You're Being Eaten Alive!

Plants are harmless, plants don’t hunt us down and eat us, they are food! Aside from poisonous plants of course, but they only try to defend themselves, they’re not trying to eat us.

In contrary to … pineapple.

Ever eaten a pineapple and your mouth hurt? You probably assumed it’s because of the acid, like when you eat a lemon and have a cut on your lip. And yes, that hurts too, but for pineapple to hurt, you don’t need a pre-existing injury because the pineapple actively causes injuries.

Inside the fruit, there is an enzyme called bromelain (also called the pineapple enzyme, how creative). It’s only found in pineapples and it has a proteolytic function, which means that it digests proteins. For whatever reason a pineapple needs something like that.

If you eat the pineapple, the bromelain is released into your mouth and starts “eating” the inner skin of your mouth. And that hurts a bit. It’s not really dangerous, as long as you don’t eat a lot of it or are allergic. In fact, bromelain is used for the treatment of muscle injuries and to help with … digestion.

There are other suspected effects that the enzyme could have, from improving the immune function to fighting cancer, but none of this is well-established enough to be used to cure people. But! Bromelain seems to improve the effects of certain antibiotics and has been shown to help with getting rid of a urinary tract infection, as long as antibiotics are used too.

If you want to take bromelain for whatever reason, the therapeutic amount is at about 2000 to 3000 MCU. What’s MCU? No, not Marvel Cinematic Universe, not Microcontroller Unit, it’s Milk Clotting Units. You can also use GDU (*Gelatin Dissolving Units), one GDU is about 1.5 MCU. _{_{_{_{_{_{_{_{_{_@suesa}}}}}}}}}

So much useless knowledge.

But pineapples aren’t the only thing that digests us, we digest ourselves! Or at least our cells do, in a way. The process is called autophagy (“self-eating”) and its purpose is degradation of stuff inside the cells, which serves as a defense mechanism against infections or general problems inside the cell.

There have been studies which show that short-term fasting upregulates autophagy in cells, which can have positive effects on neurons. Doesn’t mean that fasting is the cure for everything, but a short-term fast now and then certainly doesn’t hurt - if done right.

I think some of you expected something else when I said that “we digest ourselves”, maybe something related to the stomach. After all, our stomach acid is so acidic that it can break down seemingly anything. Why doesn’t it eat through our stomach and dissolves us from the inside out?

The solution to this is the mucus layer secreted by special cells in the stomach. This mucus isn’t broken down by the acid and protects the cells underneath. Additionally, digestive enzymes (we have those too, it’s just not bromelain but stuff like pepsin) are kept away too.

Side note: Pepsis means digestion. The drink Pepsi was named after dyspepsia which means indigestion because it was supposed to help with just that.

The protective mucus layer can be disturbed by a bacterium called Helicobacter pylori, which lives inside the stomach of most of the world’s population. It can generally be handled by our body, but if something goes wrong, a H. pylori infection can have devastating effects. Stomach ulcers are just one of them.

But it wasn’t always known that H. pylori is the cause of this. Barry Marshall and Robin Warren researched it about 20 years ago, resulting in Marshall ingesting some of the bacteria to prove the theory. He developed gastritis, as a result, treated it with antibiotics and was later awarded a Nobel Price for it.

What would you do for a Nobel Price?

Thanks @apsu for the topic! I could have written something useful but you wanted pineapples.

This is my last post for this year, as I’m going on a mini-vacation till the 1st of January and will barely be reachable for anyone. I hope you all enter this new year in a positive way, we’ll see each other on the other side!