Hot answers tagged food
12
While poison affects not every organism equally, plants did develop some poisons to avoid being eaten. However, if you look at the great multitude of so-called secondary metabolites, most of them are poisonous to either viruses, bacteria, fungi or other microorganisms, or insects, or even other plants. Plant evolution just hasn't had time to adapt to humans.
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10
The basic reason is osmosis, the tendency of solutes to move from an area of high concentration to one of low concentration across a permeable barrier. So, ingesting large amounts of salt results in a high sodium concentration in the blood stream. This in turn causes water to enter the blood vessels by osmosis. More water in the blood means a greater volume ...
10
During putrefaction of animal tissue, lysine is decarboxylated into cadaverine and arginine is decarboxylated into putrescine. These compounds are deemed to be toxic.
A serving of meat contains 8 g of protein, corresponding to 640 mg lysine and a little bit less of arginine. Let's go straight and say that a spoiled meat serving contains 640 mg cadaverine ...
7
Evolution is not that simple. There is no selective pressure for a feature if it does not ultimately in some way benefit reproduction or the offspring. Vegetables are healthy for us now because we live much longer than we used to in an environment not dominated by us, and they contain many nutrients which help to sustain a healthy body beyond, say, 50.
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7
Shortest answer: there's nothing special in human biology, you could totally make it
Short answer: Bachelor chow!
I would totally buy this stuff if they made it. The closest I have now to bland, flavorless, zero thought/effort food is Wheaties.
longer answer:
Seriously though, dogfood for humans wouldn't be that hard to make. If you just took everything ...
5
As mentioned by nico in his comment, this infographic is very misleading in that it presents quite uninteresting data in a way as if it was a sensation.
It claims the average meal drink has been soda which has increased by 6 times in size. Then it claims most of the volume is water. This is of course true. But while a substance solved in water barely ...
4
Much like Daniel Standage suggests, I think "edible" is more inferried than defined, sort of like looking at a black hole - its absence is defined by the activity around it. Human bodies are capable of metabolizing lots of compounds that become poisonous pass some threshold.
In medical terms there are LDmin and MLD and LD50: miminum Lethal Dose, Median ...
4
As far as I know, edibility (wow, I'm surprised that passes the spell checker!) is not a strictly defined term, biologically or otherwise. Humans have been around eating and drinking stuff long before the scientific method was around to study this question rigorously, and before there were regulatory agencies charged with approving new products as "safe." As ...
4
The likeliest culprit here is fermentation carried out by bacteria present in the milk. Fermentation of a sugar, for example glucose, releases carbon dioxide (a gas) :
C6H12O6 → 2 C2H5OH + 2 CO2
Since this reaction produces a gas, the gas builds up in the milk carton causing it to bulge. This is not, generally, a good sign, make sure to smell the milk ...
4
For what concerns amino acids, mice rapidly reject meals that are not balanced in essential amino acids and continue to look for other kind of foods. This behavior is called aversion response and it is an adaptive phenomena that can be observed already 20 minutes after exposure to the unbalanced food. The mechanism involves brain sensing of uncharged tRNAs. ...
4
Yes. I think it would certainly be possible for raw sawdust to be made digestible by humans through some sort of fermentation process with some kind of microbe or another.
Pickling (as is done with kimchee and cucumbers and lots of other fruits) uses naturally occurring bacteria that are artificially selected for by using a strong brine solution so that ...
3
Vegetables provide calories and don't kill you. For a hunter-gatherer, that's reason enough to eat them even if you don't like the flavor a lot. Finding nourishing foods "repellent" is a modern luxury.
Additionally, the bitter flavors in vegetables may be less noticeable to people who were not raised from infancy with hyperpalatable, sugar-sweetened food.
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This temperature range would be a compromise between a very low temperature needed to limit natural decay or decay triggered by micro-organisms (the lower the temperature, the lesser the decay) and the formation of destructive ice crystals.
Only pure water freezes at 0°C (32°F) under atmospheric pressure. But the content of apple cells and cell walls is a ...
3
There are many factors that contribute to the flavor of food - the five "traditional" tastes (sweet, sour, bitter, salty, umami), smell, texture, spiciness, "coolness" (like peppermint), temperature, etc. Smell and taste are detected in similar ways, by chemoreceptors expressed in taste pores by specialized cells of the lingual epithelium (tongue), and in ...
3
According to @Ilmari Karonen's comment and link, I have the answer. Such food does exist. However a person who tried to eat it and nothing else could bear it for only 7 days. He had cravings for "normal" food. The link was http://www.angryman.ca/monkey.html. Apparently the guy had weak will, but that's normal.
2
Based on what I've been able to locate on the USDA website:
Refrigeration & Food Safety
It would be better to take the foods out of the bags and put them in the crisper if you're using the crisper solely for vegetables:
Some refrigerators have special features such as adjustable shelves, door bins, crispers, and meat/cheese drawers. These features ...
2
Do foods with preservatives take longer to digest?
Food preservatives are either antimicrobials (e.g. sorbate, sulfite) or antioxidants (free radical scavengers such as butylated hydroxyanisole).
Digestion is initiated in the stomach by hydrochloric acid and pepsin. It continues in the small intestine with the action of numerous other enzymes including ...
2
Ara H 1, Ara H 2, and Ara H 3 are the three main peanut allergies. AH1 and AH2 are typically higher-acuity anaphylactic type reactions. The molecular cause for this is that some Immunoglobulin E develop a serum sensitivity and bind directly to vicilin and conglutin (the active proteins in AH1 and AH2). There are actually 7 or 8 Ara H complexes, but it is ...
1
To answer with a question: How do you decide what to eat (if you don't know whether something is edible)?
All animals have evolved taste and smell (and I'm sure even prior to eyesight). The purpose of taste and smell in terms of nutrition is to determine if something is edible. If something tastes bitter or extremely sour, this is mostly a warning sign for ...
1
This German review supports common wisdom that the sense of taste is predominantly informed by the sense of smell. For instance, common advice to children taking "nasty" tasting medicines is to plug one's nose. Any condition that blocks olfaction, such as sinusitis from flu or other sinus infections, or blocking nasal airflow, will decrease or block ...
1
In general, sweating is caused by too much heat, even if you're not aware of the heat. This can happen if the bowel moves and so raises the core temperature. Such movement is often accompanied with sweating, and since you only feel the normal temperature on the skin, it is cold sweat. But at the same time your core is hot so you think it's cold, but it will ...
1
I don't think this is a normal physiological response, but I would seek medical advice to be sure.
I did a quick literature search with keywords "sour", "food" and "sweating" and came up with one article about SUNCT syndrome. SUNCT syndrome is a short-lasting, unilateral, neuralgiform headache syndrome with autonomic phenomena on the symptomatic side. In ...
1
I've done some more research and it was believed that food in the gut putrefied and became toxic up until early 20th century when advances in science showed no evidence of such.
source: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/2668399
So given that food doesn't become toxic in the first place preservatives don't have an effect on something that doesn't happen.
1
I think it would depend on the benefits you are looking for.
If you ate the same thing everyday, it's possible your intestinal flora, and the rest of your GI tract would optimize themselves for maximal nutritional extraction. It is known that the flora in you GI do affect nutrition. I recall reading about obese patients who had gut-bacteria which made more ...
1
there are of course foods for bodybuilders and for weightgainers and losers, never seen just one food containing all (and I activly searched for it) but you can create your own mix if you buy some protein suplements (that are usaly made from whey and other byproducts that have a good ratio of the various essencial aminoacids) or just soyabeans that also have ...
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