Sunday, April 23, 2006
Warning: Don’t Read if You Have a Weak Stomach
I went to the Body Worlds 2 exhibit in Denver on Friday. Body Worlds is a controversial exhibit of real bodies and body parts that have gone through a process of “plastination”. Plastination is a really complicated process that I will explain by simplifying it into the “shellacking” of corpses. (You can learn what it really is here: http://www.koerperwelten.de/en/pages/plastination.asp.) It allows us to see what bodies would look like “fresh” out of a dissection lab. If you can stomach it, the exhibit is well worth seeing.
For an anatomy lesson, you can’t beat it. For a health lesson, you’ll need to wait for more pieces to come into the exhibits, as they’ve just figured out how to incorporate plastination for adipose tissue. In other words, most of the bodies you’ll see don’t have an ounce of fat on them. The two that they did show in full relief were horrifying to view, as you can see how fat infiltrates every crevice of the obese body. It’s a wonder we make it to age 50 looking like this on the inside.
I don’t talk much about heart disease on this site, but I was most fascinated by the views of arteries. Specifically, they split open arteries and laid them out so you could view the insides. The healthy artery looked, quite literally, like the smooth surface of stretched silly putty. It was rubbery and didn’t have a scratch on it. You could tell that blood would slip through it without any trouble.
The artery that had been hardened by a poor diet, on the other hand, looked more like the edges of a fried egg. It was boiled and bubbled and was thick with the most disgusting of plaques. With arteriosclerosis, these plaques literally cause the soft and supple arteries to turn into the types of pipe you would think for your house’s plumbing. Again, seeing them makes you wonder how anyone could suffer through it for more than a couple of hours, much less a few years. Yes, it’s that bad.
I don’t know what additional lesson I can provide that haven’t been said before. But if you need a visual reminder of how your body will look after putting certain foods inside it, do everything you can to get to one of these exhibits. You can find out where they are and where they’ll be by going to http://www.bodyworlds.com/en/pages/home.asp. Digg This!
For an anatomy lesson, you can’t beat it. For a health lesson, you’ll need to wait for more pieces to come into the exhibits, as they’ve just figured out how to incorporate plastination for adipose tissue. In other words, most of the bodies you’ll see don’t have an ounce of fat on them. The two that they did show in full relief were horrifying to view, as you can see how fat infiltrates every crevice of the obese body. It’s a wonder we make it to age 50 looking like this on the inside.
I don’t talk much about heart disease on this site, but I was most fascinated by the views of arteries. Specifically, they split open arteries and laid them out so you could view the insides. The healthy artery looked, quite literally, like the smooth surface of stretched silly putty. It was rubbery and didn’t have a scratch on it. You could tell that blood would slip through it without any trouble.
The artery that had been hardened by a poor diet, on the other hand, looked more like the edges of a fried egg. It was boiled and bubbled and was thick with the most disgusting of plaques. With arteriosclerosis, these plaques literally cause the soft and supple arteries to turn into the types of pipe you would think for your house’s plumbing. Again, seeing them makes you wonder how anyone could suffer through it for more than a couple of hours, much less a few years. Yes, it’s that bad.
I don’t know what additional lesson I can provide that haven’t been said before. But if you need a visual reminder of how your body will look after putting certain foods inside it, do everything you can to get to one of these exhibits. You can find out where they are and where they’ll be by going to http://www.bodyworlds.com/en/pages/home.asp. Digg This!
