The average Americaneats almost a short ton of fooda year . This let on down to roughly 630 of milk , cheese and shabu cream , 185 pounds of nub , and anincreasingly highdosage of anti - sedative drug . But where does human flesh fit in ? Humans shed something like500 million skin cellsa mean solar day . The fact is that these literal million of shed cells are making it right into our mouths , often — especially — when we think we ’re only eating a couple of nut or whatever .
What ’s the final enumeration , eating - dead - skin - cell - wise ? set on our deathbed , will be ever be able to screw the exact poundage of flesh we ’ve eaten in a lifetime ? For this week’sGiz Asks , we twist to a numeral of reputable dermatologists for some answers . It is maybe not so surprising that , as we learned , no serious student has devoted any inquiry to getting a proper estimate on this one . But our expert gamely arranged their own equations .
Dr. Johann E. Gudjonsson
Professor of Skin Molecular Immunology and Associate Professor of Dermatology , University of Michigan , Ann Arbor
To my knowledge , nobody has actually tried to value this , but I guess it depends on whether you sting your nail or not . If you do , I ’d expect it to be a lot over the course of an entire lifetime — probably up to at least few hundred grams , if not more . But if you do n’t , then probably not more than a few gm .
You also have to take into account that the interior of your mouth , down to the opening night of the stomach , is continue in what ’s called stratified epithelia — similar to but not the same as the skin — and so that will bestow quite substantially to this amount over one ’s entire lifespan .
Illustration: Elena Scotti, Gizmodo (Photos: Getty Images)
As for other people ’s skin cellular phone — That ’s probably a bit tough to classify . fomite [ i.e. , nonliving object up to of carrying infection ] are all over the place , and these carry dead tegument cells , as well as crack-up product of skin — so yes , I imagine you ’d be inhaling and ingesting other multitude cutis to some extent . But probably much more from your own household members than from anybody else .
These cells are pretty harmless — in some case it has been argued that they could in reality be beneficial , and help protect against hypersensitized reactions and possibly autoimmunity . When it add up to chemical substance and compound limit to the tegument , ingesting tegument cells could theoretically be harmful , but I ’m not mindful of any such reports .
Markus Boos
Dermatologist at Seattle Children ’s Hospital and Adjunct Professor of Dermatology at the University of Washington
It is approximate that we have about 50,000 nucleate hide cells per square millimeter . An average person is about 1.7 square meters in body control surface area ( 1.7 million straight millimetre ) , which calculate to about 85 billion keratinocytes ( i.e. , skin cells ) on our soundbox .
Keratinocytes go through 4 weeks of development before they shed , so on any one day , you are plausibly lose about 3 billion hide cells , found on these number . Of of course , you are n’t ingesting all of these ( what would dot pinch live on otherwise ? ) , but I think it would be reasonable to assume that you perchance ingest about 1 % of them ( we measure trunk control surface area some based on the sizing of your hand—1 palm = 1 % body surface arena ) .
Does 1 % of our skin come in contact with our mouth every day ? Sure ! We eat , we wipe our sassing , some people bat their lips ; there is lots of opportunity for us to manually debride our peel with our mouths or lingua , or just have the cells be tightlipped enough to our oropharynx . So my guess would be about 30,000,000 skin cells per day get ingest . ( Of course this is all just guess , using estimated numbers . )
Others have tried to do this question by guess how many total cell are in the human body and how much of our organic structure weight is pelt , and the numbers are different when you use this as your method of calculating .
We probably ingest other people ’s tegument cells , too . Probably . When you osculate someone you likely consume some ; the rubble all over our house has some utter skin cells as a component . It ’s everywhere , we just do n’t realize it ( this is belike akin to the particles of faecal matter and bacteria that have been show to be sprayed into the air after one flushes the john , often landing on our toothbrushes ) .
The fact that these cast skin mobile phone ( which at this point in time have lost their nuclei ) are belike ubiquitous , and no write up of disease infection have been reported in affiliation with them , name me think that it is unlikely that dead cutis shed from the eubstance and present in the surroundings is go to be pathogenic . That being said , we do experience that infective agents live on or within the peel ( staphylococcal bacterium , herpes virus virus , etc . ) , so caveat emptor !
Dr. Howard Y. Chang
Professor , Cancer Genomics and of Genetics , Stanford University , with a board certification in dermatology
The upper idea of skin shed per day is 1.5 pounds a year , and the average life duad is 70 year — so , first manifold those two number
assume we ingest 1 % of these cells — especially when eating or prepare food — and accept we expend 3 hr per day preparing and/or eating intellectual nourishment , the phone number we end up with is 0.13 punt consumed over one ’s lifetime—1.5 pb / year x 70 twelvemonth tenner 1 % x 3/24 . You ’d have to really make an effort to ingest significant measure of human flesh .
The take in shed skin is not harmful . A very important characteristic of the caducous dead skin cells is that they are “ squames . ” The skin cells undergo a very special form of programmed electric cell death to turn the “ corps ” into brick - comparable structures that build the wall and comprise the body ’s outer Department of Defense . The DNA in the skin cells are all chopped up and destroyed before they turn into squames . So we are not eating our “ sum ” from shed hide prison cell — either from ourselves or other individuals .
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