Nasal Nourishment

[Guest MacPhee]

I wonder whether our noses could provide an alternative way to ingest food.

 

Food, especially heated food, emits smells which our noses pick up. For example, suppose a spaghetti bolognese is being cooked in the kitchen. It gives off agreeable odours which waft around the house, so you can tell what's for dinner.

 

These odours must contain particles from the actual food. Otherwise, how would you know it was spaghetti bolognese?

 

So the nose is actually absorbing spaghetti particles. The number of particles is of course, not very great, as they are being sniffed from a distance.

 

What if though, you went into the kitchen and stood directly over the cooking spaghetti. Then deeply and forcefully inhaled, many times, breathing through the nose, filling the lungs continually, for perhaps 5 minutes. Would that result in nutritional benefit, and have any experiments been conducted along these lines?

[Chewbalka]

This could not be possible less we were to just stuff a straw up our nostrils into our stomaches much like hospitals do for patients that can not or are too weak to feed themselves. Meaning our ability to smell has no relation to our digestion system. it is attached directly to our memory.

 

Read this link from wikipedia once complete click the furtherance link to limbic system to get an understanding of what it does!

 

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smell

Edited October 21, 2012 by Chewbalka

[CraigD]

I wonder whether our noses could provide an alternative way to ingest food.

…

What if though, you went into the kitchen and stood directly over the cooking spaghetti. Then deeply and forcefully inhaled, many times, breathing through the nose, filling the lungs continually, for perhaps 5 minutes.

 

I agree with Chewy that you can’t get nutrition from smelling food.

 

As articles linked from the wikipedia article he linked to explain, when we humans and similar animals smell things – for example, the enticing fumes from a pot of boiling pasta – what’s happening mechanically is that specific molecules – for example, tiny bits of foodstuff – are binding with special proteins on special cilia in our nasal passages, causing them to allow other molecules – primarily sodium – to pass through nerve membranes, transmitting sensory signals along complicated paths ultimately ending in our brains, producing the perceived smell. The food stuffs that bind with the sensory proteins don’t enter our bloodstream, but are released from these proteins, and carried away by mucus. If this process doesn’t happen, or doesn’t happen quickly enough, we temporarily lose our ability to smell well.

 

All of these processes actually use metabolic energy, so smelling “burns” food energy, rather than providing it.

 

It is possible to ingest molecules through the linings of our noses, mouths, tracheae, and lungs – this is, of course, how drugs delivered by nasal and lung spray inhalers, and by smoking cigarettes and joints, get into our blood. I suspect it is possible, in principle, to get food energy – glucose – directly into our blood through our lungs, especially if the glucose is combined with some molecule that passes the lung’s air-blood membrane easily – but have never heard or read of this. Although diabetic are commonly warned that inhaled medicines such as steroidal anti-inflammatories can dangerously increase their blood glucose levels, this is not due to glucose being transported into the body by them, but by these drugs triggering the release of glucose stored in body tissues specialized for this purpose, primarily the liver.

 

Would that result in nutritional benefit, and have any experiments been conducted along these lines?

I’ve never read or heard of such an experiment. It would, however, be an interesting one to do, and like many nutritional tests, is within the practical reach of the home experimenter

 

A simple experiment would be to fill two “inhaler” containers, such as large plastic bags, with, to the best of your ability, equal amounts of the food fumes to be tested. One bag would then be “huffed” by the experimenter/subject, to the best of his ability, exhaling to keep the volume of the bag the same as it started. Each bag would then be places in a bomb calorimeter (despite the expensive professional machine pictures at this link, a serviceable bomb calorimeter can be made fairly inexpensively by a dedicated armature) and burned, the increase in temperature being measured. This temperature change is then converted, in the usual way for this instrument, into a heat energy value, which can be converted into the usual food energy units, calories.

 

My guess is that the food energy that would be measured in this experiment would be too small to be detectable given experimental error – but without actually doing the experiment, it’s only a guess.

[Guest MacPhee]

Thanks Craig, for your comprehensive reply. Your posts, if you don't mind me saying so, are always hugely impressive. They wrap up the subject so well, that there's little room for further discussion!

[Turtle]

the idea, however, is not without precedence. to whit, "breatharians".

 

Inedia

 

...

Breatharianism is a related concept, in which believers claim food and possibly water are not necessary, and that humans can be sustained solely by prana (the vital life force in Hinduism), or, according to some, by the energy in sunlight (according to Ayurveda, sunlight is one of the main sources of prana). The terms breatharianism or inedia may also refer to this philosophy practised as a lifestyle in place of the usual diet.

 

The consensus of the scientific community is that "breatharianism" is potentially lethal pseudoscience, and indeed several adherents of these practices have died from starvation.

...

[maddog]

I wonder whether our noses could provide an alternative way to ingest food.

Food, especially heated food, emits smells which our noses pick up. For example, suppose a spaghetti bolognese is being cooked in the kitchen. It gives off agreeable odours which waft around the house, so you can tell what's for dinner....

For our current line of evolution, I would concur with CraigD's findings.

 

However, were you to consider a different line of evolution, it would have to be on the order of 10^7 (10 million) or more time efficient than current of our bodies to convert fragrances of food alone to energy to have nasal ingestion be viable. I am not sure how one were go about this. If at all possible the chemistry of such beings would likely not be humanoid at all and possibly be very small indeed.

 

What a strange thought.... :P

 

maddog

Edited October 22, 2012 by maddog