May 9, 2013 • 40 mins
From Nose to Tail: The Colon: Finally, everything comes out in the end - which is to say it comes out of the end. Robert and Julie finish up their digestive journey with discussions of colon science, nutrient enemas, prison wallets and other astounding things.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:03):
Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind from how Stuff
Works dot com. Hey, welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind.
My name is Robert Lamb and I'm Julie Douglas. And
the title of this episode is from Nose to tail
colon the colon because yeah, yeah, because this is the
(00:25):
final episode in our journey. This is the tail portion
that is referenced in the title. Yeah you said you
described earlier, From tongue to taint, this is the bitter end,
my friends, the sphincter. I'm sure there are a lot,
but they're a lot things, but but those are the
ones we're sticking to. So I wanted to start this
one off of just a little bit of a little
(00:45):
anecdote from history that I found particularly interesting and it
and it involves a Scottish surgeon, which is also good
because we've been taking this journey with an imagined haggis,
which is, of course the Scottish delicacy. Would you call
it a delicacy or is it just more of a
Scottish cultural cultural icon of food, Yeah, yeah, which is
(01:07):
a it's a it's a cheep's stomach stuffed with with
meat and barley and organs and other things in various secrets.
But but, but this is a particular page from Scottish
history is a Scottish surgeon, Sir William Arbuth Nutt Lane
from the early twentieth century. And this guy is notable
(01:28):
because he was his big idea that we should treat
constipation uh and auto intoxication, which is the state of
being poisoned by toxic substances produced by the body by
shortening the highway by removing a couple of feet of colon.
And he later moves on to doing full colon and
(01:49):
he later moves on to doing full colon ectomies, stitching
the small intestines directly to the rectum, in other words,
picking up where our last episode left off and just
deleting this episode into highly so deleting the small intestine. Yeah,
because he went on to judge the colon as quote,
a serious defect in our anatomy, and he was all
in favor of just just cutting it out. It's just
(02:10):
let's just cut it out. Let's just connect the small
intestines directly to the end portion and uh. And as
we discussed in previous episodes that the body does have
a remarkable ability to to flow with with some of
these uh UM replumbing surgeries that take place with our
digestive system. But and the thing is, I should note that,
of course of uh colon actonies are occasionally, you know,
(02:32):
very important that they can be it can be a
life saving procedure. But in this case, he was using
it to treat um constipation. Boy was he wrong. He
was wrong. Now. He was apparently influenced by Russian Nobel
Prize bacteriologists um Ellie Mecknkoff, who thought that that humans
were evolving so fast that various parts of our bodies
were going to quickly become obsolete. So he was influenced
(02:55):
by this, and this end up kind of tarnishing his
his views of of human anatomy and human digestion to
the point where he said the colon and he's the
colon screw that cut it out, just took it right up.
And as Mary Roach points out in her book Gulp,
he was kind of saying, let's let's treat constipation with
just diarrhea. Diarrhea, I guess it's more preferable, right. Well,
(03:17):
the thing is here is that the colon is hugely important,
as we are going to discuss it a many different
aspects of it. In fact, Robert Rosenbluth, a physician that
Mary Roach interviewed for GULP, said no engineer could design
something as multifunctional and fine tuned as an anuses to
call someone an hole is really bragging him up. Yes,
(03:41):
and uh and I and I want to add one
more note about sir William here. Later on, after his
reputation took a dive because of this, uh, this this
opinion of his regarding the colon, because he's trying to
remove all his friends Colin's Yeah, and the medical establishment
um pounced on him and said you were nuts and
this is awful and rightfully so. Um. He later abandons
it and does a complete turnaround and starts saying that exercise, fruit, vegetables,
(04:05):
and brand cereal are the keys to fighting constipation. Well,
there you go, you know. So he had a bit
of a revelation there. Yeah, and I think maybe he
realized that, Yes, well, I don't know if he really
came around to thinking the colon was great, but he
definitely came around to saying, well, we don't need to
remove it. There are better ways to deal with colon problems.
So I wanted just to kind of go ahead and
(04:27):
dive into the colon if you can, because we've got
a lot to get to. And I thought that if
we start talking about the physical description of what it
looks like inside, it could serve and start contrast to
the small intestine, which remember, is pretty fancy, right. It's
got all of micro villa in it, and it's where
most of the nutrients are absorbed. This is gonna be
vital with some stuff we're gonna talk about later on.
(04:48):
I use the example in another podcast that the whole
digestion system is like bringing in a stolen Chrysler and
then stripping it down of everything valuable and then spitting
out an empty shell on center blocks um in an
abandoned part of town. So most of the car is
stripped down, all the all the really good stuff, that
really important stuff is stripped away in the small intestines,
(05:09):
and it does. It's super fancy in their right. It's
got those mucoastal folds in it. But in stark contrast,
we have the interior walls of the colon, which Mary
Roach says are as smooth and shiny as cling wrap. Okay,
And the reason for this is because of course that
is uh constructed in that way so that the feces
can move through it with ease, yes or its as
(05:32):
it sometimes referred to at this point, or or maybe
a little more towards the very end as the fecal bullus,
in the same way that we were forming this bolus
in our mouth to transport the matter down the throat.
At this point, the bolus is on its way out,
a different bolus entirely, but but still a bolus. Yeah. Now,
the path of the colon is pretty circuitous. It's kind
(05:54):
of like an upside down you that surrounds the small
intestines and as if it's were sort of like a
frame for for your digestive system, or at least the
lower part of your digestive system. So the hagus on
its journey through the colon, this former hag us, right,
this now bullus that is forming, would have water and
(06:15):
salt extracted, which would leave more of a solid waste
product for us. And you begin to see that mucus
is produced throughout the colon, and that helps again the
now mostly solid feces to move through the lower portion
of the colon to the anus. I wanted to point
(06:36):
this out. This is going to seem pretty obvious, but
you might as well know what the mechanism and play here.
When the feces is big enough and it pushes against
the rectum walls with enough pressure, this pressure is measured
by stretch receptors and the defecation reflects is triggered. Yes,
And as Mary Roach points out in her book, she
has a whole chapter, well really, I think a couple
(06:57):
of chapters, the one really powerhouse chapter dealing with the
rectum and the anus and everything going on here. It
is a very sensitive part of the human anatomy because
it has to it has to be able to make
judgment calls, essentially on exactly what's what's knocking at the door.
Is it liquid? Is it solid? Is it gas? Is
is it something that is it something that needs to
(07:17):
come out now or is it something that can maybe
late wait until the end of the movie that you're watching.
A note on diarrhea, by the way, the more water
in the feces, the more pressure in the colon, and
the more urgent the call of nature. So that's one
of the reasons why there's a certain sort of diarrhea
look that passes of our eyes, and it's why we
need to do that. Yeah, it's it's why when when
(07:39):
diarrhea is coming. Uh, there's there's no waiting until the
end of the movie. It's it's getting up and running
to the to the Yeah. Yeah, it's a direct path
to the bathroom. And the reason for this is because
the small intestine is actually moving the food through m
or the time through so quickly that the nutrients are
an absorbed the food molekills aren't completely absorbed in. This
(08:00):
again creates a a load, if you will, in the colon.
The colon, sorry, colon's out there, um that is watery
and larger and is putting more of that pressure on. Yeah. Now,
as we can all attest to you, when there is
pressure there, generally you can you can hunker down and
say not now, not now, and the body will back
(08:21):
off a little bit. You can suppress it. You can
suppress it. And if you suppress it too much, though,
you can get into this situation where it's actually a
little difficult to convince your body. No, seriously, now is
a great time to poop. We should do this now.
There may not be a time later. This is the
designated pooping time. And the bodies like, I don't know,
I'm really into holding it back these days. I learned
that from you. Okay, But here's the problem. When you
(08:43):
hold it back, when you suppress, that reflects that defication
reflects what happens. Well, the stool hangs out and your
colon longer and longer, and the longer it hangs out there,
the more water is absorbed from it, and the harder
it gets. It basically kind of ears to concrete really
more like hardened clay, is the description that we kept
(09:03):
coming across, though there was one mention of actual concrete.
But that's that's that's a whole other that's a whole
different So it's sort of more of a vicious cycle
going on here. The longer you suppress it, the longer
it sits up there, and the harder is to get
it out. Yes, and then this can lead to some
rather serious conditions as well, and and even in some cases,
I mean, this can be lethal over time. With the
(09:25):
more with the more ponderous examples of compacted to colon's. Yeah,
we'll talk a little bit more about the role of
constipation um and another aspect of the colon in a bit,
but I wanted to talk about another very infamous byproduct,
which is gas. Yes, gas, you knew we were going
to talk about it. We may even dedicate an entire
(09:47):
episode two flatulence in the most elegant way possible that
we can. But for now, um, we should probably talk
about the role of beans. Yes, because really that they're
a huge culprit. They contain complex carbohydrates called all the
Ego Saccard's and the small intestine is unable to absorb
these complex carbohydrates, so they make their way to the
(10:10):
colon where bacteria and enzymes get to work on them,
breaking them down, and in the process a lot of
hydrogen is created. Now in a third of us, only
a third of us, there's also methane yes, which, as
as as Mary Roach pointed out and her previous book
Packing from Mars, this is one of the things that
that the screening process for astronauts has has sometimes looked
(10:33):
for which individuals that past gas are going to create
flammable methane as well. Those individuals arguably should maybe stay
on Earth and not go into a compact environment where
there's going to be uh potential risk for explosion. And
there's a way to actually test this is through your
breath because methane is absorbed through your bloodstream, so actually
(10:54):
is not the thing that's causing any smells. By the way, Princess,
there are planets um out there that are largely methane
in composition, and you might think, oh, I get there,
it's just gonna smell like fart world. But it's not
gonna smell like fire world. It's just it's not anything.
If they were filled with soulfur, though, it would be
fart world. Right, Like Mars apparently smells like rotten eggs
(11:14):
because of the because because of the chemical components there,
but it's not because of methane. So okay, what's the
what's the big deal with hydrogen being created in your colon? Well,
it builds up your colon begins to balloon with it, right,
and if you have too much gas, then those stretch
receptors let the brain now, and the brain then interprets
the stretching as threat in the form of a pain.
(11:38):
Okay um. And this is when the body then says, hey,
let's just go ahead and release the hounds. And then nobody,
I'm in yoga class and no, right, you're like I'm
in I'm in yoga class, or I'm not in yoga class,
I'm maybe in my car alone, hopefully, and the sphincter
loosens and a fart is born. It's particularly difficult in
(12:00):
in yoga classes because you're going through a you're going
through so many poses, and then so many times you're
doing the left side and the right side, so you're
doing the post twice, and so I find myself in
those situations. I'm first of all, I'm I'm mortified by
the possibility of being the person who farts in yoga class,
even though it's perfectly natural, and I don't judge people
who do it. You know, the yoga teacher is going
to kind of be like a little bit proud of you. Yes,
(12:21):
I sometimes they are. Sometimes they're very goung ho like
they basically like standing, Oh you are in touch with
your doing it right, and in a sense we should
feel that way. I mean, it's we'll talk more about
this later, but I mean, it's the human body. It's
gonna do what it's gonna do, and yoga is about
putting your body through the ring or do a certain extent.
So that kind of thing is gonna happen. But I
find myself in the in the habit of thinking about
(12:44):
the body from uh as this dichotomy of left and right.
We're doing left side and the right side. So I
find myself fearful. I'm like, oh, well, I suppressed uh
flash once on my right side, but now I have
to worry about on my left side, as if there
are two different valves there, as if you have two
different in exactly. And then I have to remind myself
in the midst of the post, Robert, you only have
(13:04):
one anus. It's fine. These are the thoughts that are
going through your mind while you practice yuga. Alright, a
little insight. I like that. All Right, we're gonna take
a quick break, and when we come back, we will
get even more into the colon. We will discuss oddities
of the colon, things the colon can do that you
might not think about on a normal basis. Um so
this podcast is going to become even more amazing in
(13:25):
just a few moments. All Right, we're back and we
are going to start talking about some of the oddities
of the colon. And uh, I will tell you you all,
and you probably already know this, that I have a
strong stomach for the world of schatology. But brace yourselves,
(13:49):
because we're going to talk about reverse food consumption. Now.
Probably the the entry point for for discussing reverse of
food consumption is to talk about things that when we're
a little more familiar with. Of course, UH, suppositories comes
to mind. Uh, taking drugs in the rectum and then
experiencing the effects of said drugs again in the rectum. Uh,
(14:13):
drugs take up. Drugs take effect faster in the rectum
because you put them there. You're bypassing the stomach, the liver,
the body's vomit up, the poison defense mechanism. Uh, You're
you're getting it in through the back door literally. Uh.
And and there's this is where it can be a
little dangerous too, because there's the defense systems are not there.
It's just absorbing the the narcotic, the medication, what have you.
(14:37):
And so for for a long time, people have known
about this. Back in the third century a d. The
Mayans use suppositories or perhaps quote unquote intoxicating enemas to
receive various narcotics, and then over years people have used
everything from opium to alcohol to tobacco, peyote, uh fermented
agave a sap Um software pioneer and expatriate murder suspect
(15:01):
John mccafee is a big fan of bass salts in
the anus so um. He has a whole message board
where he was apparently saying that this was the correct
way to do it. So what I'm saying is that
it's it's not a new idea. There is some there
is some absorption going on there. It's not the it's
not the the upper intestines, it's not the small intestines
(15:21):
where most of the nutrients are absorbs. So it's not
the real money area of the digestion track. But there
is some absorption going on there. And yes, you can
take medicine this way. In fact, you can potentially poison
somebody this way. Some historians think that Emperor Claudius was
poisoned vias depository at the behest of his wife Agrippa.
(15:41):
So what I'm hearing here is that people have been
have been sticking things up their pituites since time immemorial. Yes,
in some cases it's for medical purposes. Uh, sometimes it
is just for recreational purposes, as any your staff member
can tell you. And we have a humdinger of an
example of it as an attempt to, as you say,
(16:03):
absorb nutrients. The example comes by way of gulp Mary
Rich's book and she details President James gar Fields for
a into this. We're talking one. We're talking about him
taking a bullet to the liver. Yeah, we're talking about
a nutrient enema which has thankfully fallen largely out of
(16:25):
a favor, especially the type that you're about to discuss. Yeah. Well, unfortunately,
when he was his liver was grazed by that bullet.
His doctor tried to perform surgery on him and actually
did not wash his hands and infected him. And he
had a bacterial infection, and so presumably he could not
eat in the traditional way that we eat. So that
same doctor then prescribed the nutrient enema to him. And
(16:49):
I would like to read out the contents of this enema.
And this is a recipe from Assistant U. S. Surgeon
General C. H. Crane for rectal beef extract. Infuse a
third of a pound of fresh beef, finally minced in
fourteen ounces of cold soft water, to which a few
drops of muriatic acid and a little salt have been added.
(17:11):
After digesting for an hour to an hour and a
quarter strain it through a sieve. The yolk of an
egg is then added, along with two DRAMs of beef
peptonoids and five DRAMs of whiskey. Do you know where
we're going with this, guys? Well, I know exactly where
it's going up the bump because it actually it sounds
it's a recipe goes. It doesn't sound bad until you
(17:33):
realize that where it is going, that it stopped. That
we're talking about firing this up the anus in an
attempt to get the nutrients in that food absorbed by
the body. I mean, it's it's ultimately really it's kind
of sad and disturbing to think about it because here's
a man that's dying. His the assassination attempt took place
in eight one. He died the same year, So this
(17:53):
is the man who was who was dying, and they're
trying this thing that doesn't really work because it doesn't
matter how nutrition solve this stuff is you're not going
to be able to shoot it all the way up
to the small intestines, to the area where where again
most of the energy, most of the nutrients were absorbed
by the human body. Yeah, and if you had noted
the salt in the muriatic acid was not added as
(18:16):
as some sort of flavoring obviously, but to break it
down to try to uh, sort of simulate those sort
of sort of same things that we're having in the
stomach and the small intestine. The problem here again is
is that the small intestine is the part of your
digestive system that takes those nutrients away. The colon is
(18:37):
not a good place for this, right. You can you
can put it up there, you can put it in
the rectum, but there's not much that's going to be absorbed.
It is actually incapable of absorbing large molecules fats um,
albumans and according to Mary Roach, salt and glucose, some
short chain fatty acids, a few vitamins and minerals are
(18:58):
about it. It's not much ssorption going on. Yeah, and
it just created I mean, she has descriptions in there
talking about what this was like and how they abandoned
put using raw eggs in it after a while. It
was a stink. It was just horrible. So, I mean,
I just really I really felt for Garfield the whole
time I was reading this because I'm like, oh my,
this is just not a dignified way for a man
(19:18):
to have to spend his um, you know, his final months.
But then again, i mean there are a lot of
undignified ways to spend your your final period unearthed. So yes,
and it may have prolonged his life a bit, it
would not you obviously could not be kept alive from
this method of eating or digesting whatever, reverse digesting or
but it wasn't a time. I mean, you're you're you're
(19:40):
in a desperate moment, so you're going to try anything.
And certainly his his physician was doing something that probably
at the time was the most cutting edge thing that
you could do in this situation. Yeah, and there was
a fair amount of rectal enthusiasm of the time anyway,
I mean, people were this was you know, age when
people were a little more interested in and what's going
on in digestion. And we've we've talked about this before
(20:02):
and and I keep coming back to memories of the
movie The Road to Wellville, which featured Anthony hop Gunn,
says Kellogg. In fact, there's a great scene in that
where he's prescribing um yogurt to Matthew Broderick's character and
he says something to the fact of oh, I like yogurt,
and he tells him, Oh, it's not going in that end,
so right, Yeah, and he was Kellog was absolutely obsessed
(20:24):
with feces output, yes, because he felt like this was
pointing to the healthiest status of a body, that it
could produce as many feces as possible. Yeah, and it
you know, it's one of the things that really comes
out in our study of this. And and Mary Roach
really touches on a lot too, is that Okay? To
one extent, was you know, we look at people like Kellogg,
(20:45):
We we look at some of these scientists who study
the lower end of digestion and or in proctology and
in all of these areas, and there's a tendency to
say all these people are way too into this topic.
But it's it's really more so many of us are
not into it at all, Like we don't want to
think about it. And to to to a large extent,
(21:05):
it's it's often an under underappreciated area of study and
and even an understudied area of the human body. Um Mary,
which points out that like when it comes to various
like rectal cancers and cancers of the bows like they
they've they've largely not received as much attention and his
and that there's it's it's harder to to get across
(21:26):
the importance of these things to two people. And and
so it's it's it seems like it's an area that
we still need to to work on. So many obviously
just culturally have an aversion to even thinking about what's
going on down there. Well, it's taboo right to a sense,
because anytime that you start talking about your digestive system
and what it produces, there's this idea that we feel
(21:48):
shameful about what our body produces. It becomes this taboo subject.
But it is us like that stuff down there is
not It's like the whole idea of the mind body
connection that we're not a rider on a horse, we
are a sent are. We are one creature that is
mind and body. And you are your your rectum, you
are your your anus, you are your small and large intestines.
(22:09):
So that's going to replace you are what you eat. Yeah,
I mean you are the you're the whole shebang. And
uh like, For instance, not that long ago, I was
in the yoga class and the teacher made reference of
the anus and and referred to like, you know how
they're always saying like, oh said in your set bones,
you know our tra back and referring to various parts
of the anatomy, and you're just you referred to the anus.
And it was actually really refreshing because I'm like this,
(22:31):
this is good that we're in a space where we're
talking about our bodies. We're trying to improve our bodies.
Let's treat our bodies with some monichum of respect and
and and and and don't fall into this trap of
thinking that that there are parts of us that are
gross and parts of us that that aren't worthy of
studying attention. Well, Mary Richard kind of alluded to the
fact that she thought that there was a sea change
(22:52):
happening in terms of medicine and um in the digestive system,
and she was talking about fecal transplants being so completely
off the wall four years ago but now starting to
enter a mainstream and the I think some of the
reason why we're looking at things differently as we're beginning
to understand bacteria's role in the digestive system. And I
(23:16):
think that is sort of an opening for people to say, oh,
what is actually going on here? And wow, did you
know that small intestine does the following things with the
stomach is ferreting out good bacteria bad bacteria. So I
think that helps the interest level to know that it's
not just our waste um that sort of sins of
a bad diet moving through us. Yeah, digestion doesn't stop
(23:38):
at the stomach. It as I mentioned the last episode,
it in a sense, it really doesn't get started until
after we're done with the stomach because again, all that
nutrient absorption that's taken place in the small intestines. Well,
here's something I want to ask, and this is this
is a question we can't really answer because we don't
know anything, but it um. The color of our feces
(23:58):
is brown. Right, generally speaking, it depends me write right
sometimes and it just depends on what you eat too, right.
There can be some some odd things that come out
on the other end. Generally it's brown. And this is
because the bile comes from your gall bladder and it
helps your body digest food and then it's metabolized by
the bacteria and your leg in testine, leaving behind a
byproduct called stair colbalin. Uh. And it's that stacobalin that
(24:23):
gives stool the brown pigment. So without it, your poop
would actually be sort of a pale gray color, like
white clay. What if it what if it were just white?
We had? Is this a psychological thing to brown? Why
I suppose brown get the association it did because of poop?
So you know, Uh, it's just one of those little
(24:43):
mind play questions. Yeah, it seems like I have I
have heard reference. There's some somebody had had joked about
having um white poop based on some sort of weird diet,
not to be confused with the episode of thirty Rock
where Jinn of Morowing has ice cold diarrhea drinking too
much John bad juice. But but you know, if it
were rainbow colored, which we then look up in the
(25:05):
sky and look at the rainbow and be like that
disgusting rainbow. Yeah, I mean it does color the way
we think about the world for sure. Yeah. Alright, speaking
about coloring the world, um, we should probably talk about
the colon as not just a storage unit for feces,
but also in some cultural aspects just a storage unit. Yes,
(25:28):
so we've we've all heard account. We've all probably read
or seen some sort of like a prison movie where
there's something smuggled inside somebody's rectum um. You know. So
there's some great films to deal with this. Uh, Like
I instantly think of Papillon with Steve McQueen and Dustin Hoffman.
Dustin Hoffman's character had it was it was of some
(25:49):
wealth before he ended up in the in the penal
colony um and he has I think, like a pair
of spare glasses and some money stowed away up in there.
And as anyway, you can think of a million different stories,
a million different books and shows that feature this plot point,
because ultimately it is a great place to hide something,
and it's ultimately not that far. It's not like a
(26:12):
huge deviation from what the colon is there for. It's
not it's not like you're you know, you know, hacking
a hole inside your head and storing things in there. Ultimately,
your colon is a storage facility. It is, and if
you are in prison then and it's an important way
to conduct commerce. Right. So this is from very Witch's book.
She talks about this. She talks about how the rectum
(26:33):
is actually referred to as a prison wallet cases of
vault if you're particularly limber and spacious. Indeed, and uh,
now keep this in mind that the reason why people
do this uh pound bag of tobacco on the outside
is worth twenty six dollars on the inside in prison,
it's contrabands. So the value of it is, yeah, it's
(26:56):
quite a mark up. You can make quite a pretty
penny or a lot of really good trades with its material. Yeah.
So the question you quickly becomes to what extent are
is one willing to limber up down there and uh
and create a little room and deal with a little
uh in you know, in patience of the bowels to
move this material into the prison. And then the other
(27:18):
thing being too is that for something like tobacco, the
prison guards and prisoners she was talking to an interviewed
in this fabulous chapter and goal. They said that the
consequences are not really that steep. For smuggling and some
tobacco or a cell phone, lots of cell phones coming
into you temporarily lose your visiting privileges. Right, Yeah, so
it's you know, you weigh the risk versus the reward,
(27:40):
and it tends to to work out, okay. At least
with these particular items, but there's a whole list of
contraband items that make their way into prison facilities, uh,
through these rectal wallets. Now, there are physical consequences, and
the physical consequences here are that these stretch receptors in
(28:01):
your rectum, well, they begin to get worn out of it.
It's sort of like the poop that Cried Wolf, right,
because they began to say, hey, there's something in my
rectum which probably empty it. And then you, as the inmates,
say to your body, no, that's just a smartphone. Shut up.
And this goes on and on and on until your
(28:21):
body is able to suppress that stretch receptor. And then
of course the defecation reflects the consequences that later on
you're going to have constipation. Yeah, I mean, it's the
same thing if you get if you're one of these
people that is always finn an excuse not to poop.
If you were like, I don't want to use a
dirty bathroom, I'm getting I don't want to use this
(28:41):
batom mom in the middle of something. Then over a
long period of time, that could have its consequences, right,
because the stretch receptor starts to say, oh, you know what,
you just keep suppressing this never mind, and then of
course if you have pieces up there, then it's just
going to sit there. And again, as we've talked about it,
the water is going to be absorbed more and more
from it. It's going to be more difficult to get
it out. But you see this in the prison population,
(29:03):
is that there's a large complaint of constipation because of
this um prison wallet. Yeah, it's a fascinating chapter. The
individual she talks to, the prisoner is really awesome because
he's just he's very I mean he's a convicted murder,
a caveat to the awesomeness of the individual, but still
he's very open about it all, just very like, yeah,
(29:24):
this is how it works. This is uh like his
account of how the first thing he smuggled in uh
to the facility happened to be some razor blades I believe,
or some blades from a work site. This was also
under pressure, by the way he was thinking, and they
basically said, look, you can either smuggle these blades in
or you can wind up with one of these blades,
(29:44):
you know, stuck in you. So he had to limber
up really quick. It was not a pleasant experience for him,
but he wrapped him up, got him in and sort
of kick started a prison career of of smuggling things in. Anyway,
I could go on and on. It's a great chap.
There's really illuminating, uh in as far as it's what
this kind of culture of smuggling things in consists of.
(30:06):
Because again we've seen it a million times, We've heard
about it a million times in various TV shows and
movies and and whatnot. But Mary Roach doesn't a nice
clinical analysis and cultural analysis of how it works well.
And what I like about it too is that it's
not sensational, is respectful, because she really is interested in
this idea of this body cavity, what what can be done?
What do we know from this from from culturally what
(30:28):
people have been doing? And you know, there's as we say,
a very long history of people using the rectum for
for this purpose. I mean, the fact is is that
as humans, we we kind of, as much as we
sort of try not to think about the digestive system
and the colon the anus, we are a bit obsessed
with it. You can just look at something like colon
irrigation as an example. Yeah, the idea let's flush it out.
(30:50):
Let's flush out the works. Let's get some some liquids
up in there, either just some straight water, some water
with some chemicals, and then let it all come out.
As we mentioned before, if you have solid waste up
in there, then it's a lot easier to control. If
you have water waste up in there, especially with a
certain amount of pressure, it's coming out. Yeah, and um.
Colon cleansing has been around for a long time, also
(31:13):
called colonic hydrotherapy. I always think about it in that
movie l A Story. I don't think if you've seen that,
but it's it's one of the one of the characters
is introduced to this. You're gonna say that the colon
cleansing is a character in the film. It is. It's
got a lot of feelings. Um, it's constantly being purged. Um.
But you know, as you say, some chemicals are sometimes involved.
(31:35):
Sometimes it's just herbs. Um. And what we're talking about
is a tube and sorted into the rectum some water
switch through. It does have ancient roots, but it was
discredited by the American Medical Association in the early nineteen hundreds,
and yet it persists, keeps kind of having its hadi
and coming into vogue. I guess you could say it's
hard to dismiss the first of all, the idea of it,
(31:57):
like the just the basic like moral id of there's
this part of my body and it's loaded with stuff
I don't like to think about. But clean water. Let's
shoot that up in there and just make it sparkly. Well,
you know, you just did a video on cognitive purification
exactly in a way, it's cognitive purification of of our
lower intestines, of our colon, and it doesn't really make
(32:19):
sense when you really get down to the fact that
the colon does what it does. There's no sense in
spot cleaning, you know. Um, nobody's gonna stay for a
week up there. Yeah. And then the other thing too, Um,
the sensation of of of receiving one of these cleansings.
I've seen it described as it can be kind of intensive,
(32:41):
but the line between pleasure and pain is often very
very slim, very ambiguous, and so there's something to be
said just for also the physical experience of this occurring,
where I could see that would be so you're going in,
you're getting cognitively cleaned, and there is a definite physical
component to the experience. Throw in some you know, some
(33:05):
some basic fluff about what's happening to you and why
it's good for you, and I can see why people
would come back again and again. Well. In two thousand eleven,
Georgetown University doctor ran It Shorey and her colleagues examined
twenty studies that were published in medical literature in the
last decade, and she says that while these reports show
very little evidence of any kind of benefit, there is
(33:27):
an abundance of studies that show that the side effects
following the use of a colon irrigation produces cramping, bloating, nausea, vomiting,
electrolyte imbalance, and sometimes renal failure. So this is one
of those things that it's like, oh, well, it seems like,
you know, maybe it does have a benefit, I'll try it.
(33:48):
It actually has some some very serious side effects to it,
um that people should consider. Now, are we saying no,
don't ever put anything up your button. No, we're not
saying that that's your discretion, you're not yours, And we're
just saying, like, if you were going to, if you
have the choice, if you were like I would like
to get ear candling done and have ear wax removed
(34:09):
from my ear canal by burning a flame to suck
it up, right, versus I'm going to have a clonic irrigation,
go for the ear wax removal. Now. Someone was telling
me O the day that doesn't work. Um, I mean
that it's not helpful. I don't know. I think, well,
it's the idea. Is that idea is great? Well that again,
it's cognitive purification, right. I don't want to see this
(34:30):
yuck stuff come out of my body, but yes, you do.
That's the thing we really do. We want to see
young stuff come out of our body. I think that's
the fascination. It's the fascination. We want to be like, oh,
that pus that just came out of my body is discussing,
but it's not inside me anymore. But that that ear
wax is the first line of defense. Okay. So, because
if you've got some sort of bacteria or stuff that's
(34:51):
entering through your ear canal, it's going to get caught
in the ear wax, so you don't want to remove it.
But it's a great bonding experience because you generally have
to trust somebody a lot to for them to hold
that candle in place over your head and almost catch
your head and the sofa on fire. Well, I was
gonna say it is quite I did it, of course
crazy in my twenties. Um no, no, with a friend,
(35:12):
because you've got the paper plate and you've got the
thing that's on fire over as you say, over your ear,
and then you've got the crackling going on that you
can hear from the flame. Um, it's I wouldn't really
recommend it to anyone one thing we can be sure about.
Do not use it rectally. If you're going to do it,
only use it in the ear canal, Like if you
(35:33):
had to choose between the rector irrigation and uh and
using the ear candle erectly, I just go for the area.
Well you know hydrogen, right, hydrogen is up there, it's
in the rectum. You do not want Uh, it's some
sort of source like a flame near that. Yeah. Yeah,
I feel like legally this episode is just no. That's
(35:54):
the thing we need. We keep stressing it's this is
all part of our body and how it works. And
the more we understand how it works, the more the
more free we are with talking about it and hearing
discussions about it. Then the morning tune we are with
the overall mind body connection. All right. So, just for
the lawyers out there, maybe even our lawyers, we are
not at all recommending that you do ear candling or
(36:16):
Anna's candling or colon irrigation at all. Don't do it.
Oh another thing you should never do um rectully by
the way, probably avoid um holy water enemus. Uh, this
actually existed. Mary Roach goes into this as well. In
the six hundreds in France, one exorcist to use this
as a means to get holy water into the possessed,
(36:39):
allegedly possessed person. The idea here being that a lot
of times salt is added to holy water. And there
are a few different reasons that this is done apparently,
but uh, the bottom line is if it's salted holy water,
you cannot drink a bunch of it. So how's a
man to get holy water into someone possessed by Bielzebub?
(36:59):
Well you use an enema apparently. Because so the idea
is that lab is taking refuge in inside the body. Yeah,
perhaps inside the guts where all this uh you know, unholy,
unwholesome stuff is going on. Uh. So let's pump some
water up in and flush them out. It's not not advised.
It's not a part of the like the official exorcism
(37:20):
uh documentations. That's good. That's good, the updated one. Huh.
All right, So that is all. Hopefully that's just a
nice overall about about the colon, about the rectum, a
little bit about how the ainus works, and uh and
again hopefully we can in a way. We've we've had
some fun with it, but we've be mystified it. I
recommend picking up Mary Roach's book reading more about it,
(37:41):
and just in general, I recommend reading more about how
your digestive system works. So we have an article pretty
good overview on the website on how stuff works, how
the digestive system works. It'll take you through everything we've
discussed in very basic details. And so as we uh,
as we take it out here, as we call it
a day in the podcast studio, I'd like to close
with a little music you're all familiar with, screaming Jay Hawkins,
(38:04):
who did the classic song I Put a Spell on You.
He had kind of this voodoo man vibe. Well, he
also did another little number in nineteen nine called Constipation Blues.
Not quite as popular, not quite as popular because this
is sixty nine and uh and especially then, like people
didn't want to think about people straining on the toilet
and about the the agonies of of constipation. But screaming
(38:26):
Jay Hawkins, he's a he's a brutally honest man. So
let's let's hear a little from this fabulous number, Ladies
and gentlemen. Most people record songs about love, heartbreak, loneliness,
being broke. Nobody's actually went out and recorded a song
(38:48):
about real pain. The band and I have just returned
from the general hospital. Where are we called a man
in the right position? We named this song constipation Blues.
M h Yeah. In the meantime, we'd love to hear
(39:31):
from you. You can find us online and step the
law your mind, Tom Mind, and find us on Twitter
where our handles blow the mind, and on YouTube. We
have a video channel Mind Stuff Show, and if you'd
like to drop us a line, please do so at
below the Mind at Discovery dot com. H let go.
(40:02):
For more on this and thousands of other topics, visit
how Stuff works dot com. Don't clean, I can take
much more, lit it go
Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind from how Stuff
Works dot com. Hey, welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind.
My name is Robert Lamb and I'm Julie Douglas. And
the title of this episode is from Nose to tail
colon the colon because yeah, yeah, because this is the
(00:25):
final episode in our journey. This is the tail portion
that is referenced in the title. Yeah you said you
described earlier, From tongue to taint, this is the bitter end,
my friends, the sphincter. I'm sure there are a lot,
but they're a lot things, but but those are the
ones we're sticking to. So I wanted to start this
one off of just a little bit of a little
(00:45):
anecdote from history that I found particularly interesting and it
and it involves a Scottish surgeon, which is also good
because we've been taking this journey with an imagined haggis,
which is, of course the Scottish delicacy. Would you call
it a delicacy or is it just more of a
Scottish cultural cultural icon of food, Yeah, yeah, which is
(01:07):
a it's a it's a cheep's stomach stuffed with with
meat and barley and organs and other things in various secrets.
But but, but this is a particular page from Scottish
history is a Scottish surgeon, Sir William Arbuth Nutt Lane
from the early twentieth century. And this guy is notable
(01:28):
because he was his big idea that we should treat
constipation uh and auto intoxication, which is the state of
being poisoned by toxic substances produced by the body by
shortening the highway by removing a couple of feet of colon.
And he later moves on to doing full colon and
(01:49):
he later moves on to doing full colon ectomies, stitching
the small intestines directly to the rectum, in other words,
picking up where our last episode left off and just
deleting this episode into highly so deleting the small intestine. Yeah,
because he went on to judge the colon as quote,
a serious defect in our anatomy, and he was all
in favor of just just cutting it out. It's just
(02:10):
let's just cut it out. Let's just connect the small
intestines directly to the end portion and uh. And as
we discussed in previous episodes that the body does have
a remarkable ability to to flow with with some of
these uh UM replumbing surgeries that take place with our
digestive system. But and the thing is, I should note that,
of course of uh colon actonies are occasionally, you know,
(02:32):
very important that they can be it can be a
life saving procedure. But in this case, he was using
it to treat um constipation. Boy was he wrong. He
was wrong. Now. He was apparently influenced by Russian Nobel
Prize bacteriologists um Ellie Mecknkoff, who thought that that humans
were evolving so fast that various parts of our bodies
were going to quickly become obsolete. So he was influenced
(02:55):
by this, and this end up kind of tarnishing his
his views of of human anatomy and human digestion to
the point where he said the colon and he's the
colon screw that cut it out, just took it right up.
And as Mary Roach points out in her book Gulp,
he was kind of saying, let's let's treat constipation with
just diarrhea. Diarrhea, I guess it's more preferable, right. Well,
(03:17):
the thing is here is that the colon is hugely important,
as we are going to discuss it a many different
aspects of it. In fact, Robert Rosenbluth, a physician that
Mary Roach interviewed for GULP, said no engineer could design
something as multifunctional and fine tuned as an anuses to
call someone an hole is really bragging him up. Yes,
(03:41):
and uh and I and I want to add one
more note about sir William here. Later on, after his
reputation took a dive because of this, uh, this this
opinion of his regarding the colon, because he's trying to
remove all his friends Colin's Yeah, and the medical establishment
um pounced on him and said you were nuts and
this is awful and rightfully so. Um. He later abandons
it and does a complete turnaround and starts saying that exercise, fruit, vegetables,
(04:05):
and brand cereal are the keys to fighting constipation. Well,
there you go, you know. So he had a bit
of a revelation there. Yeah, and I think maybe he
realized that, Yes, well, I don't know if he really
came around to thinking the colon was great, but he
definitely came around to saying, well, we don't need to
remove it. There are better ways to deal with colon problems.
So I wanted just to kind of go ahead and
(04:27):
dive into the colon if you can, because we've got
a lot to get to. And I thought that if
we start talking about the physical description of what it
looks like inside, it could serve and start contrast to
the small intestine, which remember, is pretty fancy, right. It's
got all of micro villa in it, and it's where
most of the nutrients are absorbed. This is gonna be
vital with some stuff we're gonna talk about later on.
(04:48):
I use the example in another podcast that the whole
digestion system is like bringing in a stolen Chrysler and
then stripping it down of everything valuable and then spitting
out an empty shell on center blocks um in an
abandoned part of town. So most of the car is
stripped down, all the all the really good stuff, that
really important stuff is stripped away in the small intestines,
(05:09):
and it does. It's super fancy in their right. It's
got those mucoastal folds in it. But in stark contrast,
we have the interior walls of the colon, which Mary
Roach says are as smooth and shiny as cling wrap. Okay,
And the reason for this is because of course that
is uh constructed in that way so that the feces
can move through it with ease, yes or its as
(05:32):
it sometimes referred to at this point, or or maybe
a little more towards the very end as the fecal bullus,
in the same way that we were forming this bolus
in our mouth to transport the matter down the throat.
At this point, the bolus is on its way out,
a different bolus entirely, but but still a bolus. Yeah. Now,
the path of the colon is pretty circuitous. It's kind
(05:54):
of like an upside down you that surrounds the small
intestines and as if it's were sort of like a
frame for for your digestive system, or at least the
lower part of your digestive system. So the hagus on
its journey through the colon, this former hag us, right,
this now bullus that is forming, would have water and
(06:15):
salt extracted, which would leave more of a solid waste
product for us. And you begin to see that mucus
is produced throughout the colon, and that helps again the
now mostly solid feces to move through the lower portion
of the colon to the anus. I wanted to point
(06:36):
this out. This is going to seem pretty obvious, but
you might as well know what the mechanism and play here.
When the feces is big enough and it pushes against
the rectum walls with enough pressure, this pressure is measured
by stretch receptors and the defecation reflects is triggered. Yes,
And as Mary Roach points out in her book, she
has a whole chapter, well really, I think a couple
(06:57):
of chapters, the one really powerhouse chapter dealing with the
rectum and the anus and everything going on here. It
is a very sensitive part of the human anatomy because
it has to it has to be able to make
judgment calls, essentially on exactly what's what's knocking at the door.
Is it liquid? Is it solid? Is it gas? Is
is it something that is it something that needs to
(07:17):
come out now or is it something that can maybe
late wait until the end of the movie that you're watching.
A note on diarrhea, by the way, the more water
in the feces, the more pressure in the colon, and
the more urgent the call of nature. So that's one
of the reasons why there's a certain sort of diarrhea
look that passes of our eyes, and it's why we
need to do that. Yeah, it's it's why when when
(07:39):
diarrhea is coming. Uh, there's there's no waiting until the
end of the movie. It's it's getting up and running
to the to the Yeah. Yeah, it's a direct path
to the bathroom. And the reason for this is because
the small intestine is actually moving the food through m
or the time through so quickly that the nutrients are
an absorbed the food molekills aren't completely absorbed in. This
(08:00):
again creates a a load, if you will, in the colon.
The colon, sorry, colon's out there, um that is watery
and larger and is putting more of that pressure on. Yeah. Now,
as we can all attest to you, when there is
pressure there, generally you can you can hunker down and
say not now, not now, and the body will back
(08:21):
off a little bit. You can suppress it. You can
suppress it. And if you suppress it too much, though,
you can get into this situation where it's actually a
little difficult to convince your body. No, seriously, now is
a great time to poop. We should do this now.
There may not be a time later. This is the
designated pooping time. And the bodies like, I don't know,
I'm really into holding it back these days. I learned
that from you. Okay, But here's the problem. When you
(08:43):
hold it back, when you suppress, that reflects that defication
reflects what happens. Well, the stool hangs out and your
colon longer and longer, and the longer it hangs out there,
the more water is absorbed from it, and the harder
it gets. It basically kind of ears to concrete really
more like hardened clay, is the description that we kept
(09:03):
coming across, though there was one mention of actual concrete.
But that's that's that's a whole other that's a whole
different So it's sort of more of a vicious cycle
going on here. The longer you suppress it, the longer
it sits up there, and the harder is to get
it out. Yes, and then this can lead to some
rather serious conditions as well, and and even in some cases,
I mean, this can be lethal over time. With the
(09:25):
more with the more ponderous examples of compacted to colon's. Yeah,
we'll talk a little bit more about the role of
constipation um and another aspect of the colon in a bit,
but I wanted to talk about another very infamous byproduct,
which is gas. Yes, gas, you knew we were going
to talk about it. We may even dedicate an entire
(09:47):
episode two flatulence in the most elegant way possible that
we can. But for now, um, we should probably talk
about the role of beans. Yes, because really that they're
a huge culprit. They contain complex carbohydrates called all the
Ego Saccard's and the small intestine is unable to absorb
these complex carbohydrates, so they make their way to the
(10:10):
colon where bacteria and enzymes get to work on them,
breaking them down, and in the process a lot of
hydrogen is created. Now in a third of us, only
a third of us, there's also methane yes, which, as
as as Mary Roach pointed out and her previous book
Packing from Mars, this is one of the things that
that the screening process for astronauts has has sometimes looked
(10:33):
for which individuals that past gas are going to create
flammable methane as well. Those individuals arguably should maybe stay
on Earth and not go into a compact environment where
there's going to be uh potential risk for explosion. And
there's a way to actually test this is through your
breath because methane is absorbed through your bloodstream, so actually
(10:54):
is not the thing that's causing any smells. By the way, Princess,
there are planets um out there that are largely methane
in composition, and you might think, oh, I get there,
it's just gonna smell like fart world. But it's not
gonna smell like fire world. It's just it's not anything.
If they were filled with soulfur, though, it would be
fart world. Right, Like Mars apparently smells like rotten eggs
(11:14):
because of the because because of the chemical components there,
but it's not because of methane. So okay, what's the
what's the big deal with hydrogen being created in your colon? Well,
it builds up your colon begins to balloon with it, right,
and if you have too much gas, then those stretch
receptors let the brain now, and the brain then interprets
the stretching as threat in the form of a pain.
(11:38):
Okay um. And this is when the body then says, hey,
let's just go ahead and release the hounds. And then nobody,
I'm in yoga class and no, right, you're like I'm
in I'm in yoga class, or I'm not in yoga class,
I'm maybe in my car alone, hopefully, and the sphincter
loosens and a fart is born. It's particularly difficult in
(12:00):
in yoga classes because you're going through a you're going
through so many poses, and then so many times you're
doing the left side and the right side, so you're
doing the post twice, and so I find myself in
those situations. I'm first of all, I'm I'm mortified by
the possibility of being the person who farts in yoga class,
even though it's perfectly natural, and I don't judge people
who do it. You know, the yoga teacher is going
to kind of be like a little bit proud of you. Yes,
(12:21):
I sometimes they are. Sometimes they're very goung ho like
they basically like standing, Oh you are in touch with
your doing it right, and in a sense we should
feel that way. I mean, it's we'll talk more about
this later, but I mean, it's the human body. It's
gonna do what it's gonna do, and yoga is about
putting your body through the ring or do a certain extent.
So that kind of thing is gonna happen. But I
find myself in the in the habit of thinking about
(12:44):
the body from uh as this dichotomy of left and right.
We're doing left side and the right side. So I
find myself fearful. I'm like, oh, well, I suppressed uh
flash once on my right side, but now I have
to worry about on my left side, as if there
are two different valves there, as if you have two
different in exactly. And then I have to remind myself
in the midst of the post, Robert, you only have
(13:04):
one anus. It's fine. These are the thoughts that are
going through your mind while you practice yuga. Alright, a
little insight. I like that. All Right, we're gonna take
a quick break, and when we come back, we will
get even more into the colon. We will discuss oddities
of the colon, things the colon can do that you
might not think about on a normal basis. Um so
this podcast is going to become even more amazing in
(13:25):
just a few moments. All Right, we're back and we
are going to start talking about some of the oddities
of the colon. And uh, I will tell you you all,
and you probably already know this, that I have a
strong stomach for the world of schatology. But brace yourselves,
(13:49):
because we're going to talk about reverse food consumption. Now.
Probably the the entry point for for discussing reverse of
food consumption is to talk about things that when we're
a little more familiar with. Of course, UH, suppositories comes
to mind. Uh, taking drugs in the rectum and then
experiencing the effects of said drugs again in the rectum. Uh,
(14:13):
drugs take up. Drugs take effect faster in the rectum
because you put them there. You're bypassing the stomach, the liver,
the body's vomit up, the poison defense mechanism. Uh, You're
you're getting it in through the back door literally. Uh.
And and there's this is where it can be a
little dangerous too, because there's the defense systems are not there.
It's just absorbing the the narcotic, the medication, what have you.
(14:37):
And so for for a long time, people have known
about this. Back in the third century a d. The
Mayans use suppositories or perhaps quote unquote intoxicating enemas to
receive various narcotics, and then over years people have used
everything from opium to alcohol to tobacco, peyote, uh fermented
agave a sap Um software pioneer and expatriate murder suspect
(15:01):
John mccafee is a big fan of bass salts in
the anus so um. He has a whole message board
where he was apparently saying that this was the correct
way to do it. So what I'm saying is that
it's it's not a new idea. There is some there
is some absorption going on there. It's not the it's
not the the upper intestines, it's not the small intestines
(15:21):
where most of the nutrients are absorbs. So it's not
the real money area of the digestion track. But there
is some absorption going on there. And yes, you can
take medicine this way. In fact, you can potentially poison
somebody this way. Some historians think that Emperor Claudius was
poisoned vias depository at the behest of his wife Agrippa.
(15:41):
So what I'm hearing here is that people have been
have been sticking things up their pituites since time immemorial. Yes,
in some cases it's for medical purposes. Uh, sometimes it
is just for recreational purposes, as any your staff member
can tell you. And we have a humdinger of an
example of it as an attempt to, as you say,
(16:03):
absorb nutrients. The example comes by way of gulp Mary
Rich's book and she details President James gar Fields for
a into this. We're talking one. We're talking about him
taking a bullet to the liver. Yeah, we're talking about
a nutrient enema which has thankfully fallen largely out of
(16:25):
a favor, especially the type that you're about to discuss. Yeah. Well, unfortunately,
when he was his liver was grazed by that bullet.
His doctor tried to perform surgery on him and actually
did not wash his hands and infected him. And he
had a bacterial infection, and so presumably he could not
eat in the traditional way that we eat. So that
same doctor then prescribed the nutrient enema to him. And
(16:49):
I would like to read out the contents of this enema.
And this is a recipe from Assistant U. S. Surgeon
General C. H. Crane for rectal beef extract. Infuse a
third of a pound of fresh beef, finally minced in
fourteen ounces of cold soft water, to which a few
drops of muriatic acid and a little salt have been added.
(17:11):
After digesting for an hour to an hour and a
quarter strain it through a sieve. The yolk of an
egg is then added, along with two DRAMs of beef
peptonoids and five DRAMs of whiskey. Do you know where
we're going with this, guys? Well, I know exactly where
it's going up the bump because it actually it sounds
it's a recipe goes. It doesn't sound bad until you
(17:33):
realize that where it is going, that it stopped. That
we're talking about firing this up the anus in an
attempt to get the nutrients in that food absorbed by
the body. I mean, it's it's ultimately really it's kind
of sad and disturbing to think about it because here's
a man that's dying. His the assassination attempt took place
in eight one. He died the same year, So this
(17:53):
is the man who was who was dying, and they're
trying this thing that doesn't really work because it doesn't
matter how nutrition solve this stuff is you're not going
to be able to shoot it all the way up
to the small intestines, to the area where where again
most of the energy, most of the nutrients were absorbed
by the human body. Yeah, and if you had noted
the salt in the muriatic acid was not added as
(18:16):
as some sort of flavoring obviously, but to break it
down to try to uh, sort of simulate those sort
of sort of same things that we're having in the
stomach and the small intestine. The problem here again is
is that the small intestine is the part of your
digestive system that takes those nutrients away. The colon is
(18:37):
not a good place for this, right. You can you
can put it up there, you can put it in
the rectum, but there's not much that's going to be absorbed.
It is actually incapable of absorbing large molecules fats um,
albumans and according to Mary Roach, salt and glucose, some
short chain fatty acids, a few vitamins and minerals are
(18:58):
about it. It's not much ssorption going on. Yeah, and
it just created I mean, she has descriptions in there
talking about what this was like and how they abandoned
put using raw eggs in it after a while. It
was a stink. It was just horrible. So, I mean,
I just really I really felt for Garfield the whole
time I was reading this because I'm like, oh my,
this is just not a dignified way for a man
(19:18):
to have to spend his um, you know, his final months.
But then again, i mean there are a lot of
undignified ways to spend your your final period unearthed. So yes,
and it may have prolonged his life a bit, it
would not you obviously could not be kept alive from
this method of eating or digesting whatever, reverse digesting or
but it wasn't a time. I mean, you're you're you're
(19:40):
in a desperate moment, so you're going to try anything.
And certainly his his physician was doing something that probably
at the time was the most cutting edge thing that
you could do in this situation. Yeah, and there was
a fair amount of rectal enthusiasm of the time anyway,
I mean, people were this was you know, age when
people were a little more interested in and what's going
on in digestion. And we've we've talked about this before
(20:02):
and and I keep coming back to memories of the
movie The Road to Wellville, which featured Anthony hop Gunn,
says Kellogg. In fact, there's a great scene in that
where he's prescribing um yogurt to Matthew Broderick's character and
he says something to the fact of oh, I like yogurt,
and he tells him, Oh, it's not going in that end,
so right, Yeah, and he was Kellog was absolutely obsessed
(20:24):
with feces output, yes, because he felt like this was
pointing to the healthiest status of a body, that it
could produce as many feces as possible. Yeah, and it
you know, it's one of the things that really comes
out in our study of this. And and Mary Roach
really touches on a lot too, is that Okay? To
one extent, was you know, we look at people like Kellogg,
(20:45):
We we look at some of these scientists who study
the lower end of digestion and or in proctology and
in all of these areas, and there's a tendency to
say all these people are way too into this topic.
But it's it's really more so many of us are
not into it at all, Like we don't want to
think about it. And to to to a large extent,
(21:05):
it's it's often an under underappreciated area of study and
and even an understudied area of the human body. Um Mary,
which points out that like when it comes to various
like rectal cancers and cancers of the bows like they
they've they've largely not received as much attention and his
and that there's it's it's harder to to get across
(21:26):
the importance of these things to two people. And and
so it's it's it seems like it's an area that
we still need to to work on. So many obviously
just culturally have an aversion to even thinking about what's
going on down there. Well, it's taboo right to a sense,
because anytime that you start talking about your digestive system
and what it produces, there's this idea that we feel
(21:48):
shameful about what our body produces. It becomes this taboo subject.
But it is us like that stuff down there is
not It's like the whole idea of the mind body
connection that we're not a rider on a horse, we
are a sent are. We are one creature that is
mind and body. And you are your your rectum, you
are your your anus, you are your small and large intestines.
(22:09):
So that's going to replace you are what you eat. Yeah,
I mean you are the you're the whole shebang. And
uh like, For instance, not that long ago, I was
in the yoga class and the teacher made reference of
the anus and and referred to like, you know how
they're always saying like, oh said in your set bones,
you know our tra back and referring to various parts
of the anatomy, and you're just you referred to the anus.
And it was actually really refreshing because I'm like this,
(22:31):
this is good that we're in a space where we're
talking about our bodies. We're trying to improve our bodies.
Let's treat our bodies with some monichum of respect and
and and and and don't fall into this trap of
thinking that that there are parts of us that are
gross and parts of us that that aren't worthy of
studying attention. Well, Mary Richard kind of alluded to the
fact that she thought that there was a sea change
(22:52):
happening in terms of medicine and um in the digestive system,
and she was talking about fecal transplants being so completely
off the wall four years ago but now starting to
enter a mainstream and the I think some of the
reason why we're looking at things differently as we're beginning
to understand bacteria's role in the digestive system. And I
(23:16):
think that is sort of an opening for people to say, oh,
what is actually going on here? And wow, did you
know that small intestine does the following things with the
stomach is ferreting out good bacteria bad bacteria. So I
think that helps the interest level to know that it's
not just our waste um that sort of sins of
a bad diet moving through us. Yeah, digestion doesn't stop
(23:38):
at the stomach. It as I mentioned the last episode,
it in a sense, it really doesn't get started until
after we're done with the stomach because again, all that
nutrient absorption that's taken place in the small intestines. Well,
here's something I want to ask, and this is this
is a question we can't really answer because we don't
know anything, but it um. The color of our feces
(23:58):
is brown. Right, generally speaking, it depends me write right
sometimes and it just depends on what you eat too, right.
There can be some some odd things that come out
on the other end. Generally it's brown. And this is
because the bile comes from your gall bladder and it
helps your body digest food and then it's metabolized by
the bacteria and your leg in testine, leaving behind a
byproduct called stair colbalin. Uh. And it's that stacobalin that
(24:23):
gives stool the brown pigment. So without it, your poop
would actually be sort of a pale gray color, like
white clay. What if it what if it were just white?
We had? Is this a psychological thing to brown? Why
I suppose brown get the association it did because of poop?
So you know, Uh, it's just one of those little
(24:43):
mind play questions. Yeah, it seems like I have I
have heard reference. There's some somebody had had joked about
having um white poop based on some sort of weird diet,
not to be confused with the episode of thirty Rock
where Jinn of Morowing has ice cold diarrhea drinking too
much John bad juice. But but you know, if it
were rainbow colored, which we then look up in the
(25:05):
sky and look at the rainbow and be like that
disgusting rainbow. Yeah, I mean it does color the way
we think about the world for sure. Yeah. Alright, speaking
about coloring the world, um, we should probably talk about
the colon as not just a storage unit for feces,
but also in some cultural aspects just a storage unit. Yes,
(25:28):
so we've we've all heard account. We've all probably read
or seen some sort of like a prison movie where
there's something smuggled inside somebody's rectum um. You know. So
there's some great films to deal with this. Uh, Like
I instantly think of Papillon with Steve McQueen and Dustin Hoffman.
Dustin Hoffman's character had it was it was of some
(25:49):
wealth before he ended up in the in the penal
colony um and he has I think, like a pair
of spare glasses and some money stowed away up in there.
And as anyway, you can think of a million different stories,
a million different books and shows that feature this plot point,
because ultimately it is a great place to hide something,
and it's ultimately not that far. It's not like a
(26:12):
huge deviation from what the colon is there for. It's
not it's not like you're you know, you know, hacking
a hole inside your head and storing things in there. Ultimately,
your colon is a storage facility. It is, and if
you are in prison then and it's an important way
to conduct commerce. Right. So this is from very Witch's book.
She talks about this. She talks about how the rectum
(26:33):
is actually referred to as a prison wallet cases of
vault if you're particularly limber and spacious. Indeed, and uh,
now keep this in mind that the reason why people
do this uh pound bag of tobacco on the outside
is worth twenty six dollars on the inside in prison,
it's contrabands. So the value of it is, yeah, it's
(26:56):
quite a mark up. You can make quite a pretty
penny or a lot of really good trades with its material. Yeah.
So the question you quickly becomes to what extent are
is one willing to limber up down there and uh
and create a little room and deal with a little
uh in you know, in patience of the bowels to
move this material into the prison. And then the other
(27:18):
thing being too is that for something like tobacco, the
prison guards and prisoners she was talking to an interviewed
in this fabulous chapter and goal. They said that the
consequences are not really that steep. For smuggling and some
tobacco or a cell phone, lots of cell phones coming
into you temporarily lose your visiting privileges. Right, Yeah, so
it's you know, you weigh the risk versus the reward,
(27:40):
and it tends to to work out, okay. At least
with these particular items, but there's a whole list of
contraband items that make their way into prison facilities, uh,
through these rectal wallets. Now, there are physical consequences, and
the physical consequences here are that these stretch receptors in
(28:01):
your rectum, well, they begin to get worn out of it.
It's sort of like the poop that Cried Wolf, right,
because they began to say, hey, there's something in my
rectum which probably empty it. And then you, as the inmates,
say to your body, no, that's just a smartphone. Shut up.
And this goes on and on and on until your
(28:21):
body is able to suppress that stretch receptor. And then
of course the defecation reflects the consequences that later on
you're going to have constipation. Yeah, I mean, it's the
same thing if you get if you're one of these
people that is always finn an excuse not to poop.
If you were like, I don't want to use a
dirty bathroom, I'm getting I don't want to use this
(28:41):
batom mom in the middle of something. Then over a
long period of time, that could have its consequences, right,
because the stretch receptor starts to say, oh, you know what,
you just keep suppressing this never mind, and then of
course if you have pieces up there, then it's just
going to sit there. And again, as we've talked about it,
the water is going to be absorbed more and more
from it. It's going to be more difficult to get
it out. But you see this in the prison population,
(29:03):
is that there's a large complaint of constipation because of
this um prison wallet. Yeah, it's a fascinating chapter. The
individual she talks to, the prisoner is really awesome because
he's just he's very I mean he's a convicted murder,
a caveat to the awesomeness of the individual, but still
he's very open about it all, just very like, yeah,
(29:24):
this is how it works. This is uh like his
account of how the first thing he smuggled in uh
to the facility happened to be some razor blades I believe,
or some blades from a work site. This was also
under pressure, by the way he was thinking, and they
basically said, look, you can either smuggle these blades in
or you can wind up with one of these blades,
(29:44):
you know, stuck in you. So he had to limber
up really quick. It was not a pleasant experience for him,
but he wrapped him up, got him in and sort
of kick started a prison career of of smuggling things in. Anyway,
I could go on and on. It's a great chap.
There's really illuminating, uh in as far as it's what
this kind of culture of smuggling things in consists of.
(30:06):
Because again we've seen it a million times, We've heard
about it a million times in various TV shows and
movies and and whatnot. But Mary Roach doesn't a nice
clinical analysis and cultural analysis of how it works well.
And what I like about it too is that it's
not sensational, is respectful, because she really is interested in
this idea of this body cavity, what what can be done?
What do we know from this from from culturally what
(30:28):
people have been doing? And you know, there's as we say,
a very long history of people using the rectum for
for this purpose. I mean, the fact is is that
as humans, we we kind of, as much as we
sort of try not to think about the digestive system
and the colon the anus, we are a bit obsessed
with it. You can just look at something like colon
irrigation as an example. Yeah, the idea let's flush it out.
(30:50):
Let's flush out the works. Let's get some some liquids
up in there, either just some straight water, some water
with some chemicals, and then let it all come out.
As we mentioned before, if you have solid waste up
in there, then it's a lot easier to control. If
you have water waste up in there, especially with a
certain amount of pressure, it's coming out. Yeah, and um.
Colon cleansing has been around for a long time, also
(31:13):
called colonic hydrotherapy. I always think about it in that
movie l A Story. I don't think if you've seen that,
but it's it's one of the one of the characters
is introduced to this. You're gonna say that the colon
cleansing is a character in the film. It is. It's
got a lot of feelings. Um, it's constantly being purged. Um.
But you know, as you say, some chemicals are sometimes involved.
(31:35):
Sometimes it's just herbs. Um. And what we're talking about
is a tube and sorted into the rectum some water
switch through. It does have ancient roots, but it was
discredited by the American Medical Association in the early nineteen hundreds,
and yet it persists, keeps kind of having its hadi
and coming into vogue. I guess you could say it's
hard to dismiss the first of all, the idea of it,
(31:57):
like the just the basic like moral id of there's
this part of my body and it's loaded with stuff
I don't like to think about. But clean water. Let's
shoot that up in there and just make it sparkly. Well,
you know, you just did a video on cognitive purification
exactly in a way, it's cognitive purification of of our
lower intestines, of our colon, and it doesn't really make
(32:19):
sense when you really get down to the fact that
the colon does what it does. There's no sense in
spot cleaning, you know. Um, nobody's gonna stay for a
week up there. Yeah. And then the other thing too, Um,
the sensation of of of receiving one of these cleansings.
I've seen it described as it can be kind of intensive,
(32:41):
but the line between pleasure and pain is often very
very slim, very ambiguous, and so there's something to be
said just for also the physical experience of this occurring,
where I could see that would be so you're going in,
you're getting cognitively cleaned, and there is a definite physical
component to the experience. Throw in some you know, some
(33:05):
some basic fluff about what's happening to you and why
it's good for you, and I can see why people
would come back again and again. Well. In two thousand eleven,
Georgetown University doctor ran It Shorey and her colleagues examined
twenty studies that were published in medical literature in the
last decade, and she says that while these reports show
very little evidence of any kind of benefit, there is
(33:27):
an abundance of studies that show that the side effects
following the use of a colon irrigation produces cramping, bloating, nausea, vomiting,
electrolyte imbalance, and sometimes renal failure. So this is one
of those things that it's like, oh, well, it seems like,
you know, maybe it does have a benefit, I'll try it.
(33:48):
It actually has some some very serious side effects to it,
um that people should consider. Now, are we saying no,
don't ever put anything up your button. No, we're not
saying that that's your discretion, you're not yours, And we're
just saying, like, if you were going to, if you
have the choice, if you were like I would like
to get ear candling done and have ear wax removed
(34:09):
from my ear canal by burning a flame to suck
it up, right, versus I'm going to have a clonic irrigation,
go for the ear wax removal. Now. Someone was telling
me O the day that doesn't work. Um, I mean
that it's not helpful. I don't know. I think, well,
it's the idea. Is that idea is great? Well that again,
it's cognitive purification, right. I don't want to see this
(34:30):
yuck stuff come out of my body, but yes, you do.
That's the thing we really do. We want to see
young stuff come out of our body. I think that's
the fascination. It's the fascination. We want to be like, oh,
that pus that just came out of my body is discussing,
but it's not inside me anymore. But that that ear
wax is the first line of defense. Okay. So, because
if you've got some sort of bacteria or stuff that's
(34:51):
entering through your ear canal, it's going to get caught
in the ear wax, so you don't want to remove it.
But it's a great bonding experience because you generally have
to trust somebody a lot to for them to hold
that candle in place over your head and almost catch
your head and the sofa on fire. Well, I was
gonna say it is quite I did it, of course
crazy in my twenties. Um no, no, with a friend,
(35:12):
because you've got the paper plate and you've got the
thing that's on fire over as you say, over your ear,
and then you've got the crackling going on that you
can hear from the flame. Um, it's I wouldn't really
recommend it to anyone one thing we can be sure about.
Do not use it rectally. If you're going to do it,
only use it in the ear canal, Like if you
(35:33):
had to choose between the rector irrigation and uh and
using the ear candle erectly, I just go for the area.
Well you know hydrogen, right, hydrogen is up there, it's
in the rectum. You do not want Uh, it's some
sort of source like a flame near that. Yeah. Yeah,
I feel like legally this episode is just no. That's
(35:54):
the thing we need. We keep stressing it's this is
all part of our body and how it works. And
the more we understand how it works, the more the
more free we are with talking about it and hearing
discussions about it. Then the morning tune we are with
the overall mind body connection. All right. So, just for
the lawyers out there, maybe even our lawyers, we are
not at all recommending that you do ear candling or
(36:16):
Anna's candling or colon irrigation at all. Don't do it.
Oh another thing you should never do um rectully by
the way, probably avoid um holy water enemus. Uh, this
actually existed. Mary Roach goes into this as well. In
the six hundreds in France, one exorcist to use this
as a means to get holy water into the possessed,
(36:39):
allegedly possessed person. The idea here being that a lot
of times salt is added to holy water. And there
are a few different reasons that this is done apparently,
but uh, the bottom line is if it's salted holy water,
you cannot drink a bunch of it. So how's a
man to get holy water into someone possessed by Bielzebub?
(36:59):
Well you use an enema apparently. Because so the idea
is that lab is taking refuge in inside the body. Yeah,
perhaps inside the guts where all this uh you know, unholy,
unwholesome stuff is going on. Uh. So let's pump some
water up in and flush them out. It's not not advised.
It's not a part of the like the official exorcism
(37:20):
uh documentations. That's good. That's good, the updated one. Huh.
All right, So that is all. Hopefully that's just a
nice overall about about the colon, about the rectum, a
little bit about how the ainus works, and uh and
again hopefully we can in a way. We've we've had
some fun with it, but we've be mystified it. I
recommend picking up Mary Roach's book reading more about it,
(37:41):
and just in general, I recommend reading more about how
your digestive system works. So we have an article pretty
good overview on the website on how stuff works, how
the digestive system works. It'll take you through everything we've
discussed in very basic details. And so as we uh,
as we take it out here, as we call it
a day in the podcast studio, I'd like to close
with a little music you're all familiar with, screaming Jay Hawkins,
(38:04):
who did the classic song I Put a Spell on You.
He had kind of this voodoo man vibe. Well, he
also did another little number in nineteen nine called Constipation Blues.
Not quite as popular, not quite as popular because this
is sixty nine and uh and especially then, like people
didn't want to think about people straining on the toilet
and about the the agonies of of constipation. But screaming
(38:26):
Jay Hawkins, he's a he's a brutally honest man. So
let's let's hear a little from this fabulous number, Ladies
and gentlemen. Most people record songs about love, heartbreak, loneliness,
being broke. Nobody's actually went out and recorded a song
(38:48):
about real pain. The band and I have just returned
from the general hospital. Where are we called a man
in the right position? We named this song constipation Blues.
M h Yeah. In the meantime, we'd love to hear
(39:31):
from you. You can find us online and step the
law your mind, Tom Mind, and find us on Twitter
where our handles blow the mind, and on YouTube. We
have a video channel Mind Stuff Show, and if you'd
like to drop us a line, please do so at
below the Mind at Discovery dot com. H let go.
(40:02):
For more on this and thousands of other topics, visit
how Stuff works dot com. Don't clean, I can take
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