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nbmb234 's review for:
Gut: The Inside Story of Our Body's Most Underrated Organ
by Giulia Enders
While I learned some new things, harmful rhetoric and blatant ignorance put me off from the book. The author includes many comments that are fatphobic; negative towards or ignorant of mental illness, especially self-harm and suicidal ideation; or generalizations about a group of people (in particular, about Africans, not specifying nationality).
Some examples:
- “If we are concerned about our weight, we need to think about more than just the big, fat calories we consume and remember that our bacteria are at the dinner table with us. How Might Bacteria Make Us Fat?”
- “The nutrition we receive from our bacteria is not only important for fighting the flab…”
- “Even though we have not yet identified them all, we know already that we’d rather not have chubby bacteria or microbes that cause diabetes or depression”
- Statistics describing people who “suffer from” a mental illness
- “A thirty-two-year-old woman cuts her wrists with a razor blade from the discount drugstore. It’s the thrill that makes her do it.”
- “But how does our lady with the razor blade fit in to all this? Why is she not horrified by the sight of her own blood? Why is the feeling of slicing through her skin, flesh, and nerves processed not as painful but rather, as thrilling? How can pain have become the hot sauce in the otherwise bland soup of her everyday life?”
- “Would the lethargy triggered by IDO be enough to drive someone to suicide? To put the question another way, what does it take to make people think about killing themselves?”
- “While the African farmer is working in the fields, a tortoise might merrily be doing its business in a sack of grain destined for Germany”
- “Families in industrialized nations often have their own family strain of H. pylori, while people living in societies with more contact between individuals, for example, in parts of Africa, have communal H. pylori strains.”
Some examples:
- “If we are concerned about our weight, we need to think about more than just the big, fat calories we consume and remember that our bacteria are at the dinner table with us. How Might Bacteria Make Us Fat?”
- “The nutrition we receive from our bacteria is not only important for fighting the flab…”
- “Even though we have not yet identified them all, we know already that we’d rather not have chubby bacteria or microbes that cause diabetes or depression”
- Statistics describing people who “suffer from” a mental illness
- “A thirty-two-year-old woman cuts her wrists with a razor blade from the discount drugstore. It’s the thrill that makes her do it.”
- “But how does our lady with the razor blade fit in to all this? Why is she not horrified by the sight of her own blood? Why is the feeling of slicing through her skin, flesh, and nerves processed not as painful but rather, as thrilling? How can pain have become the hot sauce in the otherwise bland soup of her everyday life?”
- “Would the lethargy triggered by IDO be enough to drive someone to suicide? To put the question another way, what does it take to make people think about killing themselves?”
- “While the African farmer is working in the fields, a tortoise might merrily be doing its business in a sack of grain destined for Germany”
- “Families in industrialized nations often have their own family strain of H. pylori, while people living in societies with more contact between individuals, for example, in parts of Africa, have communal H. pylori strains.”