You are what you eat
December 13, 2019 6:18 AM Subscribe
If I eat the cells of another creature, in what specific way would they become (or would they?), even in the tiniest way, a permanent or long-term part of my body? (I swear I'm not high.)
If you ate a parasite (say, a giardia cyst) that's specifically both resistant to the high acidity of your stomach AND equipped to survive afterwards in your digestive tract, those cells would indeed become part of your body, in a sense.
posted by deludingmyself at 7:45 AM on December 13, 2019 [1 favorite]
posted by deludingmyself at 7:45 AM on December 13, 2019 [1 favorite]
Same goes for bacteria that set up shop in your intestines, not just parasites.
posted by deludingmyself at 7:46 AM on December 13, 2019 [2 favorites]
posted by deludingmyself at 7:46 AM on December 13, 2019 [2 favorites]
Amino acids from these creatures would be absorbed through the GI tract and eventually utilized to make the form of collagen that is then mineralized to become bone. Bone gets added to and remodeled, but much of that would stay. That's the most permanent way I can think of!
posted by SinAesthetic at 10:26 AM on December 13, 2019 [1 favorite]
posted by SinAesthetic at 10:26 AM on December 13, 2019 [1 favorite]
Funnily enough, as accurate as the above answers are, there's a surprising diversity of cells (and other non-cell organisms that straddle the animate/inanimate divide like viruses and prions) that can survive the brutal digestive processes and integrate into your body to various degrees. If by "cells" you allow whole, living, functional organisms, the premise of parasitism is that the ingested cells/organism need or require your consumption of them to complete one, some, or all of their life stages. Some parasites, we've been learning for the last few decades, operate in ways that we historically associated with viruses in that they can integrate part of their genes into your genome. The human genome--hell, any genome--tells a long, complicated story of organisms swapping genes across species lines for eons.
posted by late afternoon dreaming hotel at 10:39 AM on December 13, 2019 [3 favorites]
posted by late afternoon dreaming hotel at 10:39 AM on December 13, 2019 [3 favorites]
This case of a man whose DNA w as affected by a transplant may have prompted your question, or may be useful.
What you eat is reasonably confined to your digestive system, with many exceptions, like gut bacteria, meds that go into the bloodstream, etc., but animal and plant cells are treated as food and processed by acid in the stomach and on to the digestive system, which evolved just for cells.
posted by theora55 at 11:42 AM on December 13, 2019
What you eat is reasonably confined to your digestive system, with many exceptions, like gut bacteria, meds that go into the bloodstream, etc., but animal and plant cells are treated as food and processed by acid in the stomach and on to the digestive system, which evolved just for cells.
posted by theora55 at 11:42 AM on December 13, 2019
Does smoking count? Smokers commonly carry the tobacco mosaic virus which harms the growth of tomatoes, cucumbers and peppers. I've seen glasshouse job adverts stipulating non-smokers. This hydroponics company is very cautious, but right on the money.
posted by unearthed at 6:03 PM on December 13, 2019
posted by unearthed at 6:03 PM on December 13, 2019
Not all proteins can be broken down into their constituent parts. Some proteins like prions are not susceptible to breakdown by proteases. These prions, which are believed to be misfolded proteins, can cause normal proteins to also become misfolded, ultimately leading to fatal neurodegenerative diseases.
One example of this is Variant Creutzfeldt–Jakob disease, a neurodegenerative disease with slow insidious onset characterized by psychiatric changes thought to be a result of ingesting meat from cattle with Bovine Spongiform Encephalopathy. You might know it better as "Mad Cow Disease".
So in this particular example, I guess you can become what you eat.
posted by reformedjerk at 6:03 PM on December 13, 2019
One example of this is Variant Creutzfeldt–Jakob disease, a neurodegenerative disease with slow insidious onset characterized by psychiatric changes thought to be a result of ingesting meat from cattle with Bovine Spongiform Encephalopathy. You might know it better as "Mad Cow Disease".
So in this particular example, I guess you can become what you eat.
posted by reformedjerk at 6:03 PM on December 13, 2019
Best answer: You are, in a sense, a petri dish. You are a walking environment designed to sustain life. Much of your body is cells that are part of systems, such as your bones, ligaments and muscles, and they are connected to each other in patterns. But you are also a bag of liquid, not blood, but tissue fluid. sixty percent of you is liquid. Two thirds of that is the fluid inside your cells and one third of is the fluid outside your cells. All that fluid is ideal for keeping living cells alive.
You are exceedingly complex. You are made out of membranes that are designed to prevent things from crossing the membrane barrier AND designed to allow things to cross the barrier. In terms of borders you are rather like a country which is meant to prevent unwanted foreign things to cross over, and to encourage wanted imports to cross over the border, and allow exports and approved citizens to cross. But in practice people and stuff get smuggled in an out, and the vast majority of stuff that crosses into the country is the super tiny stuff under no control whatsoever. Monarch butterflies waft over The Wall in migration, and the flu virus in the nose of a legitimate truck driver goes from Ontario into Michigan without any difficulty whatsoever, along with some particles of relish from his hamburger that are on his steering wheel.
Your body is unbelievable complex. There are 38 trillion bacterial cells alone happily colonizing your body. Molecules of different types, some living, some not are everywhere on your outsides, inside you, inside your intracellular fluid and inside your extracellular fluid.
So when you eat a hamburger with relish the vast majority of the meal goes down to your digestive system and an acid bath that breaks up a lot of it into components that can be reused in elemental form down below, but several million little bits of that hamburger also get scraped off or escape, at least briefly. For example you can smell your hamburger while you eat it. That means tiny particles of hamburger are in your nose. They flew into your nose. After a few bites and swallows the concentration of particles dissipates enough that you can't smell it any longer and you never did smell the bread, most of it was the grease particles which are more volatile, but those teensie little motes were there, and some tiny fraction of them remain.
A few of these cells, dispersing the way they did when the molecules that carried the smell got into your nose, manage to get stuck into your tissue on the way down. It's smooth and covered with mucus, but a larger bit of bread might scrape your throat bare of mucus and a teensie few motes the size of the flour dust temporarily become embedded in your throat. - Along with part of a beard hair that grew on a man who drove the combine that harvest the wheat, and which was processed with the wheat being ground up in the flour.
You are totally speckled with stuff like this. You resemble a solid object but this is the illusion of existence. All kinds of stuff has wandered into your body, just as all kinds of stuff wanders out of it. You leave behind a fine dust, mainly skin powder, wherever you go, and receive a fine dust of whatever is in the environment.
That hamburger permeates your system with glacial slowness. A bit of bun molecule stuck in the skin of your throat may stay there for years, or be absorbed by a cell nearby it, or may get caught in an eddy of tissue fluid and float away and end up embedded in your trachea. The cell that absorbs such a mote may break it down further, and even burn it with mitochondria, or it may remain inert inside the cell membrane. It's so tiny compared to the cell that it doesn't matter.
Life is designed to hunker down and survive, so it does. Life is designed to collect nutrients, so it does. Every cell inside you has a little wee bit of nutritious matter inside it that it is hoarding. Sometimes the nutritious matter it is hoarding is alive and sometimes not. Angels are dancing on the heads of pins, and those angels themselves have sub-microscopic digestive systems that are hoarding nutritious matter inside them.
You have been colonized by flour and cucumber and beef and everything else you ate that is alive, and some tiny colonies have even succeeded briefly in reproducing. There are a few living cells of beef tissue that survived being cooked when the other eight million cells in the hamburger patty died, and after those living cells entered and colonized your body, a tiny minuscule fraction of those have done what life does if it can, and divided, and multiplied. If they get big enough to be noticeable something absorbs them and tries to break them down, but there are believed to be teensie clusters of beef cell balls, bathed in a matrix of tissue fluid, unaware that they are not still deep in the loin muscle of a cow, instead of inside your tissue.
After a certain sub-sub-sub-microscopic level you're made of invisible force fields that have created an illusion of matter. The DNA of the flour in the hamburger bun is way bigger than those force-fields the way the galaxy is bigger than those monarch butterflies. The flour is there, but in quantities too small to matter or detect. So is the beard hair. And the relish. And the flu virus. And the bacteria. God knows how all the anaerobic bacteria got there. You are basically made up entirely of things that are too small to matter and too small to detect, many of which entered your body through your digestive system.
posted by Jane the Brown at 7:20 AM on December 14, 2019 [11 favorites]
You are exceedingly complex. You are made out of membranes that are designed to prevent things from crossing the membrane barrier AND designed to allow things to cross the barrier. In terms of borders you are rather like a country which is meant to prevent unwanted foreign things to cross over, and to encourage wanted imports to cross over the border, and allow exports and approved citizens to cross. But in practice people and stuff get smuggled in an out, and the vast majority of stuff that crosses into the country is the super tiny stuff under no control whatsoever. Monarch butterflies waft over The Wall in migration, and the flu virus in the nose of a legitimate truck driver goes from Ontario into Michigan without any difficulty whatsoever, along with some particles of relish from his hamburger that are on his steering wheel.
Your body is unbelievable complex. There are 38 trillion bacterial cells alone happily colonizing your body. Molecules of different types, some living, some not are everywhere on your outsides, inside you, inside your intracellular fluid and inside your extracellular fluid.
So when you eat a hamburger with relish the vast majority of the meal goes down to your digestive system and an acid bath that breaks up a lot of it into components that can be reused in elemental form down below, but several million little bits of that hamburger also get scraped off or escape, at least briefly. For example you can smell your hamburger while you eat it. That means tiny particles of hamburger are in your nose. They flew into your nose. After a few bites and swallows the concentration of particles dissipates enough that you can't smell it any longer and you never did smell the bread, most of it was the grease particles which are more volatile, but those teensie little motes were there, and some tiny fraction of them remain.
A few of these cells, dispersing the way they did when the molecules that carried the smell got into your nose, manage to get stuck into your tissue on the way down. It's smooth and covered with mucus, but a larger bit of bread might scrape your throat bare of mucus and a teensie few motes the size of the flour dust temporarily become embedded in your throat. - Along with part of a beard hair that grew on a man who drove the combine that harvest the wheat, and which was processed with the wheat being ground up in the flour.
You are totally speckled with stuff like this. You resemble a solid object but this is the illusion of existence. All kinds of stuff has wandered into your body, just as all kinds of stuff wanders out of it. You leave behind a fine dust, mainly skin powder, wherever you go, and receive a fine dust of whatever is in the environment.
That hamburger permeates your system with glacial slowness. A bit of bun molecule stuck in the skin of your throat may stay there for years, or be absorbed by a cell nearby it, or may get caught in an eddy of tissue fluid and float away and end up embedded in your trachea. The cell that absorbs such a mote may break it down further, and even burn it with mitochondria, or it may remain inert inside the cell membrane. It's so tiny compared to the cell that it doesn't matter.
Life is designed to hunker down and survive, so it does. Life is designed to collect nutrients, so it does. Every cell inside you has a little wee bit of nutritious matter inside it that it is hoarding. Sometimes the nutritious matter it is hoarding is alive and sometimes not. Angels are dancing on the heads of pins, and those angels themselves have sub-microscopic digestive systems that are hoarding nutritious matter inside them.
You have been colonized by flour and cucumber and beef and everything else you ate that is alive, and some tiny colonies have even succeeded briefly in reproducing. There are a few living cells of beef tissue that survived being cooked when the other eight million cells in the hamburger patty died, and after those living cells entered and colonized your body, a tiny minuscule fraction of those have done what life does if it can, and divided, and multiplied. If they get big enough to be noticeable something absorbs them and tries to break them down, but there are believed to be teensie clusters of beef cell balls, bathed in a matrix of tissue fluid, unaware that they are not still deep in the loin muscle of a cow, instead of inside your tissue.
After a certain sub-sub-sub-microscopic level you're made of invisible force fields that have created an illusion of matter. The DNA of the flour in the hamburger bun is way bigger than those force-fields the way the galaxy is bigger than those monarch butterflies. The flour is there, but in quantities too small to matter or detect. So is the beard hair. And the relish. And the flu virus. And the bacteria. God knows how all the anaerobic bacteria got there. You are basically made up entirely of things that are too small to matter and too small to detect, many of which entered your body through your digestive system.
posted by Jane the Brown at 7:20 AM on December 14, 2019 [11 favorites]
Response by poster: Damn. All of these answers are helpful but I never fail to be amazed at a Jane the Brown answer. Thank you!
posted by HotToddy at 7:50 AM on December 14, 2019
posted by HotToddy at 7:50 AM on December 14, 2019
You might be interested in Bone (and other tissue) Isotope Analysis in archaeology, which can be used to infer diet at short and long scales of an individual's life.
There are many, many such studies, for example:
Stable isotope analysis allows researchers to identify isotopic markers of certain foods in human bone and teeth, which can be used to reconstruct ancient diet and population movements.
For example, in the Southwest, scientists use the ratios of different carbon isotopes in human bone to estimate the relative contributions of domesticated corn and wild plants to the ancient diet at different times throughout history. Such studies have shown that people in the Four Corners area became dependent on corn by about 500 B.C.
And
Our results reveal that the [3000 year old] Skrydstrup Woman was between 17–18 years old when she died, and that she moved from her place of origin -outside present day Denmark- to the Skrydstrup area in Denmark 47 to 42 months before she died. Hence, she was between 13 to 14 years old when she migrated to and resided in the area around Skrydstrup for the rest of her life. From an archaeological standpoint, this one-time and one-way movement of an elite female during the possible “age of marriageability” might suggest that she migrated with the aim of establishing an alliance between chiefdoms.
posted by Rumple at 7:59 PM on December 15, 2019 [1 favorite]
There are many, many such studies, for example:
Stable isotope analysis allows researchers to identify isotopic markers of certain foods in human bone and teeth, which can be used to reconstruct ancient diet and population movements.
For example, in the Southwest, scientists use the ratios of different carbon isotopes in human bone to estimate the relative contributions of domesticated corn and wild plants to the ancient diet at different times throughout history. Such studies have shown that people in the Four Corners area became dependent on corn by about 500 B.C.
And
Our results reveal that the [3000 year old] Skrydstrup Woman was between 17–18 years old when she died, and that she moved from her place of origin -outside present day Denmark- to the Skrydstrup area in Denmark 47 to 42 months before she died. Hence, she was between 13 to 14 years old when she migrated to and resided in the area around Skrydstrup for the rest of her life. From an archaeological standpoint, this one-time and one-way movement of an elite female during the possible “age of marriageability” might suggest that she migrated with the aim of establishing an alliance between chiefdoms.
posted by Rumple at 7:59 PM on December 15, 2019 [1 favorite]
I've just found this recent paper Evolution and ecology of plant viruses which discusses 'evolution of interactions between these viruses and both their hosts and transmission vectors'
The paper is paywalled but a key graphic gives a clue to some of the content re relationships across the kingdoms of life.
posted by unearthed at 12:33 PM on December 27, 2019
The paper is paywalled but a key graphic gives a clue to some of the content re relationships across the kingdoms of life.
posted by unearthed at 12:33 PM on December 27, 2019
This thread is closed to new comments.
Cells are made up of proteins and fats, and at least some of the proteins and fats you eat are used by your body to build new cells. But the cells you eat aren't simply re-used in your body; rather, they're broken down into their constituent parts (amino acids, in the case of the proteins) in your digestive tract, which your body uses to make new cells.
As an analogy, you could think of what happens to aluminum cans when you recycle them. The recyclers don't simply take the cans and refill them; they put them all in a furnace, melt them down, and use the raw materials to make new cans. There's no way to draw a line between one specific can I recycled last week and one specific can that someone else will buy a month down the line. Similarly, your body breaks down the cells you eat for raw materials, and uses some of those raw materials to build new cells in your body; but you can't say that "that cell from the steak I ate became this cell in my body."
posted by Johnny Assay at 6:51 AM on December 13, 2019 [8 favorites]