With all the hormones and whatnot inside. Dopamine, adrenaline, melatonin, whatever. Also, there’s this Hunter S. Thompson bit on the… pineal gland?
If it had an effect on you, wouldn’t it be a really messed up high, all over the place? With uppers, downers etc mixed? (Not including the emotional implications of eating raw human brains.)
It’s a good way to get prion disease for sure.
Why would that be likely? Wouldn’t that only be the case of the brain you are eating already has it?
For whatever reason prion disease has a chance to spontaneously occur when mammals cannibalize. Especially if they are obligate herbivores. Prion disease was originally discovered in cows transmitting it to humans due to some particularly sick fuck running a slaughter factory thinking it would be a good idea to put cow meat scraps back in their feed soylent green style.
Risk factor: cannibalism Prevention: Avoid cannibalism
That sounds too difficult
Often takes years or even decades for symptoms to appear after exposure
Oh jolly, everything about this resembles the Mad Cow Disease
[…]
The epidemic likely started when a villager developed sporadic Creutzfeldt–Jakob disease and died. When villagers ate the brain, they contracted the disease and then spread it to other villagers who ate their infected brains.
Jolly
It’s a prion disease. Mad Cow, Creutzfeldt-Jacob, Chronic Wasting (so far only seen in deer), and Scrapies (known of for a long time and so far limited to sheep and goats) all start with a misfolded protein and gradually break down the brain till it looks like a sponge.
Specifically a spongiform encephalopathy. Completely incurable and universally fatal. If you contract a prion disease medical science can only ever prolong the inevitable, and it is extremely unlikely that will ever change barring some unknown hyper futuristic nano-machine technology.
And Chronic Wasting Disease (CWD) in cervids such as deer, moose, and elk, which thankfully has not been shown to be transmissible to humans yet. Prions are the stuff of nightmares.
Oh, and Fatal Familial Insomnia.
It resembles mad cow disease because they’re both prion diseases, which are more or less only spread by consumption of brain.
Some of the other nasty ones that keep my a little freaked out are Chronic wasting disease, aka the zombie deer disease and Fatal Insomnia , which just sounds like something straight from a horror film.
As part of mourning people would eat parts of dead family members.
Also alot of people who find out about this think you’ll get it from eating just anyone’s brain but the chance of developing the initial desiese is literally one in a milion, not that you should go around eating brains
Nah, it’s the other way around, you’d have to be really fucking high to wanna eat human brains
no your stomach acid would denature most of the proteins, then they’d be conjugated at the liver so whatever goes in will be transformed by what comes out. A lot of those hormones are tightly regulated so I’m thinking even if they make it into circulation they’d be eliminated fairly quickly. Only exception would be if they’re acid stable, not impacted on their way through the gut/metabolised by microbiota, absorbed in tact and still active after the first pass effect. Also theres enzymes like trypsin in your stomach that are specifically for degrading proteins so I doubt it would make you anything other than a canibal.
Would smoking raw human brains make you high?
Wait no thermal degredation
Would nebulizing raw human brains make you high? Especially of I got a little brain-diffuser in the corner that just filled the room with the aroma
It would still go through the liver for metabolism. The only thing “boofing” effectively does is skip the stomach part of the digestive process. To take up anything from the digestive tract, it gets transported through the intestinal lumen and into the mesenteric and hepatic portal system. The liver filters everything that gets into the blood from the gut before it goes into the inferior vena cava and into the rest of the circulatory system.
Correction to clarify: the lower gut/colon mostly only takes up water and certain vitamins that are released by gut bacteria, and very small molecules like ethanol can sometimes get through as well. The very lowest part of the colon does have a vascular supply that can bypass the liver, and there are some medications designed to take advantage of the select receptors and transporters down there. However, neurotransmitters and peptide hormones (which is what OP was asking about) would likely not get taken up until it was much higher up in the digestive tract, and at that point it would go through the hepatic portal system.
Thank you to those that corrected me. Intestines are actually fairly complicated.
I don’t think that’s correct.
Does rectal have first-pass effect? In general, drug absorption in the upper part of the rectum is transported to the liver via the portal system and thus undergoes first-pass metabolism, whereas drug absorption in the lower rectum is transported directly to the systemic circulation
you’re mostly right, however trypsin is produced in the pancreas and excreted into the duodenum, so not in the stomach. I think maybe you’re thinking of pepsin?
Ya it was the first one to pop into my head as an example, the main point is anything active would be neutralized one way or another by the time it ended up in circulation.
The liver “conjugates”/metabolises a bunch of stuff, its been almost a decade since I studied this stuff but bassically it will remove or add functional groups on/off a given compound. Most of what you eat heads straight to the liver for “processing” where food (and orally administered drugs) get altered prior to circulation. Its part of the first pass effect.
Simplifying the question a bit:
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Which hormones can be absorbed when eaten, and what effects would you feel
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At what concentration are those found in the brain
To answer the first one:
My understanding is that it’s basically impossible to get these hormones through oral pathways.
Mostly because they break down in stomach acid or can’t cross the blood brain barrier.
And finally, if all that were solved, these hormones are typically short lived and are quickly lost.
Which is why, say you are low on dopamine. We don’t give people dopamine pills, but instead some other medicine that promotes higher levels of dopamine.
We don’t actually promote higher levels of dopamine as far as I know. Dopamine agonists work by mimicing what dopamine does to your nervous system. It doesn’t actually produce any more. Also you can be given dopamine intravenously. It is mostly used to raise blood pressure in newborns. But you are right. For other uses, its smarter to mimic it, because of how short it lasts.
We do, however, promote a higher concentration of serotonin with SSRIs. We do that by blocking natural inhibitors that destroy serotonin after being used. This way we can use them more before they die off.
I used to think that these hormones might break down in stomach acid as well, but then I discovered melatonin fruit gummies, which supposedly help you sleep. These gummies are what really inspired this question. (The ones I have are mango flavored, not brains flavored, btw, in case you were wondering)
Melatonin also breaks down in your stomach. It’s absorbed through the mouth and tongue while chewing. After that, most of the rest is lost. That’s why Melatonin pills require higher doses to do anything. The medical science world is still split if any of the fancy melatonin you gobble up in all those gummies can cross the blood brain barrier at all.
So the same rules apply.
