Can i eat cellulose

It is also used as an additive. Organic cellulose powder can be found in shredded cheese products, while microcrystalline cellulose is used in food as a thickener and bulking agent.

It is also used as a fat substitute and for anti-caking, according to a March article published by BioCrystals Journal. These diverse roles may make cellulose sound unappealing as a food, but if you eat fruits and vegetables, you will consume cellulose and gain the benefits.

Cellulose is an insoluble fiber that your body doesn't have the enzymes to digest. As a result, sugar in cellulose is not used for energy like other carbs, but it still has important jobs to perform as it travels through your digestive tract. The fiber absorbs water, which adds bulk and moisture to stool and helps prevent constipation. Like other types of insoluble fiber, cellulose may help prevent heart disease as well as lower your risk of diabetes and certain cancers, according to the Mayo Clinic.

Eating cellulose in food can also help reduce cholesterol, blood pressure and inflammation in the body. It could also help with weight management efforts as high-fiber foods tend to be more filling. The recommended daily intake for total fiber, including insoluble and soluble, is 25 grams for women and 38 grams for men, according to the Mayo Clinic. You may experience side effects such as gas, bloating and diarrhea when you consume too much cellulose or suddenly increase the amount of fiber in your diet.

According to the USDA , the amount of vegetables you should eat daily depends on several factors, including your age, sex and how active you are. In general, daily recommended intake is 1 to 3 cups. However, the human body would need some adjustments to introduce the microbes into the body. Our stomach is much too acidic for most microbes to survive. The acid, among other secretions and enzymes, follows the food into the small intestine, where the microbes might end up competing with us for food.

By the time the food has reached the large intestines, only the cellulosic material is left for dehydration and possibly hydrolysis. However, our large intestines lack the ability to absorb the sugars that the microbes would produce from hydrolysis. Perhaps another organ could be added to the end of the human gastrointestinal tract to especially accommodate cellulose-digesting microbes.

Modern medicine allows safe inter-species transplantation, but the ideal solution would be to genetically engineer humans to develop the organs themselves to avoid he complications of surgery and organ transplantation.

Genetic engineering for the purpose of treating disease and illness is still undergoing intense debate, so nonessential pursuits such as cellulose digestion will not be possible until the scientific and medical communities accept genetic engineering as a safe and practical procedure.

A simpler solution would be to take supplements similar to the ones used to treat lactose intolerance. Cellulose broken down in the stomach can be absorbed as glucose. Extracting the right enzymes to work in the human stomach can bypass the problems of supporting microbes inside the human body.

Additionally, since the process would occur inside the human body, the limitations that posed a problem for commercial hydrolysis of cellulose would become necessary biological controls.

In the case of lactose intolerance, lactase is easily extracted from yeast fungi such as Kluyveromyces fragilis , so perhaps the easiest solution for cellulose indigestion is to extract the appropriate enzyme from the right microbes As mentioned previously, the commercial extraction of enzymes is not yet practical. As previously stated, this field of human enhancement does not receive much research because companies and funding institutions are much more interested in the lucrative biofuel industry.

Consequently, many questions remain unasked and unanswered. For example, what would the removal of cellulose weight from stool do to the process of defecation? What other effects might the microbes have on the human body? How do we deal with the other byproducts of cellulose hydrolysis such as methane production? These questions could be analyzed through observation.

Other mammals have survived many millennia by digesting cellulose with microbes, and since humans are mammals, there are no underlying reasons why human bodies cannot be compatible with these organisms. The microbes that currently reside in the human body already produce gases inside the digestive system, ten percent of which is methane 3.

Methane production used to be viewed as a problem at cattle ranches and dairy farms, but methane itself is a highly energetic biogas that can be used as fuel. Harnessing it might prove difficult considering that current social graves do not favor open flatulence even for the sake of renewable energy.

However, certain diets richer in alfalfa and flaxseed have been proven to reduce methane production in cows, which could potentially solve that problem Vegetation, which is severely lacking in the modern diet, is the major source of insoluble fiber.

Vegetables contain many vitamins, nutrients, and soluble fiber, which has numerous health benefits as mentioned in the introduction.

Adding these foods to our diet after adding cellulose-digesting capabilities could help assuage the obesity epidemic and significantly improve human health. Ultimately, improving human digestion could vastly reduce waste generated by humans and increase the efficiency of human consumption. We only need to better observe and understand those particular microbes to integrate them into our bodies, which are already structurally favorable for such a change.

With the successful integration of microbes, we could cut down on food intake by making use of the energy in previously indigestible cellulose, reduce cellulosic waste by turning it into food, solve problems of food shortages by making algae, grass, straw, and even wood edible, and eventually turn human bodies into a source of renewable energy.

References 1. Cellulose Human Digestive System Mills, Comparative Anatomy of Eating Baldwin, R. Abe, D. Bignell, M. Higashi, Ed. Friendly Bacteria in the Digestive System Do you know the difference between soluble and insoluble fiber? Find out and learn how to get your recommended daily dietary fiber.

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