Errors in the Book

Page 9 is mostly wrong. This area has progressed incredibly since I wrote the book. We now know that the reason so many different plants taste bitter is because our taste buds have at least two dozen sensors performing biochemical analyses in parallel. All bitter chemicals taste the same because the different sensors feed into the same nerve; it's not important for us to know which particular toxin has triggered our urge to spit the food out. For a lot more detail about our taste mechanisms, click here: Details about taste buds

Page 45, Move sentence “Although we humans ...” back to end of preceding paragraph.

Page 66 The sentence reading “Barely one 1 milligram of TTX” should read “Just one milligram of TTX”.

Page 61 paragraph re Alfred Hitchcock. Change to "puffins and shearwaters". Although “The Birds” was based loosely on a Daphne Du Maurier story, the bizarre actions of Santa Cruz sea-birds occurred a year before film production began, and Hitchcock even telephoned local newspapers for more details. See http://www.geocities.com/laxaria/thebirds.shtml ,

Page 107 top paragraph: remove excess period (dot) from “.In my opinion”.

Page 122, paragraph 4, sentence should read, “When Japanese move to Australia, their risk of stomach cancer gradually diminishes...”

130, bulleted list, item “Rats exposed to radiation”: insert missing hyphen into “medium-tolow”.

Page 135, 2^nd paragraph, last sentence: Remove excess period (dot) after “beats per minute”.

Page 135-136, last paragraph dealing with “age-adjusted death rates”. If term is confusing, replace sentence beginning “For any cause of death...” with “For any cause of death whatsoever, the men who were unfit at both tests had three times higher risk of dying than men who were consistently fit.”