Guts

Summary

Radiolab – “Guts” (April 2, 2012)
Hosts: Jad Abumrad, Robert Krulwich
Notable Guests: Mary Roach, Fred Kaufman, Arlene Shaner, John Reiner, Professor John Cryan, Carl Zimmer, Joan Oleira

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Episode Overview

In this compelling episode of Radiolab, the team embarks on a deep dive—sometimes literally—into the mysterious world of the human gut. Exploring everything from scientific history and strange medical case studies to the intimate connections between our digestive system, brain, and emotions, “Guts” combines hands-on reporting, quirky humor, and scientific curiosity. The episode weaves together the bizarre tale of fistulated cows, the groundbreaking studies of digestion in the 1800s, the emerging science of microbiota-gut-brain interactions, and a powerful personal story of illness and resilience.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. The “Yuck Factor” & Fistulated Cows

[01:04–03:13]
Guest Mary Roach, author of “Gulp,” shares her up-close encounter with a fistulated cow—an animal with a surgically created “window” into its stomach, used for research.

• Mary Roach’s enthusiasm: “I’m the kind of person where… they’ll be like, 'Ms. Roach, you need to step back. Your head is actually inside the body cavity.'” (01:33, Mary Roach)
• Describes the experience of literally plunging her arm into a live cow’s stomach: “Keep going, keep going, and I’m literally up to my shoulder inside this cow.” (02:48, Mary Roach)
• The sensory experience: it's warm, steamy, and the stomach muscles squeeze back: “It’s groping you back.” (03:55, Mary Roach)

2. Transformation Within: How The Gut Mediates “Outside” and “Inside”

[04:40–05:35]

• Fred Kaufman muses on the gut as a site of “magical transformation:” “You take something outside of your body, you put it in your body, and it turns into you.” (04:48, Fred Kaufman)
• The "donut" analogy: “The human body is a torus. We’ve got a hole going through the middle of us... what seems to be inside our stomach actually is always outside us.” (05:00, Fred Kaufman)
• Jad and Robert set up the episode’s thesis: “We’re going to take this thing that’s deep inside us and turn it inside out.” (05:27, Robert Krulwich)

3. A Window Opens: The Story of Dr. Beaumont and Alexis St. Martin

[06:05–16:04]

• Historical case: In 1822, fur trapper Alexis St. Martin is accidentally shot, leaving a permanent hole (fistula) in his stomach—offering Dr. William Beaumont unprecedented access to a living digestive tract.
• Beaumont’s “stomach fishing” experiments: inserting different foods tied to a string into the stomach, pulling them out to inspect digestion progress.
  • “He attaches them to a silk string and... inserts them through the artificial opening into the stomach.” (11:04, Arlene Shaner)
• Discoveries:
  • Digestion is chemical, not mystical: “Beaumont, one of his big discoveries was…actually, there are no secret forces… it’s a chemical.” (14:25, Fred Kaufman)
  • Identification of gastric juice (enzymes) and its digesting power, both inside and outside the body.
• The ethical ambiguities: The personal dynamics between Beaumont and St. Martin—“Maybe he even thinks, this man could be my ticket out…” (09:47, Fred Kaufman)
• St. Martin’s status as a medical subject, his struggles, and post-mortem legacy: “His family let his body rot in the sun for three days, then buried him… put big rocks over him so he would not be exhumed.” (16:04, Fred Kaufman)
• Memorable quote: “How does food become us?” (08:38, Jad Abumrad)

4. The Gut’s Inner Rainforest: Microbiome & Identity

[17:32–20:54]

• Guided by Carl Zimmer and John Cryan, the team explores the vast microbial ecosystem in our intestines.
  • Robert: “It’s like a rainforest.” (19:34)
  • Tim Howard: “About 100 trillion microorganisms... if you made them into one lump... about 3 pounds—like your brain.” (20:48–21:13)
• Every person acquires their first microbes during birth and then through life’s contact with people, animals, and the environment.
• The gut as a “collective” that’s not just you: “The part of you that turns the world outside into you isn’t just you.” (18:43, Robert Krulwich)

5. Mind–Gut Connection: How Microbes Affect Mood (Mouse Study)

[21:13–29:01]

• Professor John Cryan investigates whether certain bacteria (Lactobacillus rhamnosus) affect the behavior and neurochemistry of mice.
  • Experiment: Mice fed the bacteria displayed less "behavioral despair" in a water test—they didn’t give up as quickly as control mice.
  • “The mice that eat the bacteria, they hit the water, the stress hormones come online. But... in comes GABA.” (27:19, Robert Krulwich)
• Discovery: Those bacteria affected levels of GABA (a calming neurotransmitter) and stress hormones in the brain, via the vagus nerve.
  • “If you cut the nerve, the mice went back to being quitters.” (29:01, Robert Krulwich)
• Memorable quote: “They behave like as if they were on Valium.” (27:29, Professor John Cryan)

6. Human Evidence: Probiotics, Mood & the Source of Happiness

[29:16–32:43]

• Discussion of a French clinical trial where people taking probiotics showed lower anxiety and stress.
  • “People who took those probiotics said they felt less angry, less anxious, and less depressed.” (30:33, Robert Krulwich)
• Surprising stats: “80% of all the serotonin in your body is in your gut.” (31:04, Joan Oleira)
• Implication: Our gut bugs have us on a chain—our moods and psychological well-being may be shaped, in part, by our microbes.
  • “Let’s think about how we can treat people’s psychological disorders with bacteria this way.” (32:01, Tim Howard)
• Poetic reflection: “A lot of our moods come from the same organ that produces… It does make a little bit more sense from the perspective of evolution.” (32:32–33:18, Joan Oleira)

7. The Personal Story: John Reiner and Life Without Eating

[35:11–54:36]

• John Reiner’s experience of Crohn’s disease, emergency surgery, and the subsequent need to live without using his gut (on intravenous feeding for months).

• Emotional and existential hunger:

  • Vivid daydreams/memories of food (40:59)
  • Attempting to relive sensations by touching and smelling food—“I plunge my hands into the chocolate cake… to get some sensation of connection with food.” (44:29, John Reiner)
  • Humiliation and feeling of failure as a parent and provider due to inability to eat (42:46, John Reiner)

• The deep psychological impact:

  • Depression, strains in marriage, escapist behaviors—“It was just very hard to face.” (46:27, Jenny Steiner)
  • Moment of despair: “You’ve reached the end of the line… were you really having suicidal thoughts?” “I don’t know that I would have thrown myself in, but it was the first time I was standing at the edge thinking about it.” (48:54–48:57, Jad Abumrad / John Reiner)
  • Peculiar “turning point”—trying to find hope by visiting a favorite restaurant, Chanterelle, only to discover it closed (48:35)
  • Surreal moment: John helps cook a stranger’s pork chops in their backyard (50:03)

• Culmination:

  • Forced by medical circumstance to try eating regular food again. Taste buds gradually regenerate, culminating in a joyous moment: “I could feel that… fried egg congealing with the crunchy bacon and the crunchy toast… I can see that I’ve got little bristles, I’ve got little bumps on my tongue. And I can taste this fantastic $3 sandwich.” (53:07–54:10, John Reiner)

• Memorable quote: “Everybody eats when they come to my house.” (55:00, Jad Abumrad, referencing food and belonging)

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Memorable Quotes

• “We are these sacks of guts. And we walk in these skeletons... and we never even see them.” — Mary Roach (05:44)
• “How does food become us?” — Jad Abumrad (08:38)
• “Nobody understood it because you can’t see.” — Fred Kaufman (08:48)
• “It’s a whole universe down there.” — Robert Krulwich (19:17)
• “You have an oil well of happiness in your gut, and if you get the right pump, you could feel happy more of the time.” — Robert Krulwich (31:13)
• “It was like, pow… I am Jewish. These are my people.” — John Reiner (40:11)
• “Please give me some time alone with my bundt cake.” — John Reiner (45:16)
• “I have food, if not in me, at least on me.” — John Reiner (44:39)
• “I can taste this fantastic $3 sandwich.” — John Reiner (54:10)
• “Everybody eats when they come to my house.” — Jad Abumrad (55:00, quoting a classic food song)

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Notable Moments & Timestamps

| Time | Moment/Segment | |---------|--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------| | 01:33 | Mary Roach’s “head inside the body cavity” remark—diving deep into reporting | | 02:48 | Up to her shoulder inside a cow’s stomach | | 03:55 | “It’s groping you back”—the stomach is muscular, active | | 09:47 | Ethical ambiguity: St. Martin’s role as research subject and “ticket out” for Beaumont | | 14:04 | Proof that digestion is chemical, not mystical | | 21:13 | The gut as a microbial organ as significant as the brain—you’re home to a “collective” | | 27:29 | “They behave like as if they were on Valium” (chilled out mice, thanks to gut bacteria) | | 31:04 | “80% of all the serotonin in your body is in your gut” | | 44:29 | “I plunge my hands into the chocolate cake…”—powerful visual of food hunger | | 48:35 | “Chanterelle has closed.” John’s search for hope meets disappointment | | 54:10 | Recovery and joy: “I can taste this fantastic $3 sandwich.” | | 55:00 | Musical outro—celebrating food and shared experience |

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Themes & Takeaways

• The gut is not just a digestive organ, but a site of profound scientific, historical, and emotional significance.
• Scientific understanding of digestion evolved from mystical “vital forces” to chemistry, thanks to curious (and sometimes ethically murky) experiments.
• Our mental health and identity may be astonishingly intertwined with our gut’s microbial denizens.
• Personal stories reveal the existential and psychological depths of our relationship with food and the act of eating.
• Sometimes, even a simple meal after adversity becomes a celebration of life and connection.

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For anyone who hasn’t listened, “Guts” is a surprising and moving tour through science, history, and human vulnerability—a testament to the wonder of what lies (literally) within.

Transcript

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[John Reiner]

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[Jad Abumrad]

Learn more at Apanext dot. Oh, wait, you're listening.

[Mary Roach]

Okay.

[Jad Abumrad]

All right. Okay. All right.

[John Reiner]

You're listening to Radiolab Radio from WNY.

[Jenny Steiner]

And npr.

[Mary Roach]

Hello.

[Jad Abumrad]

We're gonna start this show today. Hey, Mary. With Mary Roach. Hey, Tim here.

[Mary Roach]

Hi, Tim.

[Tim Howard]

Hey, let me see if I can.

[Jad Abumrad]

Mary is one of our favorite authors, mostly because she kind of writes about stuff that's yucky. Gross.

[Mary Roach]

I'm the kind of person, if I find myself in an operating room for whatever I'm reporting on, I'm the kind of person where they. They'll be like, Ms. Roach, you need to step back. Your head is actually inside the body cavity.

[Jad Abumrad]

And for her latest book called Gulp, she got really, really into and inside cows.

[Mary Roach]

Yeah, the fistulated cows that the agricultural schools have.

[Jad Abumrad]

And what's a fistulated cow?

[Mary Roach]

A fistula is an irregular anatomical passageway.

[Jad Abumrad]

And a fistulated cow in this case has a hole, an opening right in its side so that you can actually stick your hand into its side and reach all the way down to the stomach.

[Robert Krulwich]

This is a living cow, right? It's a movie, it's a live cow.

[Jad Abumrad]

And you've done this.

[Mary Roach]

Yeah, it was, it was this amazing because really, you know, a cow is.

[Robert Krulwich]

She did it at the University of California, Davis.

[Mary Roach]

You're standing there sort of normally, and for some reason I've worn a skirt and kitten heels and my hosts are wearing manure encrusted muck boots. And this is a source of great entertainment that I'm here and it's packed really tightly. You gotta really work your arm. The guy I was with, Ed depeters, He's like, no, keep going, keep going. I'm like, I don't know, Ed. I'm not sure, really.

[Robert Krulwich]

Go further in or.

[Mary Roach]

Yeah, keep going, keep going. And I'm literally up to my shoulder inside this cow.

[Jad Abumrad]

I so want to do that.

[Mary Roach]

Where are you guys?

[Robert Krulwich]

We're in New York.

[Mary Roach]

Yeah, I know where there's one out there. I can get you a fistulated cow.

[Fred Kaufman]

You want to walk them down towards.

[Professor John Cryan]

The barn, and I'll go get the group.

[Fred Kaufman]

All right.

[Robert Krulwich]

Yeah.

[Jad Abumrad]

I didn't actually get to do it, unfortunately, but we sent our producer, Tim Howard.

[Tim Howard]

Hi, I'm Tim.

[Jad Abumrad]

Out to Rutgers University.

[Tim Howard]

Come on in.

[Jad Abumrad]

Closer. Where a bunch of high schoolers had come to see Lily. Lily. Lily, the fistulated cow.

[John Reiner]

Hey, let's give it a go. I'm gonna pop the cork.

[Robert Krulwich]

All right. Did he say cork?

[Jad Abumrad]

Yeah. You have to uncork the hole in the couch.

[John Reiner]

See all the steam coming out? Ready?

[Jad Abumrad]

All right, this is Tim reaching his hand in.

[John Reiner]

Go straight across the top to the far side.

[Jenny Steiner]

Okay.

[Tim Howard]

Oh, my God.

[Mary Roach]

It's powerful in there.

[John Reiner]

Oh, gosh.

[Mary Roach]

I mean, I was a little worried it was going to break my hand.

[Robert Krulwich]

You mean like pressure?

[Mary Roach]

Yeah, it's a very muscular organ. It's squeezing my arm, mixing.

[John Reiner]

And I can feel the side of.

[Jad Abumrad]

The stomach pushing against me.

[Tim Howard]

Squeezing and contracting and really squeezing.

[Mary Roach]

It's groping you back.

[Arlene Shaner]

I'm stuck.

[Jad Abumrad]

So I'm just gonna try to go a little bit. A little bit deeper.

[Mary Roach]

And it's hot. It's steamy. It's, like, bubbly and physical.

[Jad Abumrad]

It's.

[Mary Roach]

It's very.

[Jad Abumrad]

Yeah. And she is so calm right now. I can't believe it.

[Mary Roach]

The cow's bored. And I've got this look on my face like I've seen God or something. I'm like, whoa.

[Robert Krulwich]

Mary says that for all her times in morgues and in all the places she's been, this one. This one was. This was really different.

[Mary Roach]

The expression I was wearing, I'm sure I've never had cause to use.

[Jad Abumrad]

And here's why.

[Fred Kaufman]

If you think about it, the stomach is a center of magical transformation.

[Jad Abumrad]

That is Fred Kaufman, who wrote a whole book about the stomach.

[Fred Kaufman]

You take something outside of your body, you put it in your body, and it turns into you.

[Jad Abumrad]

So it's like this conduit between what's outside you and what's inside.

[Fred Kaufman]

The other thing that's weird is that the human body is a torus. We're donuts. We've got a hole going through the middle of us. All the way through us. So what seems to be inside us, what seems to be inside our stomach actually is always outside us.

[Robert Krulwich]

Oh, this is getting so deep.

[Jad Abumrad]

You don't like the Doris?

[Robert Krulwich]

No, I think it's great.

[John Reiner]

I think I'll go with it.

[Jad Abumrad]

Cause I was thinking we could start that way because that's what we're kind of doing this hour. We're gonna take this thing that's deep.

[Robert Krulwich]

Inside us and turn it inside out.

[Jad Abumrad]

Yeah. I'm Jan Abumrad.

[Robert Krulwich]

I'm Robert Krulwich.

[Jad Abumrad]

This is Radiolab. And today, guts. That mystery that lies between our mouth and our butts.

[Mary Roach]

We are these sacks of guts. And we walk in these skeletons and we walk around and we never even see them. And for centuries, nobody really knew what's going on in there.

[Jad Abumrad]

But then something happened that opened up a window.

[Mary Roach]

Yeah. Do you want to start?

[Robert Krulwich]

Yeah, let's start at the beginning of it.

[Jad Abumrad]

Yeah, let's. Once upon a time, it.

[Mary Roach]

Okay, so once upon a time, it all begins.

[Jad Abumrad]

And when is this?

[Mary Roach]

They first met in 1822.

[Jad Abumrad]

Once upon a time, in 1822, there was a guy named William Beaumont.

[Fred Kaufman]

William Beaumont is a farm boy from Lebanon, Connecticut. Five brothers and six sisters. And William clearly is the smart one.

[Robert Krulwich]

He was the one with the big dreams.

[Jad Abumrad]

So at an early age, he leaves home and gets himself a job as a doctor, an army doctor up north.

[Mary Roach]

At Fort Mackinac, which is this. It's a trading post, basically.

[Jad Abumrad]

So Beaumont, he has a little doctor's office at the top of this hill.

[Mary Roach]

And at the bottom there's a general.

[Jad Abumrad]

Store for fur traders who would come in from Canada.

[Mary Roach]

Super hardy dudes. Like, it's cold up there and they're going out in canoes and they're running with these huge packages of furs on.

[Jad Abumrad]

Their backs, I imagine. Big beards, sure. Any case, that was all just set up. Here's the actual story.

[Fred Kaufman]

One day, June 6, 1822, normal morning.

[Mary Roach]

All the fur traders come in and.

[Jad Abumrad]

Are unloading and loading, getting their coffee.

[Mary Roach]

Salted meat, supplies to go out, trap.

[Jad Abumrad]

Some fur, when all of a sudden, boom, right outside the shop, somebody's gun went off.

[Mary Roach]

Somebody calls Beaumont.

[Jad Abumrad]

Beaumont dashes out the door, runs down.

[Mary Roach]

The hill, finds this guy, this 18 year old kid, really in bad shape.

[Jad Abumrad]

The kid's lying on the ground. He's a big guy, muscular, but he's covered in blood.

[Fred Kaufman]

And he has a hole right below his ribcage about the size of the palm of a grown man's hand.

[Robert Krulwich]

Nobody was sure what Happened. But someone's gun had gone off by accident and shot this boy point blank.

[Fred Kaufman]

His lungs are dripping out. There's blood.

[Jad Abumrad]

This is what Beaumont sees when he shoots.

[Fred Kaufman]

This is what Beaumont sees. And the other thing Beaumont sees is.

[Mary Roach]

Food.

[Fred Kaufman]

Coming out of his stomach.

[Mary Roach]

Meat and bread and coffee.

[Fred Kaufman]

Yeah.

[Mary Roach]

Basically, the remnants of his breakfast spilled.

[Jad Abumrad]

Out on the ground right in front of him.

[Mary Roach]

Can kind of see the gears turning and Beaumont's head, as if he's thinking.

[Jad Abumrad]

Whoa, there it is.

[Mary Roach]

Digestion in action.

[Robert Krulwich]

Which was kind of disgusting. But it was also something of a revelation, because in 1822, the stomach was.

[Fred Kaufman]

An area of mystery, just like today we're aware the brain is an area of mystery.

[Jad Abumrad]

And for centuries, people believed that the stomach, more broadly, the gut, was, in a very real way, the center of our beings.

[Fred Kaufman]

Yes. In puritan times, the bowels are the seat of human sympathy.

[Jad Abumrad]

You know, like where our deepest feelings come from.

[Fred Kaufman]

If you have bowels for somebody, that means you sympathize with them.

[Jad Abumrad]

Oh, is that something people would say?

[Fred Kaufman]

Absolutely.

[Jad Abumrad]

We should bring that turn back.

[Robert Krulwich]

That's very interesting. I have bowels for you.

[Jad Abumrad]

Point is, medical science was pretty fuzzy in what happens down there. I mean, they knew it was important, but they had no idea how it worked. Like, how does food become us?

[Fred Kaufman]

Nobody understood it because they can't see.

[Mary Roach]

You can't directly observe it without opening the person up.

[Robert Krulwich]

But here was a guy open right up.

[Jad Abumrad]

But of course, Beaumont is a doctor, so he's like, wait, I've got to save this guy. So he starts sewing him up frantically. Pretty sure this fellow's not gonna make it.

[Mary Roach]

And he was surprised that two days later the guy was alive.

[Jad Abumrad]

Really surprised. And as the months passed, this kid, St. Martin. That was his name, Alexis St. Martin. He gets better, but a year later.

[Fred Kaufman]

He still has this hole in his stomach.

[Jad Abumrad]

The hole never closes.

[Mary Roach]

What happened is he grew a fistula.

[Robert Krulwich]

Just like the cow we talked about earlier. Except in this case, he didn't have a cork where he was wounded. He had a flap of skin covering the hole. If you wanted to, you could just pull back the flap and look inside.

[Jad Abumrad]

And we don't know if Beaumont left it that way on purpose. What we do know is that he.

[Mary Roach]

Sees an opportunity to make the body give up its secrets.

[Fred Kaufman]

He sees he's got something that nobody else has.

[Mary Roach]

Maybe he even thinks, this man could be my ticket. And out of being a lowly, fort Mackinac doctor.

[Fred Kaufman]

So Beaumont kind of hires him as a man around his house, as a.

[Mary Roach]

Manservant you know, he said, oh, it was a charitable thing. I wanted to help him, you know.

[Jad Abumrad]

Because it couldn't work.

[Mary Roach]

And I'm thinking, I don't know, maybe, maybe not.

[Fred Kaufman]

And so about a year later, he starts.

[Jad Abumrad]

Wow.

[Fred Kaufman]

He starts his experiments.

[Jad Abumrad]

Oh, my Lord. This is straight out of a movie. While reporting this story, we ended up visiting the rare book room at the New York Academy of Medicine, which is pretty much the coolest room ever. It's all mahogany and they've got ancient skulls sitting on top of bookshelves.

[Arlene Shaner]

And the books are hundreds and hundreds of years old.

[Jad Abumrad]

In any case, the librarian Arlene Shayner showed us around and then put on some white gloves, disappeared between some stacks and came out.

[Arlene Shaner]

Here we have with a little purple book, Beaumont's observations. Experiment one is on August 1, 1825. So at 12 o', clock, I introduced through the perforation into the stomach the following articles of diet.

[Fred Kaufman]

So what he does is he takes different foods.

[Arlene Shaner]

A piece of raw salted fat pork.

[Fred Kaufman]

Some corned beef, you know, like a 1 inch square of corned beef, a.

[Arlene Shaner]

Piece of stale bread, and he attaches.

[Fred Kaufman]

Them to a silk string and he.

[Arlene Shaner]

Inserts them through the artificial opening into the stomach.

[Fred Kaufman]

Into the stomach for an hour. Then he takes it out.

[Robert Krulwich]

Like a fisherman.

[Fred Kaufman]

Yeah, yeah, he's fishing. He's doing stomach fishing. And he takes it out and he records, you know, so it was an hour later how much was digested, withdrew.

[Arlene Shaner]

And examined them, found the cabbage and bread, about half digested the pieces of meat.

[Jad Abumrad]

This went on for hours, returned them.

[Arlene Shaner]

Into the stomach at 2:00pm, withdrew them again, and hours returned them into the stomach again for years.

[Robert Krulwich]

Over the next few years, Beaumont puts anything he can possibly think of into that stomach.

[Arlene Shaner]

Pigs feet, soused, take an hour. Animal brains, boiled, take an hour and 45 minutes. Fresh eggs, hard boiled, take three hours and 30 minutes. Soft boiled, take three hours. Fresh eggs, fried, take three hours and 30 minutes. Fresh eggs, roasted, take two hours and 15 minutes.

[Fred Kaufman]

Look, it's just the totality of food in America at that point.

[Arlene Shaner]

Whipped eggs take an hour and a half.

[Fred Kaufman]

He's trying everything.

[Arlene Shaner]

Baked custard takes 2 hours and 45 minutes.

[Jad Abumrad]

Oh, my God, it goes on for pages.

[Fred Kaufman]

Alexis St. Martin is becoming increasingly irritable about this whole process, I would imagine.

[Jad Abumrad]

Because a lot of the times the things that Beaumont would stick into his stomach would make him sick, give him.

[Arlene Shaner]

A fever, pain in his head, depressed pulse, dry skin, coated tongue.

[Jad Abumrad]

So in 1825, three years after this all started, St. Martin finally bolts, goes back to Canada, gets married, even has a few kids. All the while, Beaumont is writing him letters, trying to lure him back.

[Mary Roach]

And he was offering him, okay, I'll pay for your family. Okay, I'll give you $50 a year. Okay, I'll give you 75. I mean, he kept. And then he was like, I'll throw.

[Jad Abumrad]

In the lamb, because, you know, he still wanted to know. All right, fine.

[Arlene Shaner]

It takes three hours and 15 minutes.

[Jad Abumrad]

To digest a carrot, oyster, soup, three and a half hours or soup, whatever. But how does it work? How does the stomach do it?

[Robert Krulwich]

And eventually, because he needs the money, Alexis St. Martin does come back.

[Arlene Shaner]

Beaumont starts his experiments again.

[Jad Abumrad]

And one night, while Beaumont is peering into the boy's stomach, he gets his answer.

[Arlene Shaner]

He says he applies a few crumbs of bread to the inner surface of the stomach. Immediately afterwards, small, sharp papillae became visible.

[Jad Abumrad]

He saw little pimples form on the wall of the stomach.

[Arlene Shaner]

And out of the pimples exuded a clear, transparent liquor.

[Robert Krulwich]

Out squirt some juice, out squirts some jump.

[Jad Abumrad]

And that was it.

[Fred Kaufman]

That's the magic juice.

[Arlene Shaner]

Clear, almost transparent. Tasted a little saltish. And acid when applied to the tongue.

[Mary Roach]

Yeah, tasting. A lot of tasting went on. And then he would collect the stomach acid and see if you could digest outside the body. There was this theory that the body had this vital force and that that was necessary for the bodily processes, including digestion. So if you took the stomach acid out, what would happen?

[Arlene Shaner]

December 14, 1829, at 1pm I took one and a half ounces of gastric juice fresh from the stomach, put into it 12 drams recently, salted beef, boiled.

[Mary Roach]

The theory at the time was it wouldn't work. You had to have the magical powers of the human body.

[Arlene Shaner]

But digestion commenced.

[Mary Roach]

Beaumont, one of his big discoveries was. No, you don't.

[Fred Kaufman]

That actually there are no secrets. Forces of sympathy and excitement driving things. It's a chemical.

[Jad Abumrad]

That's what it's all about.

[Robert Krulwich]

Now, Beaumont didn't know it, but that juice he was seeing, which he called.

[Arlene Shaner]

Gastric juice, those are enzymes.

[Jad Abumrad]

And what enzymes are like little chemical scissors. They break down food so that you can take something in from the outside, like this carrot and absorb it.

[John Reiner]

But it becomes literally a part of you.

[Fred Kaufman]

The key to the whole thing, the.

[Jad Abumrad]

Key to life, are enzymes, in a way. They are the magical force, just in chemical form.

[Robert Krulwich]

That's it.

[Fred Kaufman]

That's the truth. He was the first to understand it, the first to see it, the first to figure out The Method of How to Prove It. And he proved it.

[Jad Abumrad]

So Beaumont writes a book about this.

[Arlene Shaner]

And this book is published in 1833.

[Fred Kaufman]

And he becomes famous.

[Arlene Shaner]

People were fascinated by Beaumont's experiments.

[Mary Roach]

He would kind of go on these tours.

[Fred Kaufman]

He's called over to Yale University, gets.

[Robert Krulwich]

Invited to speak in Europe with his.

[Fred Kaufman]

You know, wherever he goes, he brings.

[Jad Abumrad]

His gastric juice and he lectures from the dude's stomach.

[Fred Kaufman]

Yeah, yeah. He travels around with it.

[Jad Abumrad]

And whenever he could, he would take St. Martin with him.

[Mary Roach]

St. Martin was his PowerPoint. You know, he's like, I need you, man. I need you on the stage. So everybody else can come up and stick their tongue in your stomach.

[Robert Krulwich]

For William Beaumont, this works out pretty great.

[Mary Roach]

He's thought of as this, you know, tremendous contributor to the understanding of digestion.

[Jad Abumrad]

As for Alexis St. Martin, he was a curiosity.

[Fred Kaufman]

He was a medical curiosity for the.

[Jad Abumrad]

Rest of his life, for the day he dies. Even in death, his body is a.

[Fred Kaufman]

Hot commodity, and his family was very aware of this. They let his body rot in the sun for three days and then buried him very deeply and put big rocks over him so he would not be exhumed.

[Jad Abumrad]

Thanks to Arlene Shaner at the New York Academy of Medicine and Fred Kaufman, who wrote a book called A Short History of the American Stomach.

[Robert Krulwich]

And a special thanks to Mary Roach. Her forthcoming book is called Gulp. A Trip down the Alimentary Canal.

[Fred Kaufman]

Hey, everybody. Fredrick Kaufman here. I'm giving my shot at the credit. So here we go. Radiolab is supported in part by the National Science foundation and the Alfred P. Sloan foundation, enhancing public understanding of science and technology in the modern world. More information about [e-mail]. radiolab is produced by WNYC and distributed by NPR.

[Tim Howard]

NPR.

[John Reiner]

This is Mary Roach.

[Fred Kaufman]

Thanks, bye.

[Jad Abumrad]

Hey, I'm Jad Abumrad.

[Robert Krulwich]

I'm Robert Krulwich.

[Jad Abumrad]

This is Radiolab.

[Robert Krulwich]

And today, well, we're talking about the interior space that runs down from your mutt to your butt, and it is.

[Jad Abumrad]

Called your gut, your mutt. What is that?

[Robert Krulwich]

It's just an old person's word for mouth. Anyhow, as we just heard for a very, very long time, people believe that the stomach was a place of magical transformation.

[Jad Abumrad]

Yeah. But of course, as we know now, it's just a big muscle with acid and enzymes and stuff.

[Robert Krulwich]

But if you travel a little deeper down, down below the stomach.

[Jad Abumrad]

Yeah.

[Robert Krulwich]

Then things get spooky again.

[Tim Howard]

We just, you know, we have these sort of shadowy images of what's going on in there.

[Robert Krulwich]

That's Carl Zimmer, a shadowy figure himself, a science writer and.

[Tim Howard]

Can I, can I get some water?

[Robert Krulwich]

Yeah, yeah. And a frequently thirsty man.

[Tim Howard]

My throat got a little scratchy.

[Robert Krulwich]

Soren and I called him up, you know, while you were gone on paternity leave.

[Jad Abumrad]

Yep.

[Robert Krulwich]

And he told us. You want a mystery?

[Jad Abumrad]

Yeah, I do.

[Robert Krulwich]

Okay, then. The stomach is just a warmup.

[Jad Abumrad]

Oh, yeah.

[Robert Krulwich]

The 25ft of coiled soiled fetid tubing inside you.

[Jad Abumrad]

Give me the intestines.

[Professor John Cryan]

Yeah, yeah.

[Robert Krulwich]

That's where the real mystery lies, you know, because here's the riddle. The part of you that turns the world outside into you isn't just you.

[Tim Howard]

It's more like a collective.

[Jad Abumrad]

What does he mean by that?

[Robert Krulwich]

Well, if you zoom into our intestines, what you'll see is legions of tiny creatures.

[Tim Howard]

Bacteria, viruses, fungi, protozoans.

[John Reiner]

And those are all little single celled kind of guys.

[Tim Howard]

Yeah, we're talking about non human things inside of me.

[Robert Krulwich]

How many have you got? Would you say me? Yeah.

[Tim Howard]

Probably in the order of maybe a couple thousand species. So there's E. Coli, Bacterioides, Fragiles, and then another one, another one, another.

[Robert Krulwich]

It's a whole universe down there.

[Jad Abumrad]

Yeah.

[Robert Krulwich]

Microbacteria, Fravobacteria, Vircinia, the Phallococcus, Chromobacter. Some of them you'll find in all of us.

[Tim Howard]

And then there are just a whole bunch of other species that are rarer, might be in one person and not in the other.

[Robert Krulwich]

It's like a rainforest.

[Tim Howard]

Oh, yeah. There are ecologists now studying your gut, looking at these complicated networks of hundreds, thousands of species that are living inside of you and depending on each other or preying on each other. It's just this incredibly complicated pattern that scientists haven't figured out.

[Robert Krulwich]

When you're in an embryonic, in a.

[Jad Abumrad]

What are they called?

[Robert Krulwich]

The sacs.

[Tim Howard]

Your amniotic sac.

[Robert Krulwich]

Your amniotic sac. How much bacteria do you have in and about you there? You're sterile, you have none?

[Tim Howard]

No at all. You're clean.

[Robert Krulwich]

Huh.

[Tim Howard]

But then as you are coming out, all of a sudden you're into this new environment, the birth canal. You're breathing, your mouth is open. Stuff is coming into your mouth that's coating your skin. There are lots of bacteria there, the vagina, the birth canal. It's a very complicated ecosystem there.

[Robert Krulwich]

And right after you're born, says Carl, you meet a nurse, then some doctors, you'll go home, you'll play in your backyard, you'll suck on a shoe, you might eat some dirt and get licked by a dog, and by the time you're going to school, you've got probably.

[Tim Howard]

About 100 trillion microorganisms.

[John Reiner]

So 100 trillion other kinds of cells in you.

[Tim Howard]

Yeah. So if you were to take, like, all the bacteria in your body and just made them into one lump, it would be about three pounds.

[John Reiner]

Wow.

[Robert Krulwich]

Really?

[Tim Howard]

Think of it as an organ. I mean, your brain's about three pounds, your heart's a pound or two. So this is another organization.

[Robert Krulwich]

In this case, it's an organ that helps you digest food. But here's the thing, this place in you, which is filled with foreign critters, somehow this organ gets into your head.

[Jad Abumrad]

What does that even mean?

[Robert Krulwich]

Wait, just wait a second. Let me introduce you to someone first.

[Professor John Cryan]

Hello? Can you hear me?

[John Reiner]

Yes. Yeah, we can hear you, John.

[Professor John Cryan]

My name is Professor John Kryne. I'm the professor and chair of anatomy and neuroscience here at University College, Cork, in Ireland. And I'm a neuroscientist.

[Jad Abumrad]

A brain guy?

[Robert Krulwich]

Yep.

[Professor John Cryan]

If someone told me six years ago as a neuroscientist, that I'd be here talking about microbes, I would have, you know, laughed it off.

[Robert Krulwich]

But to make a long story short, John found that as he was getting into neuroscience, a lot of the neuroscientists at his university in Cork in Ireland, they were getting into bugs, for reasons that will become apparent in a moment. And eventually, he got the bug for bugs and began to work with this one particular strain of bacteria.

[Professor John Cryan]

This is the Lactobacillus strain.

[John Reiner]

What was it? Lacto something.

[Professor John Cryan]

Lactobacillus, Sorry. Lactobacillus rhamnosus.

[Robert Krulwich]

It looks like a pill.

[Jad Abumrad]

Really.

[Robert Krulwich]

It's kind of an oblong thing, and it's sometimes used to make yogurt.

[Professor John Cryan]

We were interested in whether, if you fed mice with this for a number of weeks, whether it would alter their behavioral state.

[Robert Krulwich]

Meaning, if you fed these mice a bunch of this bacteria, would they become very different mice?

[Jad Abumrad]

Yeah, different mice.

[Robert Krulwich]

You mean, like different mice?

[Jad Abumrad]

Fatter mice?

[Robert Krulwich]

No, no, no, no, no. Would they change their personalities? This is like a profound change.

[Jad Abumrad]

Because of a bacteria in their stomach?

[Robert Krulwich]

Yeah.

[Jad Abumrad]

Not in their brain.

[Robert Krulwich]

No.

[Jad Abumrad]

Just in their tummies.

[Robert Krulwich]

Just in their tummy.

[Jad Abumrad]

That's insane. That's not gonna work.

[Robert Krulwich]

But let me tell you what he did, all right? He had two groups of mice. One of them got Balactobacillus. The others, they got just normal mouse food. Yeah.

[Professor John Cryan]

We fed them a broth, just as a control. So it didn't have any bacteria then we looked at how they responded to a mild water stress, and what we found was that mild was a mild.

[John Reiner]

Yeah.

[Robert Krulwich]

What does that mean?

[Professor John Cryan]

Sorry? Well, it's water. It's water at room temperature.

[Robert Krulwich]

Basically what he did is he took these two groups of mice, the bacteria mice and the no bacteria mice, and then he would drop them into a bowl of water.

[Professor John Cryan]

And all rodents are very good swimmers, but they just don't like water.

[John Reiner]

Oh.

[Robert Krulwich]

Now, what he was looking for was any difference between the two groups in terms of how they dealt with this water situation.

[Jad Abumrad]

Like if one group squeaked more than the other or something, whatever you mean.

[Robert Krulwich]

No, you just keep an open mind and you wait and see what's gonna happen.

[Jad Abumrad]

Fine.

[Robert Krulwich]

So here we go. Starting with the first group, the normal ones. He drops them in, and as you'd.

[Professor John Cryan]

Expect, they try and escape.

[Robert Krulwich]

They try and escape, and he timed them to see how long they keep at it.

[Jad Abumrad]

Okay.

[Robert Krulwich]

And one minute passes, they swim to.

[Professor John Cryan]

The edge and all around looking for an escape.

[Robert Krulwich]

Two minutes pass, Three minutes pass.

[Professor John Cryan]

But about four minutes in, he says.

[Robert Krulwich]

The mice start to get worn down. And then they decide, at this point, there's no point.

[Professor John Cryan]

I'm giving up.

[Robert Krulwich]

Which means what? The ordinary mice just go, do a dead mouse float?

[Professor John Cryan]

Yeah, dead mouse float. You know, they just gave up.

[Robert Krulwich]

They don't drown.

[John Reiner]

No, no, no.

[Robert Krulwich]

They just sit there and think, I will wait this out until it's over.

[Professor John Cryan]

Exactly. It's been coined behavioral despair.

[Jad Abumrad]

I can't do this anymore.

[Robert Krulwich]

That is how a normal mouse reacts to being tossed into water. It struggles for about four minutes, it gives up, and then sinks into despair for the second group. This is the group that ate the bacteria.

[Jad Abumrad]

Yeah.

[Robert Krulwich]

You just also drop them in the water.

[Professor John Cryan]

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

[Robert Krulwich]

Here we go. At first, he says, they were just like the first group. They were swimming around frantically for 1 minute, 2 minutes, 3 minutes. But then at the 4 minute mark, when the first group of mice had given up, these mice, they kept going.

[Professor John Cryan]

They kept looking for an out past.

[Robert Krulwich]

Four minutes to five minutes. Six minutes.

[Jad Abumrad]

So they're not despairing.

[Professor John Cryan]

Exactly.

[Robert Krulwich]

And they might have kept going on and on and on, but he then plucked them out of the water after six minutes.

[John Reiner]

The thing that's kind of strange is.

[Jad Abumrad]

Like, you know, worrying and scurrying about.

[John Reiner]

And panicking like that all seems like what it is to be a mouse.

[Jad Abumrad]

And you're saying that bacteria in the gut can change that?

[Professor John Cryan]

Yeah.

[Jad Abumrad]

Wait a second, Soren. Okay, fine. There seems to be a difference between these two groups. But how do you know, how does John know that the bacteria had anything to do with it?

[Robert Krulwich]

Well, he didn't just stare at the mice. He looked at their, at their mouse.

[Professor John Cryan]

Chemistry by looking at the stress hormones. And we measured.

[Robert Krulwich]

And what he found is that in the first group, the mice that quit.

[Professor John Cryan]

And despaired, we got about a hundredfold increase in corticosterone levels.

[Robert Krulwich]

That's the hormonal version of.

[Professor John Cryan]

Exactly.

[Robert Krulwich]

And in that first group, when he dropped them in the water, their blood flooded with this one, which initially, you know, it's not a bad thing because a mouse has to act. But all out panic isn't great for a little mouse. And after a couple of minutes of hormone coursing through the veins, the mouse just burns out and shuts down. But in the second group of mice, now these are the mice that ate the bacteria.

[Professor John Cryan]

We found that in the mice fed the Lactobacillus, they.

[Robert Krulwich]

Well, first of all, they had half as much of that stress hormone.

[Fred Kaufman]

Half.

[Robert Krulwich]

And they had another chemical suddenly in the mix.

[Professor John Cryan]

We found very, very distinct changes in the receptors for GABA in a variety of brain regions.

[Jad Abumrad]

Gaba?

[Professor John Cryan]

Gaba.

[Jad Abumrad]

What's gaba?

[Robert Krulwich]

Well, he says you can think of it as the opposite of a stress hormone.

[Professor John Cryan]

It basically is there to shut down the brain, stop things, inhibit, make us more relaxed, chilled out.

[Robert Krulwich]

And he thinks what's happening is that in these mice that eat the bacteria, they hit the water, the stress hormones come online. But before things get too intense, in comes Gaba. And GABA just goes. And as a result, these mice, they're.

[Professor John Cryan]

Chilled out, they're relaxed, they're not afraid.

[Robert Krulwich]

They never panic, they never burn out, and they never fall into despair.

[Professor John Cryan]

They behave like as if they were on Valium.

[Jad Abumrad]

So somehow the mice, the gut bacteria of the mice are sending volume to the brain. Is that what he's saying?

[Robert Krulwich]

That's what he's saying, yeah.

[Jad Abumrad]

But you haven't, he hasn't said anything about bacteria yet. I mean, it's a long distance. Well, let me here, brain up here.

[Arlene Shaner]

Look.

[Robert Krulwich]

John told me that if you look inside a mouse's body, you will find a giant nerve, the vagus nerve, that.

[Professor John Cryan]

Runs between the gut and the brain.

[Jad Abumrad]

Oh, you mean like a phone line?

[Professor John Cryan]

Exactly.

[Robert Krulwich]

And he thought, well, maybe they chemically tickle one end of the line, send a sh. Signal up to the brain, which then makes the gaba. Now in order to prove this, he thought, why don't I just cut the.

[Professor John Cryan]

Line, Basically sever the vagus nerve.

[Jad Abumrad]

Oh. Because then if the bacteria are the ones doing it, if he cuts the phone line, they won't be able to do it anymore. And then the mice should go back to normal.

[Professor John Cryan]

Exactly. So in collaboration with my colleagues at McMaster in Ontario, he got some mice. We fed them the bacteria again, but.

[Robert Krulwich]

This time, before throwing them into the pool, he cut the nerve.

[Professor John Cryan]

And we found that all of the changes that we had seen, the swimming.

[Robert Krulwich]

Forever, the not giving up, and the.

[Professor John Cryan]

Neurochemical changes in the brain, the gaba.

[Jad Abumrad]

Shh.

[Professor John Cryan]

Making them so calm, were completely absent.

[Robert Krulwich]

Ah, you cut out the highway, mma. The communication, the brainy changes.

[Professor John Cryan]

Stop.

[Robert Krulwich]

Totally.

[Professor John Cryan]

Totally.

[Robert Krulwich]

Huh.

[Jad Abumrad]

When they cut the nerve, the mice went back to being quitters.

[Robert Krulwich]

Yep. Oh.

[John Reiner]

You have to be convinced that.

[Jad Abumrad]

Okay, I am convinced. So here's my question, though. This is a mouse we're talking about. Just a mouse. Does this have anything to say about us? I mean, is there any connection to make?

[Robert Krulwich]

Well, I asked Carl that question.

[Tim Howard]

There was one study that.

[John Reiner]

Where was it?

[Jad Abumrad]

Oh.

[Tim Howard]

Oh, you know what? Oh.

[Joan Oleira]

So this was a clinical trial actually done in France last year.

[Robert Krulwich]

That's Joan Oleira, who regularly reports about things neurological for us and others. And he knew about the study too.

[Joan Oleira]

Yeah. So they fed people just massive doses of probiotics.

[Jad Abumrad]

Does probiotic mean, like the good ones versus the bad ones?

[Joan Oleira]

Yeah, probiotics are the good gut bacteria.

[Robert Krulwich]

They're in yogurt and things like that. So these guys in France, they gave these people packets, like sugar sized packets of powder. And inside the packets there are two different kinds of bugs.

[Tim Howard]

Lactobacillus helveticus and Bifidobacterium longum.

[Jad Abumrad]

Two of my favorites.

[Tim Howard]

Well, you should like them because they gave them to people and they showed.

[Joan Oleira]

A fairly dramatic reduction in their basal anxiety levels.

[Tim Howard]

They became less stressful and had less.

[Robert Krulwich]

Anxiety because when they took them to high diving boards and threw them off instead of screaming, how did they.

[Jad Abumrad]

What do they.

[Robert Krulwich]

How do you test these things?

[Tim Howard]

I see the Hopkins symptom checklist.

[Robert Krulwich]

Basically, they did a little survey and asked questions.

[Joan Oleira]

How distressed do you feel? You know, they took levels of stress.

[Tim Howard]

Hormone and the 24 hour urinary free cortisol.

[Joan Oleira]

You know, so they had some quantitative measures, and people who took those probiotics.

[Robert Krulwich]

Said they felt less angry, less anxious, and less depressed.

[Jad Abumrad]

Wow. So the gut bugs have us on a chain too.

[Tim Howard]

Yeah, because we, you know, we have, you know, one thing to remember is like, you know, our mood, a lot of the way our mood is set is through.

[Jad Abumrad]

That's like when they do antidepressant Drugs.

[John Reiner]

It's the serotonin reuptake something.

[Robert Krulwich]

Yeah.

[Tim Howard]

So you're controlling the amount of serotonin that's going in and out of your neurons.

[Jad Abumrad]

Right.

[Tim Howard]

You have very little serotonin in your brain, but it makes a huge difference. You have a huge supply of serotonin in your gut.

[Joan Oleira]

80% of all the serotonin in your body is in your gut.

[Jad Abumrad]

Really?

[Tim Howard]

Yeah. And the bacteria can be feeding on that stuff and you know, it could be that, you know, they.

[Robert Krulwich]

You have an oil well of happiness in your gut and if you get the right pump, you could feel happy more of the time.

[Tim Howard]

Just one possibility.

[Robert Krulwich]

So, Jed, when you and I are sitting around feeling all stressed and anxious, or if we're just happy and gay in the old sense of the word.

[Joan Oleira]

Now we know this mood is shadowed, influenced and shaped by the bacteria you have in your intestine.

[Tim Howard]

The kinds of studies that show this effect, they've all happened in the past couple years. And that's it. Period. But there's this review. It was in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. It was just kind of commenting on a couple of these studies and saying, like, let's think about which bacteria we should focus on for psychological treatments. Let's think about how we can treat people's psychological disorders with bacteria this way. Let's just think about it.

[John Reiner]

This is in the Proceedings of the National Academy of the Sciences.

[Jad Abumrad]

They're talking about.

[Tim Howard]

Yeah.

[John Reiner]

Treating psychological disorders with yogurt.

[Tim Howard]

Yeah. Medicinal yogurt in the future.

[John Reiner]

But medicinal as in Prozac?

[Tim Howard]

Sure.

[John Reiner]

Medicinal as in whatever they give to people with schizophrenia.

[Tim Howard]

Well, I don't. I mean, who knows? I mean, who knows what will work and what won't work? It's just. But it's something that people are saying, like, we need to look into this.

[Joan Oleira]

There's something for me a little poetic about the fact that a lot of our moods come from the same organ that produces. I mean, I haven't put my finger on what's poetic about that, but it.

[John Reiner]

Just.

[Joan Oleira]

I mean, it does make a little bit more sense when you step back and think about this from the perspective of evolution. That, you know, our biggest decisions way back when were what to eat. Is this gonna kill me and make me sick? Is this food spoiled? So it makes sense that the part of the body which can detect that is also intimately connected with the decision making systems that have to do with this going to make me happy or this is. I should fear this and not eat this. So as outlandish as it Seems that, you know, the self is connected with the part of the body that produces it also has a little bit of engineering logic to it.

[Robert Krulwich]

Special thanks to Carl Zimmer. His latest book is called Science Inc. It's a description of tattoos that people get on scientific themes and you can see them on their arms, their legs, thighs and embarrassing places.

[Jad Abumrad]

Speaking of embarrassing places, we're going to go to one right now. We'll be right back.

[Fred Kaufman]

Start of message. Hello, Radiolab listeners. If your company is looking for opportunities to reach millions of folks like you, other like minded Radiolab listeners, and you'd like to find out a little bit more about the sponsorship opportunities in the podcast, on the air or at Radiolab live shows, then just email [e-mail] thanks.

[Jenny Steiner]

This is Jenny Steiner calling from Milwaukee, Wisconsin. Radiolab is supported in part by the National Science foundation and by the Alfred P. Sloan foundation, enhancing public understanding of science and technology in the modern world. More information about [e-mail].

[Jad Abumrad]

Okay, everybody. Hey, I'm Jad Abumrad. I'm Robert Kurlwitz. This is Radiolab. And thank you. This whole hour we have been talking about. Go ahead.

[Robert Krulwich]

Guts, Guts. In the last section we talked about bacteria and the armies of them that are in your guts.

[Jad Abumrad]

Yeah. The problem is that they're a little hard to picture, kind of abstract.

[Robert Krulwich]

Why don't we finish with a story that makes the whole issue real and much more concrete? This is the tale of a troubled relationship between a man and his on.

[Jad Abumrad]

Again, off again gut.

[Robert Krulwich]

Yeah.

[Jad Abumrad]

Hello.

[Robert Krulwich]

Hello.

[Jad Abumrad]

Hello. Man's name is John Reiner. He's a writer, lives here in New York.

[Robert Krulwich]

So one day you are eating your way through your life as you usually do, and then things take an odd turn.

[Jad Abumrad]

Yeah. How did it begin?

[John Reiner]

It began with a surprise. I was at home and I was about to go make myself a tuna.

[Jad Abumrad]

Fish sandwich, but John thought, you know what, let me go to the bathroom first, get that out of the way. So he sits down on the pot to do his business, and I felt.

[John Reiner]

A funny twinge in my gut.

[Jad Abumrad]

Now, John has had gut pain before.

[John Reiner]

I suffer from something called Crohn's disease, which is a gastrointestinal condition. But I had gone through a period of about a year's remission. Excellent health.

[Jad Abumrad]

And so when this pain came on, John figured, no big deal.

[John Reiner]

It seemed to come out of nowhere. And I thought, it'll go away out.

[Jad Abumrad]

Of nowhere, like usual.

[John Reiner]

But it didn't. Within about, you know, a minute, what was a small twinge all of a sudden, felt like a knife into my gut. Before long, I'm on my living room floor, flat on my back, and I can't move.

[Jad Abumrad]

John calls an ambulance. They rush him to the hospital, and when they get there, the doctors take one look and tell him your intestines were clogged and now they've burst and.

[John Reiner]

It'S now spreading bacteria throughout your system. Basically, you're on the verge of having sepsis, meaning you could die, so you need emergency surgery. But they also told him that I should recover.

[Jad Abumrad]

And when he came out of the or looked like he would, but the doctor said, let's play it safe. Stay here for a week. We'll feed you through an IV and give your gut a break.

[John Reiner]

So I'm on an IV for a couple of days, and I've been on nothing by mouth in the hospital numerous times before, but always for four to five days.

[Jad Abumrad]

And after four or five days, John says what normally happens is that you'll start to feel hungry again, and that's a great sign.

[John Reiner]

That means that your gut is healing.

[Jad Abumrad]

And it's ready for food. But this time that didn't happen. In fact, he says he got sicker.

[John Reiner]

Nausea, vomiting, chills, fever spike.

[Jad Abumrad]

So the doctors take more pictures of John's insides, and they notice something weird.

[John Reiner]

In the area where I had the tear in my intestine, there's now a fistula, which is a hole.

[Jad Abumrad]

Normally this is something you could sew right back up, but the doctors tell him, in your case, no.

[John Reiner]

The tissue around the area of the tear is so compromised that you can't withstand another surgery right now. Plus, you've got high level of infection. Again, you're no candidate for surgery.

[Jad Abumrad]

Our only solution, they tell him, is to let your gut heal on its own. But in order to do that, we've got to shut it down. Yes, Basically numb it with anesthesia.

[John Reiner]

So my gut was in an induced coma. Nothing would pass through it. There'd be no activity.

[Jad Abumrad]

Which meant the doctors told him, obviously, no eating.

[John Reiner]

Instead, we're gonna put you on a food pump. And the food pump is a mechanical pump, about the size and the weight of two bricks carried in a backpack.

[Jad Abumrad]

And the pump in the backpack is attached to this big bag, big bladder.

[John Reiner]

The big 3,000 milliliter bag of TPN is the medical name for the nutrients.

[Jad Abumrad]

What does that stand for?

[John Reiner]

Total parenteral nutrition. And the stream runs out of the pump, through the tube into my arm.

[Robert Krulwich]

You're going to be given essentially an outdoor stomach that's right.

[Jad Abumrad]

And this is where our story really begins. So John goes home with his new exo stomach. He can't eat. But every day around mealtime, he says he would turn on the food pump. And this is actually what it sounds like.

[John Reiner]

So I'd start my feeding at 4 o'. Clock. Pump would start. I'd sit on the loveseat for a while. My kids would come home from school, my wife would come home from teaching. And then the real food would come into the apartment.

[Jad Abumrad]

Sometimes neighbors brought food over, sometimes John's wife would cook.

[John Reiner]

Regardless, I was always sitting on the loveseat in our living room with the.

[Jad Abumrad]

Food pump whirring like a dishwasher, while just a few feet away, his family.

[John Reiner]

Would sit at the table eating fabulous food.

[Jad Abumrad]

Night after night, this happens, and it's.

[John Reiner]

Making me absolutely crazy.

[Jad Abumrad]

And he says after about a week of this and then two weeks and then three weeks of just sitting there night after night watching his family eat dinner without him, he says he would start to drink, drift off, and get lost in these really vivid daydreams of meals that he'd eaten in the past.

[John Reiner]

One of the first memories I have is going to Katz's for the first time.

[Jad Abumrad]

Katz is a famous Jewish deli in Manhattan.

[John Reiner]

And standing there at the counter, pastrami.

[Robert Krulwich]

I'm right, we must.

[John Reiner]

Where the counterman cuts the pastrami and he puts it on a plate and, you know, he gets it out of the hot cooker and it's on a fork, and he hands it to you and you take a taste.

[Jad Abumrad]

And he says in that particular instance, when he took a bite, that first bite of the pastrami sandwich, it was like, pow. He said it was the first time in his life where he suddenly, he was like, oh, my God, I'm Jewish. I. I am Jewish.

[John Reiner]

These are my people.

[Jad Abumrad]

That was the first time you felt that.

[John Reiner]

It was. It was.

[Jad Abumrad]

And after about a month of no food at all and these vivid daydreams about food, something weird happened. John got hungry, like actually hungry, which really doesn't make much sense because hunger signals normally travel from the gut up to the brain. And his gut was numb, but he says he really started to feel hungry.

[John Reiner]

It was, you know, I think of it, it was an existential hunger, and.

[Jad Abumrad]

It got really bad.

[John Reiner]

For example, my wife's a terrific cook, and one night she made a little treat for the kids. Mini burgers and French fries. And our small apartment smelled like the kitchen of a White Castle. So my wife brought out this big plate of sliders And a pyramid. And the kids were knocking down the pyramid and throwing them back. And I couldn't take it anymore. So I snuck out of the living room while they were preoccupied. I went into our kitchen and there were some fries on the stovetop. And I put my hand on the fries and I brought them up to my mouth. And I was expecting salt and oil, fatty goodness. Fatty goodness. And the texture of crunchiness and all that.

[Jad Abumrad]

I'm tasting it now and I put.

[John Reiner]

It on my tongue and I've got nothing.

[Robert Krulwich]

Nothing really.

[John Reiner]

And I'm rolling it around.

[Robert Krulwich]

You can't even feel it on the.

[John Reiner]

I mean, my tongue feels.

[Jad Abumrad]

Not even the salt.

[John Reiner]

It's like when you go to the dentist and you've got Novocaine, really. And my tongue is numb and I'm.

[Jad Abumrad]

Rolling you're tongue just out of practice.

[John Reiner]

I couldn't figure out what was going on. And then I brought up a knife.

[Jad Abumrad]

And John claims that when he looked at the reflection of his tongue in this metal knife, I see that my.

[John Reiner]

Tongue is as flat and smooth as this Formica tabletop I've got my hand on. And you see.

[Jad Abumrad]

Oh, so you don't have the little bristly furnaces.

[John Reiner]

No bristles, Right. And I realize I haven't used it in so long that my taste buds have evaporated. You know, they're gone. And at the moment that that happens, my oldest son, Teddy, who was 9 at the time, comes in and he says, dad, you're not supposed to eat. I said to him, I wasn't eating. I wasn't eating.

[Jad Abumrad]

That's like you switch places almost.

[John Reiner]

And he looked at me with the most scornful, disgusted, just ashamed expression. And I was completely humiliated. I normally failed as an eater, right? I failed as a father as well.

[Jad Abumrad]

As the weeks dragged on and John didn't get any better, he actually started to take that thought, thought seriously. Like maybe he really was failing at being a dad.

[John Reiner]

I'm a stay at home dad. And as a result, I'm the shopper and the cooker and the food planner and the provider for us. And I was out of commission three years, out of work with no gut. Meanwhile, I can't stop thinking about food. I'm remembering food that I ate 20 years ago, like I had that afternoon. And I'm online looking up menus from restaurants that I've gone to.

[Jad Abumrad]

Really?

[John Reiner]

Yeah. And looking up recipes, you know, for dishes that I've made.

[Jad Abumrad]

And this obsession grew and grew until one night, he says his neighbor Marcia.

[John Reiner]

Decided to cook for Us. One night when I wasn't eating, and she brought down a chocolate bundt cake for my wife and kids to eat.

[Jad Abumrad]

Walks it right past John on the way to the kitchen.

[John Reiner]

And I could smell this thing. I could smell the rumor. I could smell the eggs. I could smell the flour. I could smell everything.

[Jad Abumrad]

So again, he sneaks into the kitchen.

[John Reiner]

And I lower my nose down to this bundt cake. And I'm smelling it, and I'm sniffing it, and I'm inhaling this thing like an anteater. And that's not enough in my state. So I plunge my hands into the chocolate cake.

[Jad Abumrad]

You what?

[John Reiner]

I plunge my hands into the chocolate.

[Robert Krulwich]

Cake in order to get one with the goo or what?

[John Reiner]

Yeah, in order to get some sensation of conn. With food.

[Robert Krulwich]

Did you think, what's happening to me? Or did you think, oh, the church?

[John Reiner]

The moment my fingers were in this cake, I felt I'm in heaven. I've reconnected with the living. I have food, if not in me, at least on me. And at the moment while I'm experiencing most pleasure, my wife comes into the kitchen.

[Jenny Steiner]

When I went in to get the kids some more food, I found him.

[Jad Abumrad]

This, of course, is John's wife, Susan.

[Jenny Steiner]

With his hands in the cake, just trying to touch the crumbs. And he looked so guilty. And I was also like, what are you doing?

[John Reiner]

What are you doing?

[Jenny Steiner]

Like somebody going through an underwear drawer. It was very, you know, wrong.

[John Reiner]

And I have no explanation. I mean, I can say I need to do this. You have no idea how wonderful this is. Please give me some time alone with my bundt cake.

[Jenny Steiner]

You know, it was just. It was this bizarrely funny but deeply sad, perverse moment. Yeah, I suppose it was the first crack in my. In my bubbled attempt to pretend things were normal. You know, I realized how bad things had gotten.

[Jad Abumrad]

And after that, she says things only got worse.

[Jenny Steiner]

It just became. There was never anything to be happy about. He wasn't able to eat. He wasn't sure what the prognosis was. He wasn't sure if he was going to need a second surgery. It was just all bad.

[Jad Abumrad]

She says John became really depressed, and.

[Jenny Steiner]

He became very difficult to even. Not even to cheer up, but just to say, well, let's just not talk about it for now. You know, he was constantly expressing his unhappiness.

[Robert Krulwich]

Was that the thing? It was just the. It was dark all the time.

[Jenny Steiner]

Very dark. It just became very hard to face.

[Jad Abumrad]

So she left.

[Jenny Steiner]

Well, I had spring break and my kids had spring break, so Susan took.

[Jad Abumrad]

The kids to her parents place in Indiana for a week.

[Jenny Steiner]

I needed. I needed to take a break.

[Jad Abumrad]

Not for good. Maybe the kind of break that means I'm not really sure what our future looks like.

[Jenny Steiner]

I don't know how we're going to do this.

[Jad Abumrad]

And I can't really figure that out while I'm with you.

[John Reiner]

So I was alone, not entirely, while I was on the food pump and not doing well.

[Jad Abumrad]

But after a few days of moping around the house, John gets an idea.

[John Reiner]

What I need to get myself out of this is I need to return to a place of sanctuary for me. There was a restaurant not far from your studio here called Chanterelle. It was a French restaurant and it was one of these very expensive capital letter restaurants that my wife and I had always planned to go to if we had a special occasion for years. I walked past this restaurant and I would look in the window before getting onto the subway and I would see the plates of, you know, scallops coming out and the wine steward pouring, you know, red wine and the handwritten menus on the tables and things like that. So I thought if I can get to Chanterelle and if I can look through the window, then I can heal myself. I'll have a reason to hope. So I got on the subway and it was past 4 o' clock and I was supposed to be home starting up the pump and feeding. And I got off the subway and I walked over to Chanterelle and I was kind of a little dizzy and delirious. And I get to the window and the dining room is empty. There's dust on the floor. The wall panels have been stripped, the tables are bare. It's empty. It's a cave. Sometime in the intervening months, or the preceding months rather, Chanterelle has closed. And I didn't know that.

[Jad Abumrad]

You're killing me with this story.

[John Reiner]

And I think to myself, you've reached the end of the line. This is it. There's nowhere else to go. And I walk towards the river and I know that people throw themselves in when. And they do this. And it never made sense to me before, you know, I wasn't ever ready to end things.

[Jad Abumrad]

Were you really? Were you having suicidal thoughts?

[John Reiner]

I was having really depressed thoughts. And I don't know that I would have thrown myself in, but it was the first time I was standing at the edge thinking about it, thinking about this is how these things happen. So I got to the river and I blacked out, collapsed on the sidewalk. And I woke up and it was dark. I'd scraped my chin and my elbows were bruised and I'd taken a hard fall. And I got up and I started to walk around. I was on this buckled old sidewalk, and I looked around and there are these federal era houses, and there was a grill, a gas grill in one of the backyards that was going. Somebody was cooking dinner. And I could smell it. I could smell the smoke coming off the grill. And I could smell it. It was pork chops. And I was so delirious and so happy to be smelling food that I took it upon myself to finish cooking this guy's meal.

[Jad Abumrad]

Wait, what?

[John Reiner]

So I. That's so eerie. I lifted up the lid. I lifted up the lid and it looked like to me, you know, one side of the pork chops were cooked and they were ready to be flipped. So I flipped them. And I was so far gone that I thought, okay, well, four more minutes and these babies are going to be ready to go. And I didn't have a watch, so I started counting off, counting down four minutes in my head because I was going to get this stuff perfect. And all of a sudden, the back door of this townhouse opens up and a guy walks out with an apron on and a cocktail in one hand and a seasoned shaker in the other. And he looks at me and I look very borderline. I mean, I'm rail thin. I've got, you know, I'm cut up from having fallen on the sidewalk. I've, you know, a crazy expression in my eyes. I haven't shaved in, you know, a week. I look really very unsavory. So he sees me and I have no way of explaining myself other than to say, they're just about done. And I hand him the tools and I turn around and I walk away before he has the chance to call the police or anything like that.

[Robert Krulwich]

How many years ago was this?

[John Reiner]

This was now three years ago.

[Jad Abumrad]

And what do you take away from that? Was that some kind of turning point where you walk away from the grill and you're ready to fight the good fight or what?

[John Reiner]

That only happens in the movies and in fairy tales. What actually happened was I got sick again. I had another infection, more bacteria, and I had to go back to the hospital. And when I went back to the hospital this time, they said, okay, we can't even do the food pump anymore because you keep getting these infections, and if the bacteria spreads to your bloodstream through the food pump, then you'll be gone and we can't operate on you because you Won't survive the surgery. So all we have left is to try eating. The only thing that's left is to go back to food because you can't ingest it intravenously. We're afraid of infection, and we can't repair your gut surgically. So the only way you can keep yourself alive is to try to use your gut again. Huh.

[Robert Krulwich]

So they start you on a round of, I don't know, baby food, Gerbers.

[John Reiner]

I did start on the traditional applesauce and Jell O and pudding, soft and easily digested foods.

[Jad Abumrad]

And John says it worked. His body was able to take the.

[John Reiner]

Food, but I couldn't taste anything. And it continued that way for another couple of months.

[Jad Abumrad]

And did the food ever taste like food again?

[John Reiner]

Well, I was at the radiologist.

[Robert Krulwich]

This is not the scene I was expecting.

[John Reiner]

Well, you know, I have a little ritual with this particular radiologist. He's on the east side. And whenever I get tests there, when I'm done with the tests, I'm able to eat again and again. This is when you do test prep. You're going about 24 hours without eating. So, you know, the thought of food becomes a celebration that you're going to have.

[Jad Abumrad]

Right.

[John Reiner]

So there's a diner on Third Avenue in 84th Street, 85th street, that I always go to, and I get the same meal every time. I sit at the counter and I get a fried egg and bacon sandwich on whole wheat toast. So I went there and I got the last seat at the counter and I ordered my usual, and I chew into it, and I realize that I've got sort of embryonic flavors going on. I've got the sort of the start of the sensation of tasting and the start of flavors in my mouth. And I could feel that great combination of the fried egg congealing with the crunchy bacon and the crunchy toast. And I do the same. You know, I've got a knife, a butter knife, and I do the same mirror knife examination at the counter. And I can see that where before it was shiny and smooth as a porpoise. I've got little bristles, I've got little bumps on my tongue. And I can taste this fantastic $3 sandwich.

[Robert Krulwich]

Do you kiss the lady sitting next to you?

[John Reiner]

Well, I turn to the guy sitting next to me and I tell him, this is the best damn thing I've ever eaten. And in classic New York diner fashion, he looks at me. He looks up from his Kindle, he looks at me, and he says, you should try the Meatlo. And I think you know this is it. I'm back, baby. I'm back.

[Jad Abumrad]

Have a banana, Hannah. Try the salami, Tommy. Give it to Gravy Davey.

[John Reiner]

Everybody eats when they come to my house.

[Jad Abumrad]

Try a tomato plate too. Here's Cacciatore Dory.

[John Reiner]

Taste the bologna, Tony. Everybody eats when they come to my house.

[Jad Abumrad]

I fix your favorite. Thanks of course to John Reiner whose book is called the man man who Couldn't Eat. I'm Jad Abumrad.

[Robert Krulwich]

I'm Robert Crow.

[Jad Abumrad]

Thanks for listening. Pass me a pancake, man. Drake having a derby ear looking defender Mendo everybody.

[Fred Kaufman]

Start of message. This is John Reiner. Radiolab is produced by Jad Abumrat.

[John Reiner]

Jad Abumrat.

[Fred Kaufman]

Our staff includes Ellen Horn, Soren Wheeler, Pat Walters, Tim Howard, Brenna Farrell, Dylan Keeves, Lynn Levy and Sean Cole with help from Matt Kielty, Rachel James, Brendan McMullen and Rafaela Benin. Special thanks Special thanks Special thanks to Christian Lutza, Clint Berger, Barry Jesse, Carol Bagnell and the Rutgers University Animal Care program. Thanks guys. Thanks.

[Jad Abumrad]

Everybody eats when they come to my house.

[Arlene Shaner]

End of message.

[Jenny Steiner]

Wix it's where website creation meets AI and where your boldest ideas become real. It just takes one platform to build a site that looks great and does everything you need it to. And it just takes one person you to start taking care of business like a 10 person team with AI tools for creating an entire website from scratch or testing new ways to make money. WIX is there with you from day one. Try it out [e-mail] as the daughter of immigrants, financial struggles were part of my everyday reality. In high school, I became homeless and had to live in a women's shelter. Thankfully, being an Apia McDonald Scholar enabled me to attend college and begin a new chapter in my life. And now my reality is filled with endless possibilities.

[John Reiner]

McDonald's has awarded nearly $4 million through APIA scholars to support students.

[Jad Abumrad]

Learn [e-mail].