Post by Master Kim on Nov 8, 2014 14:53:12 GMT -5
Giulia Enders' debut book, whose title translates as Charming Bowels, has sold 200,000 copies in her native Germany
To dismiss Giulia Enders' debut work as a "toilet book" would do it great injustice – not least because the author argues that we shouldn't really be reading books in the lavatory anyway.
Darm mit Charme ("Charming Bowels") – which has sat atop the German paperback charts for the last eight weeks and shifted more than 200,000 copies in the process – may deal with defecation, constipation and other bowel movements, but its message is far from flippant: our gastrointestinal tract is not only the body's most under-appreciated organ, but "the brain's most important adviser".
In the book, which was published in Germany in March and whose UK rights have already been bought by Scribe, Enders argues that we are unduly proud of the complex achievements of our brain and heart, while regarding our bowels as little more than a shameful tube that produces "small brown heaps and farting noises".
Few know that only the last of our digestive tract's eight metres deals with faeces, that it produces more than 20 kinds of hormone, contains more than a thousands species of bacteria and is controlled by a nervous system that is almost as complex as the brain's.
And Enders argues that even scientists like her – a 24-year-old doctoral student at Frankfurt's Goethe University – have only in recent years started to explore the possibility that the health of our bowels could have a more direct influence on our mental wellbeing, our motivation, memory and sense of morality than our DNA....
Gut reaction: book celebrating digestive tract becomes German bestseller - www.theguardian.com/books/2014/may/07/gut-reaction-book-digestive-tract-german-bestseller
The science of western medicine is 200 years, at least, behind oriental medicine.
To dismiss Giulia Enders' debut work as a "toilet book" would do it great injustice – not least because the author argues that we shouldn't really be reading books in the lavatory anyway.
Darm mit Charme ("Charming Bowels") – which has sat atop the German paperback charts for the last eight weeks and shifted more than 200,000 copies in the process – may deal with defecation, constipation and other bowel movements, but its message is far from flippant: our gastrointestinal tract is not only the body's most under-appreciated organ, but "the brain's most important adviser".
In the book, which was published in Germany in March and whose UK rights have already been bought by Scribe, Enders argues that we are unduly proud of the complex achievements of our brain and heart, while regarding our bowels as little more than a shameful tube that produces "small brown heaps and farting noises".
Few know that only the last of our digestive tract's eight metres deals with faeces, that it produces more than 20 kinds of hormone, contains more than a thousands species of bacteria and is controlled by a nervous system that is almost as complex as the brain's.
And Enders argues that even scientists like her – a 24-year-old doctoral student at Frankfurt's Goethe University – have only in recent years started to explore the possibility that the health of our bowels could have a more direct influence on our mental wellbeing, our motivation, memory and sense of morality than our DNA....
Gut reaction: book celebrating digestive tract becomes German bestseller - www.theguardian.com/books/2014/may/07/gut-reaction-book-digestive-tract-german-bestseller
The science of western medicine is 200 years, at least, behind oriental medicine.