(Sorry to be so graphic) So I had a salad for lunch. When it came out the other end, I can see whole pieces of lettuce floating around in the bowl. Does that mean my body didn’t actually absorb the nutrients inside said lettuce?
Correct. Maybe you should try chewing.
Not necessarily. Plants have large and juicy cells surrounded by a cell membrane and a cell wall. You can crush a lot of cell walls without disintegrating a piece of lettuce completely, and you’d have extracted the nutrients from those, but you can also swallow pieces with almost no crushing and those cells would be protected by the cell walls from your digestive juices, being made of indigestible cellulose.
You’ll probably find that crunchy lettuce like iceberg comes out more intact than a softer lettuce, like Bibb. The cellulose, which humans can’t digest, is what’s being left behind, so to speak. Like corn kernel shells…you’re digesting the stuff inside. You just can’t digest the actual cellulose outer part.
you might be a poor masticator.
practice, practice, practice.
you will enjoy it and the juices it produces.
A man consults his Jewish doctor with a similar complaint:
“Doc, I think I must have a digestive problem. Everything I eat comes out the other end looking just like it went in. If I eat an apple, a whole apple comes out the other end. If I eat a slice of bread, a whole slice of bread comes out the other end. If I eat a chicken drumstick, a whole chicken drumstick comes out the other end. What should I do about this?”
The doctor answers:
Nu? Es drek!So? Eat shit.
Human beings are rather poor at deriving nutriment from vegetation, seeing as we don’t have multiple stomachs or chew the cud.
Of course, the lettuce you ate likely didn’t have much in the way of nutrients to begin with.
Or eat our own poop, as rabbits do.
This. You got yourself a bit of H2O and a bit of roughage. Not terrible. Oh, and you gave your jaw muscles a bit of exercise. It’s always good to exercise our muscles, right? The media is always telling us how obese everyone is, and how we need to do more. So, I say kudos.