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What happens biologically if a human eats human flesh?
I watched a crime movie where the bad guy kills victims and serves their flesh to unsuspecting people, including the police. Later on the bad guy confesses and describes how he made food out of his victims, causing everyone that heard and ate his food to get disgusted and vomit in overly dramatic fashion.
This lead me wondering: if a human actually did (unwittingly) consume human flesh, in this case cooked to the point of not being very easy to detect, what would happen to his body?
Wikipedia writes that some diseases were transmitted such as prion diseases, but it cites the eating of brain tissue, so if an otherwise healthy human was killed and his flesh cooked and served to another human and is eaten, would the second person get sick? What is it about cannibalism that causes eating the flesh of the same species unhealthy?
4 Answers
- G0rdiLv 67 years agoFavourite answer
Providing the human flesh is free from certain diseases then it is digested in exactly the same way as any other meat. If well cooked, then the chances of any infections spreading are minimal.
There is nothing special about eating food of the same species from a purely physiological viewpoint - in fact there are many instances where cannibalism has actually saved lives, with no physical or medical effects, including many cases of shipwreck and, more recently, the so-called 'Miracle of the Andes' - see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1972_Andes_flight_dis...
There are examples of disease being spread by cannibalism. Perhaps the most notable is a disease called 'Kuru' found in some tribes in Papua New Guinea who eat the people, particularly relatives, after they have died (so-called 'mortuary cannibalism').
Kuru is caused by small strands of protein which infect the brain, causing symptoms similar to Creutzfeldt–Jakob Disease (CJD) in humans and Bovine Spongiform Encephalopathy (BSE, also known as 'mad cow disease') in cattle.
Kuru was spread by eating the body, particularly the raw brains of the recently deceased infected person but may also spread through open wound infection. As the practise of mortuary cannibalism has been greatly reduced, so the instances of Kuru have greatly reduced although, with an incubation time of up to 40 years, it may not have yet been eliminated.
- JamesLv 67 years ago
We digest it.
Physiologically, there's nothing wrong with eating human flesh so long as it doesn't contain disease and is cooked properly, but I've heard there's some social stigma associated with cannibalism... silly, right?
- 7 years ago
Nothing.
Earth has many living things. All living things can eat their own flesh / same species as long as it is not forced.
- Anonymous7 years ago
we cannot eat our flesh b'coz it is waste for our body thats why it come out from our body if eat we surely have any disease
some species eat their flesh because they have not absorb all minerals and nutrients from food in one time thats why thet eat their own flesh
