Vsauce, I’m Jake and I’ve been playing a lot of the game Super Smash Bros recently
especially as the character Kirby who is known for his ability to inhale and ingest things
a lot larger than himself.
And that got me thinking about our own bodies, the way they digest and their limits when
it comes to shoveling food into them which brings up the question...How Much Can You
Eat?
Our bodies are full of surprises.
Actions and processes that are always happening that we aren’t entirely conscious of, for
example the incredible functions of saliva.
Let’s go to the bar.
On average, you make 2 to 4 pints of saliva a day or about a half gallon.
If you’ve ever eaten something acidic like a pickle, you might have noticed that more
saliva enters your mouth, this is because your mouth is trying to dilute the acidity
to protect you.
Or when you eat bread you’ll notice it starts to get sweet.
That’s the saliva breaking starch down into sugar for your body to use.
When you say something melts in your mouth, it’s probably because of saliva.
It also has histatins in it which speed up the healing of wounds.
Fun fact: sugar isn’t bad for your teeth, it’s the metabolites that are created by
bacteria feeding on the sugar in your mouth that are bad
It’s weird how you’re probably more aware now of saliva currently in your mouth since
we started to taco bout it.
Did somebody say “Taco”?
Oh, hey Taco Tammy!
Hey Jake!
Did you know that not only do you have taste receptors in your mouth, but also in your
stomach, voice box and esophagus?
This is true, but thankfully the only ones that talk to our brain are the ones on our
tongue.
Or did you know that your stomach digests itself?
Yup, your stomach lining replaces itself every 3 days.
Or did you know…
Don’t do it, Jake.
Don’t eat the talking taco.
It’s just the hunger hormone or Ghrelin being released in your stomach due to the
visual stimulation of a giant delicious taco.
Forgive me.
Jake, no, noooooooooooo!
How our stomachs digest food was a mystery until 1822.
Dr. William Beaumont treated a man who had accidentally been shot in the stomach.
He survived but Beaumont was unable to close the hole in his stomach, giving him a window
into the digestive process.
He would place food through the hole, take out gastric acid for sampling, and even put
food and other objects into test tubes with the acid to see how the stomach would digest
it.
(Pull out from anatomy model) What he discovered was that digestion was more of a chemical
process than a mechanical one.
All, this talk of gastric acid and digestion is making me hungry, are you hungry?
Oh still got some salsa on me.
Come with me.
Our stomachs can hold around 3 to 4 liters of stuff.
If you try and put more than that, your body will tell you to stop and if you don’t it
will finally just make you throw up.
But can you die from eating too much?
Yes...kind of, if you ingest a lot of sodium bicarbonate.
The people who have died from a stomach explosion did so because they were incredibly full of
food and had ingested too much baking soda/alka-seltzer, which reacts with the acid, creating gas and
causing them to burst.
I’m sure you’ve done experiments with vinegar and baking soda in a ziploc bag.
But then there are people like legendary eater Charles Domery.
In one day Domery ate 10 pounds of raw beef, 4 pounds of raw cow udders, 2 pounds of candles
and 3 large bottles of beer, a total of 20lbs.
In the 1790s he was in the Prussian Army during the War of the First Coalition against France
but ended up deserting and joining the French military since their food rations were larger.
Then there are professional eaters like Takeru Kobayashi who ate 18 pounds of cow brains
in 15 minutes.
Now that might seem like a weird thing to eat, but people have eaten weirder.
Pica is a disorder where you crave and eat nonfood items like dirt, paper, metal and
chalk.
Michael Lotito was famous for eating things you generally wouldn’t.
He ate a 15 pound bicycle, a coffin and, over the course of 2 years, an airplane.
Luckily he just ate airplanes and not people.
Kuru is a very rare disease that attacks the nervous system and one that you can generally
only get from eating human brain tissue.
It came about in the tribal regions of Papua New Guinea where people would cannibalize
their dead relatives during funeral rites.
So don’t eat human brains...or just don’t eat people.
Remember Charles Domery?
He tried eating the leg of a shipmate who had it blown off in a sea battle.
Hunger can you make you do crazy things, but our bodies are always protecting us.
In general, it wont let us eat so much that we explode and will try to protect us when
we put harmful things in it.
We can’t swallow as much as Kirby but Kirby has another characteristic - when he inhales
people he can also absorb their traits...and that is very similar to what we do with food.
We absorb the nutrients, the pieces necessary to keep our bodies moving, our brains functioning,
our stomachs digesting and our saliva flowing.
All these little pieces come together to make us work so you could say that you are what
you eat...which is even more true if you eat people...and as always...thanks for watching!