--- "C. ten Broeke" <[log in to unmask]> wrote:

> the slightly smaller intestines of
> the Japanese, it

I'm sort of surprised to see that. Is is such a
well-known statement?

I've actually spent some time trying to track down the
source of that, and haven't come up (yet) with
anything very good. Actually there was a TV show I
happened to watch with dealt with it, where some
professor said that whereas it was true in former
times, the intestine length of young Japanese is
getting longer now, presumably because of an effect of
diet on intestine length. I found an abstract
somewhere of a paper finding that you could change the
gut length of some animal, a bird perhaps, by feeding
it different foods in childhood (chickhood?).

If you do have a good source for the information about
the gut length, though, I'd be very happy to know.

Jens


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