Eat insects, or mushrooms.
Many people around the world eat insects, with gusto. My wife and my son ate a few lime ants in Australia.
Now to dig deeper, insects’ crunchy exoskeletons are largely a polymer called chitin made of a glucosamine derivative (remember glucosamine?). We can also get chitin in mushrooms and some other foods. Eating chitin triggers a beneficial immune response.
Do-Hyun Kim and colleagues tested the response to chitin in mice. The stomach distends (briefly), the stomach’s tuft cells release a neuropeptide (a hormone), and the body starts making an enzyme that lets us digest chitin. With long-term intake of chitin our mammalian (at least, mouse) digestive track gets “remodeled” – more cells in the stomach lining, of several functional types. The immune system gets a bit stronger and any of us mammals, it’s inferred, get more resistant to putting on fat. Part of the response is even mimicked by distending the stomach artificially with air.
So, we gain the availability of nutrients with key benefits far beyond what junk food or even pretty good food can provide. These responses are one thing we do all by ourselves, not needing our gut bacteria to help; it’s our own chitinase enzyme that gets turned on. It appears that all mammals have the chitinase enzyme for digesting. I didn’t know we could digest chitin, but, hey, we’ve been eating insects over our evolutionary history.
This has been an outreach activity of the Las Cruces Academy, viewable at GreatSchools,org.
