenty-five thousand flakes a minute, over a million pieces every hour. Run a finger along a dusty shelf, and you are in large part clearing a path through fragments of your former self. Silently and remorselessly we turn to dust.
If you want to imagine what a disease might do if it became bad in every possible way, you could do no better than consider the case of smallpox. Smallpox is almost certainly the most devastating disease in the history of humankind.
Impulsively, I lumbered aboard, bought a ticket, and took a seat toward the back. The trick of successful walking, I always say, is knowing when to stop.
We are only beginning to understand the importance and nature of a woman’s vaginal microbiome. Babies born by Cesarean section are robbed of this initial wash. The consequences for the baby can be profound. Various studies have found that people born by C-section have substantially increased risks for type 1 diabetes, asthma, celiac disease, and even obesity and an eightfold greater risk of developing allergies.
They believed that any boy treated with decency, encouragement, and respect would grow into a model citizen, and they were nearly always right. Ninety-five percent of Xaverian boys went on to live normal, stable lives.
The more or less universal belief that we should all walk ten thousand steps a day – that’s about five miles – is not a bad idea, but it has no special basis in science. Clearly, any ambulation is likely to be beneficial, but the notion that there is a universal magic number of steps that will give us health and longevity is a myth. The ten-thousand-step idea is often attributed to a single study done in Japan in the 1960s, though it appears that also may be a myth.
The best way to reduce snoring is to lose weight, sleep on your side, and not drink alcohol before retiring.
Over a lifetime, we eat about sixty tons of food, which is equivalent, notes Carl Zimmer in Microcosm, to eating sixty small cars. In 1915, the average American spent half his weekly income on food. Today it’s just 6 percent. We live in a paradoxical situation. For centuries, people ate unhealthily out of economic necessity. Now we do it out of choice.
One reason chimps can’t talk is that they appear to lack the ability to make subtle shapes with tongue and lips to form complex sounds.
The conviction that we should all drink eight glasses of water a day is the most enduring of dietary misunderstandings.