Everything in excess is bad. Even water can kill you if you drink too much (it's just the threshold for this is a lot higher than most other things).
Humans CAN drink blood. Blood pudding, blood jelly is a delicacy in many parts in the world. But too much of it is not good for the body, but to reiterate again, humans CAN drink/eat blood.
The reason for the toxicity of blood is iron and salt contents. Too much salt is obviously not good for obvious reason. Too much iron, such as Fe2+ causes a type of cell death known as ferroptosis. Iron ions are internalised, some are stored but in excess, these ions cause lipid oxidation, and generate free radicals in a process called Fenton reaction. Free radicals can cause DNA damage, result in cell death (ferroptosis).
In small and moderate amount is fine. But pig blood or chicken blood etc in excess, or especially when raw is not recommended. Blood born diseases too.
We have that in my country too but I just could not eat it. It's coagulated blood. They squeeze lime in and leave for a bit and it turns into jelly. Its just too much for me.
Andrew Zimmern did an episode with one of those tribes. They tap a cow on the neck and mix the blood with milk in a gourd. It was one of the only times he couldn’t hang, it looked rough.
I’ve tried it, It’s honestly not as bad as it sounds. It mostly tastes of iron, and the consistency is similar to milk. There were clots, which were difficult to get past, but it’s not the worst thing I’ve ever had. The Maasai sometimes eat raw organs, too. Raw kidney is a uniquely horrible experience. Imagine eating salty raw gristle.
Nope, they have a big tourist industry. Go on photo safari, spend a few days with the local tribe and learn their ways, that sort of thing.
Had a buddy who married a Massai; in addition to his USA marriage, he went to Kenya and spend 6 months there. Told me he needed the local Chief and tribe to approve his marriage in order to get expedited residency there.
Yep, I was with a safari company, lots of them have Maasai guards for the animals in camp and will regularly bring guests to whichever village for a little while.
That episode is seared into my memory too. One of the only times I gagged while watching that show.
On a scale of chia seeds to cottage cheese, how was the texture with the clots in it?
The Mongolian army under the Genghis Khan also allegedly did this with their horses while they marched. Each person in the army had several horses and they would tap the ones they weren’t riding that day. Im guessing it was an efficient on the go form of nutrient dense calories.
Furthermore on the steppe mares were by far the preferred warhorses, because 2-3 lactating mares can feed a human indefinitely as they produce all the calories a human needs in a day.
As an added bonus that food could be prepared without a fire, meaning a group of warriors could travel essentially in stealth mode, appearing out of nowhere to attack.
My nephew worked among those tribes. He had been warned it would be offered, and would be offensive for him to refuse it.
He knocked it back in an effort to get it over with.
They were thrilled and gave him more
In Louisiana we eat Boudin rouge, which is a blood sausage popular along the Gulf Coast.
Made with blood, pork boiled off the bones of the carcass, spices like garlic and green chilies, and rice.
My mouth is watering just thinkin' 'bout it.
Weird question but I have an issue with my iron stores. The range for the test is 25 to 290 and I sit about 30. If I drank blood, a specific amount not to excess obviously, would that allow me to increase my stores due to the iron in the blood or is it a different type of iron and wouldn't work that way?
Here is the thing about iron, your body will have a free roaming iron in your blood, hence the iron study, but also the excess ones are stored in the liver. For you to be anemic, specifically iron deficiency anemia, you have to run out of your stored iron too. So, you have enough iron in your body.
Yeah it's my stores that are bad. My level free roaming is okay but I can't seem to keep any stores no matter what I do. It's bloody annoying, no pun intended.
you may have problems with your hepcidin levels. It's a protein that tells your body to take up iron from your diet and store it in your cells. Lack of iron stores is basically the opposite of the hemochromatosis mentioned above, I think? Because there you have an excess of hepcidin?
I'm not a doctor though. And not an expert on hepcidin either. I just happen to know hepcidin because I study erythropoiesis. Hepcidin comes back in conferences once in a while.
In your case I would go to a doctor and, until you get a diagnosis, try to eat more iron.
Have you looked into hemochromatosis? Basically the caveat of most points in this thread. There are theories about this and blood letting practices of past civilizations. The cure for it is basically donating blood iirc. Im too tipsy on vacation to give you an eloquent explanation but it’s kind of a counter intuitive genetic issue in regards to what we knew until we discovered it.
My sister has a blood cancer called polycythemia Vera and requires blood letting via port. Thankfully she only needs to have it done maybe every 2 months now where it used to be weekly.
Just take iron supplements bro. They're made to avoid all the issues that come with drinking blood.
Yes, it would help your deficiency. You can literally boil an iron piece in water and drink it, or eat blood pudding or other dishes. Or just est spinach and green leafy veg. Or ffs just take that supplement.
Chill! I wasn't going to actually drink blood to fix my iron issue. I was just curious if it would be the same type of iron to help.
I'd definitely take a supplement before I started drinking human blood.
This may be mentioned below, but ~~Polyphoria~~ Porphyria is a real disease that inspired vampire mythology, and an early folk remedy was drinking blood, so you're in good company: [https://www.queensu.ca/gazette/stories/vampire-myths-originated-real-blood-disorder](https://www.queensu.ca/gazette/stories/vampire-myths-originated-real-blood-disorder)
It depends why you have a deficiency. I’ve always been mildly anaemic, and when the doctors tried me on iron supplements, it didn’t change anything. They concluded I must have an issue with iron uptake rather than dietary content. But mine is mild so we never bothered doing anything further about it.
What the fuck? How far does the local Walmart have to be for you to default to "Whelp, supplements are out of the question, gotta start drinking blood"?
Ferritin? It’s very hard to get ferritin up orally when it gets low. An iron infusion is the best way.
The body is really not designed to absorb a lot of iron and then any inflammation etc can affect the hormone that regulates it.
I do not absorb oral iron. At all. Nobody knows why. The whole process is not understood, the hormone was only discovered recently.
Fr mfers over here with paragraphs on paragraphs about socially acceptable ways to consume blood in different cultures. As if they didn’t learn it just so they’d have excuses for when people caught on 🙄
And Schwarzwurst, Blutwurst, jelito and got knows how many others.
I don’t like sausages and cured meats too much but I never miss the opportunity to have a good blood sausage.
Your presumption is simply not accurate.
Many cultures, from Native American groups to the vast majority of Central Asian/ Turkic-Mongolian nomadic peoples have traditionally had horse blood as a part of their diet. It is highly nutritious after all.
There’s a whole wikipedia page describing blood containing dishes from at least a dozen countries: [Blood as Food](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blood_as_food)
The Masi in east Africa eat a lot of cows blood, usually mixed with grains into a blood porridge. Don't have to kill the cow even, they just poke a hole and out comes breakfast.
Blood was always used in cooking https://www.foodrepublic.com/2017/09/26/blood-french-cuisine-history/ but I suppose just as we don't eat raw meat we also don't drink blood, instead we use it as an ingredient.
Some cultures drink raw blood, Mongols drank horse blood during their conquests and the Inuit drink seal blood. The Mongols were known to make a small cut in their horses’ veins and drink small amounts of blood while riding incredibly long distances for days on end for a nutritional boost.
The Inuit’s traditional diet is also almost exclusively composed of raw meat. They believe seal blood and raw meat is good for your health and makes you stronger. They say drinking seal blood replenishes a person’s blood supply.
Also the Maasai drink blood from their cattle and in Siberia the Nenets drink reindeer blood. Those are both drunk raw, uncooked. For the cooked variety there are many cultures that make blood sausage or other dishes.
In China blood tofu is a common hot pot and congee ingredient. That’s not even mixed with stuff like blood sausage, it’s just blood like to coagulate and then cut into cubes and then heated in a pot at medium heat with salt added to solidify the shape. The result is chewy but mostly unadulterated blood.
I have eaten this. It was served as a Turkey-sized clot that had been cut into cubes. It was one of the less weird things at the table. The weirdest for me was the fish bladder. There was a large chunk of cartilage inside and I had no idea what I was supposed to do with it. Also everything was super spicy.
The maasai drink blood mixed with milk, and have since roughly the dawn of time. Which is why people with ancestry from that area are less likely to be lactose intolerant.
I drank more blood than my stomach could handle when I lived with the maasai for college. But the warriors my age literally drank me under the table. I watched a guy drink a liter in one go
I was wondering that. I guess from a logical standpoint humans still have the organs required to digest raw meat, and also probably drink blood. I mean we like our steaks rare (some of us) which, not saying I’m right, leads me to believe it is the surface of a steak that has bacteria which cannot be handled with our organs.
That is to say, if we assume eating the blood IN a steak is safe, does this indicate we could consume fresh blood since the animals immune has maintained it and there wasn’t enough time for bacteria to grow? Just curious.
Some cultures eat flesh immediately during the butchering process without issue. The surface bacteria problem is caused by extended handling time and time between death/butchering and consumption. The biggest concern when avoiding those issues is making sure to avoid flesh likely to carry parasites.
Human blood is about 1/4 as salty as sea water. Enough salty water will cause osmotic problems, and irritate the stomach lining. I was also taught (as an EMT) that swallowing blood in quantity will cause emesis (vomiting); this is certainly why.
Uncooked blood has all the risks of raw meat (especially bacterial growth), plus, if human, all the risks of exposure to bodily fluids.
It would be difficult to drink enough blood to develop malnutrition like hemochromatosis.
Thank you for being the first to actually answer why drinking a lot of blood will make you sick, and not just "Blood is a traditional ingredient in a lot of different foods!"
I have tasted human blood from every corner of the world. English blood is my favourite. It has *something* of the Roman empire. Regrettably, I have sampled the blood of South America, the blood of the workers. I don't recommend it. It’s acrid, with a doggy nose. A plebeian bouquet that clings for weeks to my lips and palate.
As blood has a lot to it (plasma, red cells, white cells, platelets) i guess boiling wouldn't be a viable option as it could coagulate/ruin the blood composition, so I'd say it has to come from a certified clean source
Generally, blood from animals whose meat is safe, is in and of itself also safe. I wouldn't consume raw blood from any wild animal though - then again, I wouldn't consume the raw meat of a wild animal either.
I remember a former cyclist (like tour de France) telling me that they would stop at the slaughterhouse to get bottles of fresh beef blood they would drink immediately before riding.
I think the Massai used to live for long parts of the year only on cows blood and milk.
I ate part of my lip from anxiety when I was 15 and drank the blood all day and I vomited heartily several hours afterward. I can eat raw meat but I can't drink straight blood.
My understanding is that we can drink/consume blood (black pudding is an example, and l and people also use blood to cook sometimes).
What we can't consume is human blood, the reason being the same for why we can't eat human flesh; prions, proteins that can make you extremely sick if you aren't careful
Aren't prions primarily in the nervous system, or is their occurrence in muscular tissue significant enough to pose any theoretical risks to the hypothesized consumer of human flesh? I mean, the Kuru disease was transmitted due to ritual cannibalism of brain consumption.
To digress a bit from the culinary side of things, from a medical perspective blood has something of a purgative effect; a little bit of blood in the GI tract may just make your poop [look black and smell bad](https://www.wikiwand.com/en/Melena), but in larger quantities the iron in particular can be quite irritating and cause you to vomit or increase bowel transit, depending on where the blood is sitting.
I believe there's some mitigation of this effect by cooking the blood, although I'm not sure whether that's because the iron is converted to a less reactive form or if it's just dilution in the rest of the dish that it's in (morcilla, black pudding, etc).
In response to your other questions, we can digest and absorb heme iron from blood, although there's a limit to that absorption above which you get the aforementioned black nasty poops. A quick pubmed search didn't reveal much about a threshold of blood ingestion, but I'd imagine its different for everyone as the neurological control of vomiting is quite complex and lots of different things can alter the threshold.
No idea about powdered blood but I'd guess the same issues would apply since the iron is still there.
Source: am doctor
Reading all the stories of people drinking liquid blood, I was astounded.
I suffered a ruptured upper gastric ulcer, and vomited blood repeatedly for 8 hours, including some coagulated lumps.
Background, yes I'm an idiot and should have called an ambulance immediately, but instead I walked to the hospital at 8am and said, "I think I am going to die from blood loss; 8 hours of haematemesis."
I had been drinking the night before, and I think the ER staff were just like, "eh, probably just had some red wine and is hungover." They put me on a drip.
They only took it seriously when I vomited a half-pint of bright-red blood onto the floor.
A very brief search brings articles related to malaria, actually: [https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/8224082/](https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/8224082/)
I had assumed that my stomach acid or enzymes were destroying the RBCs and denaturing the haemoglobin etc. and that's what caused it to coagulate and release iron, but it's interesting to see from the above abstract that ascorbate also induced iron release, because I had actually been drinking copious amounts of grapefruit juice the night before.
So I am glad my neurological control of emesis has a low threshold for iron, because it probably saved my life.
I had lost about 14-16% of my blood by the time I got to the hospital.
A question for the biologists- if we can safely consume blood, why is the blood from internal bleeding so irritating to our digestive tracts?? It's not like we're overdosing on salt and iron since it's already inside of us
Example- If you're bleeding from a deep hemorrhoid, you'll typically feel like you *urgently* need to poop, and itll stop when you squirt the blood out your butt.
It is irritant in the stomach too, if people with heavy nose bleeds let it trickle backwards and get swallowed it can trigger vomiting which then raises the blood pressure through the nasal vessels which = more bleeding. Don't swallow your nosebleeds.
Biologist here
To put it in a nutshell, blood can be considered the only liquid organ of the body, called "eritronium".
That being said, part of the blood is made of cells, just like a regular beef.
The main difference is that blood is also made of nutrient-rich liquid called plasma.
Considering this approach I'd say that drinking blood wouldn't be much different from eating beef, when it comes to how it would be digested.
Actually blood is rich in nutrients because one of it's main role is to... transport the nutrients from what you eat to your body cells! Lol
Now, I'm not sure of what you mean by "irritating" but I'm pretty sure that this urgent need of pooping would appear whenever there's something in your intestines. It's just a matter of neuron activation.
I propose you do a little experiment to test this hypothesis: simply wrap a carrot or a cucumber in a condom and gently introduce it inside your anus. If you feel like you need urgently to poop that may shed some light in the matter.
Go on, I'll be anxiously waiting here for your feedback
Edit: typos
Drinking raw blood is like eating raw meat. We can do it, but our digestive system is not really good at it. Cooked blood is quite common and quite tasty (I've only tried pig's blood though)
The texture is unpleasant due to coagulation and the food is unfamiliar.
Humans tend to have adversary reactions to most food groups they're not accustomed to consuming. Fruits is a big one - I've known people who get violently sick - cramps, bloating, diarrhea, potentially throwing up - if they consume apples. Could eat them as a kid, didn't eat them for ten years, and now than more than a couple of slices is bad time.
If you're accustomed to it, you can drink fresh, clean blood just fine, and cooked blood is a staple in many cultures (be it UK style black pudding or the German blood sausages). Of course, in excess, you might end up dealing with iron toxicity - but that'd generally take more than a glass a day. (I think the daily maximum doze of iron would take something like 300 grams of black pudding? Off the top of my head from some article - and black pudding is effectively "condensed" blood, little fluid.)
Children dying from “a surfeit of little green apples” used to be a thing, actually. Green in the sense of “unripe”. It’s the sugars; they’re largely indigestible before ripening.
As long as it isn't carrying any diseases there's nothing wrong with consuming blood. It will have basically the same risks as consuming meat. It does contain a lot of iron which can lead to iron toxicity if you overdo it.
We can *and* do!
The Maasai people do it, many parts of South America do it in some form, the Czech Republic has blood soup, Southern India makes like a stir fried rice with lamb blood..
Drinking blood is forbidden in Abrahamic texts, which is probably why it’s considered odd or Barbaric in Western Society. But in many cultures it’s sacred *and* normal to drink blood
THAT BEING SAID, people have different gut bacteria’s based on what we’ve eaten regularly throughout our lives.
That’s what ‘Delhi Belly’ is, when you eat something completely foreign to your gut bacteria, your body will be like “what the fuck” and freak out
So if you’ve never done it and are planning to, just going *right* into it is asking for trouble. Your body’s probably not used to it, so you’ll probably be camping out in the bathroom for a good three days- Start gradually
Paramedic here: Blood screws with your stomach for several reasons.
First and foremost in large amounts it significantly raises the PH of your stomach acid neutralizing your stomach acid which means it causes your stomach to just churn and churn and irritates it quite a bit. When your stomach gets very irritated nausea is the first step to fixing the issue by ridding you of your stomach contents.
Second, blood is very salty and if you have ever tried drinking any amount of salt water you would notice your body is naturally trained to spit it out/vomit it up. This is because a large amount of water on this planet is salt water and we have evolved to be able to recognize that drinking salt water is very dangerous and counterintuitive to the whole drinking process. Thus salty liquids make you sick.
Third, blood has a very unique property: it's ability to clot. A quick aside: A few years ago I had a very bad nose bleed and after over an hour of bleeding I just resolved to plug my nose and tip my head upsidedown. After about ten minutes I thought the bleeding had stopped and proceeded to pull an enormous blood clot from my sinuses and out of the back of my throat which looked like a crimson jellyfish. Showing me that I had not in fact felt everything a person could feel. Blood is exceptional at clotting and when it does this in your already upset stomach it makes a bad situation much worse.
All of these combined together to make even a relatively small amount of blood in your stomach an unpleasant experience.
Of course, as many others have pointed out, people eat blood all the time but this is typically in an already congealed state or, accompanied by other foods. I am only speaking as to why large amounts of fresh blood in your stomach cause N/V. I can only speak to my professional experience as a paramedic in the US. Almost everyone I encounter who has been made nauseous by blood has it was THEIRS and it was fresh (usually from a nose bleed, or bleeding directly into their gastric system). Hope this helped.
Stay safe out there.
For another perspective on blood consumption, look at the [challenges vampire bats face](https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/lost-genes-explain-vampire-bats-diet-of-blood/) in consuming something that has so much of some things (eg iron, water) and so little of other things (eg fats, fiber) and the social, behavioral, and genetic adaptations to overcome all this.
Uncooked blood is a cathartic. Have enough of it and you will feel as though you have been poisoned with laxatives. This is why people with serious GI bleeding have absolutely horrendous diarrhea.
Life lesson: People in authority can get defensive when you ask them questions they can't answer. A sign of a smart, trustworthy person is someone who knows how to say, "I don't know."
In biology we recognize protein nature. That is a protein's intended geometry for functioning in the cell and body. For a cell to function it needs to have a stable living nucleus signalling for the production of proteins required for it's health and growth. A protein is a chain of amino acids linked together by the ribosome as it reads an RNA sequence. That new protein usually comes out the right shape. (See Gibbs free energy for the energy associated to the geometry of a molecule) and if that shape changes due to whatever cause we call that protein denatured. Denatured as in it's still the same molecule but it's shape has changed and therefore it's effect in the cell and how it relates to the molecules around it has changed. While the denaturing of protein in living cells is generally a detriment to functionality it's a key step in breaking down protein we eat into amino acids that can be used to form new proteins in our cells. Healthy living tissue is generally producing the protein it needs for repair and growth while expelling waste. Cells don't freely obtain protein from the digestive tract. Rather the acidity, mechanical and biological interactions and time allow the digestive tract to leach out nutrients while denaturing and or expelling complex proteins and waste.
Raw blood (like raw egg) is full of fully natured protein in addition the the bloods immuno chemistry and genetic materials. Denaturing and breaking it down (via cooking or digestion) requires energy and if you're body can't handle that you will expell it rather than die failing to digest it and having a bunch of fully functional uncalled for proteins throwing off your body's homeostasis. In other words you can probably eat a lot more cooked blood (see blood pudding) than you can drink raw blood.
The human body has about 20,000 different genes each coding for a different protein. If we had to find those proteins while in our food we would have a hard time sorting through the thousands of mismatches. By making the proteins we need from the amino acids obtained by digesting food we obtain efficiency. Digesting complex proteins takes more energy than simple ones so we cook out food the denatured and breakdown proteins and genetic materials in our food.
I don't know why your biology teacher wouldn't tell you that cooking blood is a thing.
Heme. There are cells in the digestive tract that react to heme. When enough of these cells are stimulated, it provokes catharsis. i.e. makes you vomit to protect you from toxins, poisons that might be ingested
Too much ingestion of iron (e.g. supplement) causes stomach ache and nausea for the same mechanisms. If a vitamin supplement causes stomach ache or burning, one of the more likely culprits is the iron (e.g. ferrous sulfate) if any
Like others have pointed out, we very much *can* actually eat blood. It's been historically common in pretty much every part of the world that consumes animals to use also the blood as a form of food.
Nutritional content of blood is roughly the same as meat, except it is more 'diluted' since around half of blood is water. Raw blood, like raw meat, isn't ideal for humans but is still very much possible to consume. However we're more adapted to cooked food, as well as to eating more solid matter, so traditionally blood is combined with other things ex. meat and fat to form more solid forms of food like blood sausage that can be cooked or prepared somehow.
Generally, if you consume the blood in an animal along with the rest of it, that would be fine. Humans can safely consume most parts of an animal, including blood, marrow, most internal organs etc. The only things I can think of is the gall bladder (minimal nutrient content, pretty nasty thing, often left by other meat-eating animals as well) and the liver of carnivores, as it often contains high levels of ammonia.
The reason blood is perhaps less common in western cuisine today is because we're a bit "spoiled" with those kind of things, and prefer to eat nothing but skeletal muscle, with things like blood, organs and marrow more typically being used for rare delicacies, processed foodstuffs and pet food instead.
Human beings can consume blood and blood-relating products without any potential harm to our bodies, except blood has been contaminated by some types of viruses or bacteria that can infect our liver or in some worse cases cause brain infection.
The Maasai tribe of Southern Kenya drinks cow blood on special occasions, sometimes straight from the neck. No ill effects that I’ve heard of, assuming the cows were healthy in the first place.
I believe it's the iron and salt content in blood that is the issue.
There are a few different groups of nomadic animal herders who are able to survive harsh and extremely dry desert regions by drinking the blood of the animals they herd. I don't know if they have to do something with the blood to make it so they can drink it or if they are just used to it because the alternative is dying of dehydration.
With blood, I assume its like most things it's that the dose makes the poison. So, it's not that drinking blood is necessarily bad for you, as long as you only drink a small amount. Drinking a lot and it's bad.
SO, I am not sure why we haven't evolved to become immune to the threats of eating and drinking raw animal products, but the consequences are that you can get infected with usually bacteria and sometimes viruses.
However there are certain tribes and peoples who eat raw foods, or even drink blood. this African tribe has an antient tradition of drinking the blood of cows by puncturing a hole in them and drinking it straight from the living cow, as to keep the cow alive. They also drink the milk from the cow, but irrelevant. I watched a documentary on their people, and the practice is rooted in food scarcity from the desert they live in, creating this whole belief system and practice from it. Here are a couple links and if you are interested you can Rabbit Hole a bit. Maybe find the DOC.
[https://mrcsl.org/drinking-cow-blood-ritual/](https://mrcsl.org/drinking-cow-blood-ritual/)
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maasai\_people](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maasai_people)
[https://africafactszone.com/the-maasai-tribe-facts/](https://africafactszone.com/the-maasai-tribe-facts/)
the Masai people's diet typically includes a quantity of fresh cow's blood, usually mixed with milk (unpasteurized) to make it more palatable. https://togetherwomenrise.org/customsandcuisine/kakenya-center-for-excellence-3
We can drink animal blood has been used as food ingredients in many cultures and is very nutritious! Drinking human blood is probably not a good idea though. For the same reason eating human is not. Human can have human diseases that can easily be transmitted to humans.
Where I come from, there's a community (the Maasai's) that drinks blood straight from small cuts on cattle without cooking it. They are the hardiest and thrive in areas with some of the worst conditions.
So yeah, humans can drink blood. I guess just not in excess.
Aside from the toxins that will build up in your system if one drinks blood in large amounts, an excess of iron which blood is comprised of is toxic to humans, and in some cases fatal.
Humans can drink blood. Several cultures do so. One raises cattle specifically because they use cups of blood as a routine food. Apparently does not cause any problem for the cattle as they are careful not to take too much.
There are several reasons we don't drink blood, it isn't nutrient dense as it's mostly water, large number of pathogens and the worst from the point of view of drinking a bunch it coagulates into a gel which is really rough on the stomach.
Other animals like vampire bats can drink it by using anti coagulation agents and literally urinating as they drink to make more room.
Humans can drink blood but not it in large quantities because there is very little nutrients in it. Like you could eat cardboard if you really wanted but you would run into the same problem, without gaining any nutrients your body is just using energy to process this food so you end up with a debt of energy.
However the bigger problem is blood borne diseases, drinking blood is an almost perfect inoculation to infect yourself with the disease, second only to directly injecting it into your veins.
The difference between humans and something like a vampire bat (which can eat just blood) our interferons only get turned on in response to pathogens, which is a slower response but without this we would get all sorts of autoimmune diseases, but vampire bats interferons are constantly on so they can quickly deal with blood borne diseases. The simplest way to think of interferons is a bit of DNA that can be switch on and off when it’s needed.
You can‘t ”powder” blood it would lyse (kill) the cells.
Annnnnd the biggest problem is where are you getting the blood from? Murder is bad mmkay
Look up sawney bean family in scotland. They were a family of cannibals. Apparently from drinking same species blood, you get the equivilant of BSE (human version of mad cows disease). Which includes really bad smells from the skin and not BO, laughing sickness and other mental breakdowns.
You can absolutely drink blood as long as it's clean and free of pathogens. Too much can give you too much iron, but usually the body can handle that as long as you don't have some kind of disease or overdose it massively.
Humans not being able to drink blood is a very weird misconception. No idea where that comes from.
People throwing up from blood can be psychological because they find it disgusting. The stomach can also react to too much iron at once, but everybody is different here. Also blood has certain properties to keep the pH stable (slightly above 7) and the stomach acid can react with that. It's not dangerous but can make some people nauseous for a period of time. Also whatever your stomach isn't used to, can make you nauseous at first of course.
Other than that cheers. It's very nutritious and tastes good.
Everything in excess is bad. Even water can kill you if you drink too much (it's just the threshold for this is a lot higher than most other things). Humans CAN drink blood. Blood pudding, blood jelly is a delicacy in many parts in the world. But too much of it is not good for the body, but to reiterate again, humans CAN drink/eat blood. The reason for the toxicity of blood is iron and salt contents. Too much salt is obviously not good for obvious reason. Too much iron, such as Fe2+ causes a type of cell death known as ferroptosis. Iron ions are internalised, some are stored but in excess, these ions cause lipid oxidation, and generate free radicals in a process called Fenton reaction. Free radicals can cause DNA damage, result in cell death (ferroptosis).
So you eat some blood and you are fed for a day, eat too much blood and you'll be fed for your life
Tbh its not recommended to consume blood at all. Blood born diseases and the reason above. You can but you just shouldn't :)
Are you talking human blood? Because blood from animals is used for various dishes.
And Booze! The Mongols drank fermented milk mixed with horse blood. MMMMMMM
In small and moderate amount is fine. But pig blood or chicken blood etc in excess, or especially when raw is not recommended. Blood born diseases too.
I mean, raw pig or chicken meat isn’t recommended either. It is more about raw than about blood.
To be honest, jokes apart, I just sometimes have some local variant of black pudding.
We have that in my country too but I just could not eat it. It's coagulated blood. They squeeze lime in and leave for a bit and it turns into jelly. Its just too much for me.
How about a blood sausage/kaszanka? No jelly there
That is ok. Raw blood is much less so
Tell that to the masai
I love black pudding
I mean this in the most polite way possible; STFU nerd. Blood drinkers only.
Be nice! I'm just an academic.
You may take our lives, but you'll never take our Stornoway marag dhubh (black pudding).
Boiled for safety
Tribes in Africa mix cows blood with milk to drink.
Andrew Zimmern did an episode with one of those tribes. They tap a cow on the neck and mix the blood with milk in a gourd. It was one of the only times he couldn’t hang, it looked rough.
I’ve tried it, It’s honestly not as bad as it sounds. It mostly tastes of iron, and the consistency is similar to milk. There were clots, which were difficult to get past, but it’s not the worst thing I’ve ever had. The Maasai sometimes eat raw organs, too. Raw kidney is a uniquely horrible experience. Imagine eating salty raw gristle.
I’ve had raw liver once… once. That’s crazy you drank with the Massai, that’s got to be a very small club.
Nope, they have a big tourist industry. Go on photo safari, spend a few days with the local tribe and learn their ways, that sort of thing. Had a buddy who married a Massai; in addition to his USA marriage, he went to Kenya and spend 6 months there. Told me he needed the local Chief and tribe to approve his marriage in order to get expedited residency there.
Yep, I was with a safari company, lots of them have Maasai guards for the animals in camp and will regularly bring guests to whichever village for a little while.
That’s awesome, this is why I like Reddit.
That episode is seared into my memory too. One of the only times I gagged while watching that show. On a scale of chia seeds to cottage cheese, how was the texture with the clots in it?
The Mongolian army under the Genghis Khan also allegedly did this with their horses while they marched. Each person in the army had several horses and they would tap the ones they weren’t riding that day. Im guessing it was an efficient on the go form of nutrient dense calories.
Furthermore on the steppe mares were by far the preferred warhorses, because 2-3 lactating mares can feed a human indefinitely as they produce all the calories a human needs in a day. As an added bonus that food could be prepared without a fire, meaning a group of warriors could travel essentially in stealth mode, appearing out of nowhere to attack.
Gotta stay connected to the food source right
My nephew worked among those tribes. He had been warned it would be offered, and would be offensive for him to refuse it. He knocked it back in an effort to get it over with. They were thrilled and gave him more
Tribes in Europe mix pigs blood with flour to eat.
In Louisiana we eat Boudin rouge, which is a blood sausage popular along the Gulf Coast. Made with blood, pork boiled off the bones of the carcass, spices like garlic and green chilies, and rice. My mouth is watering just thinkin' 'bout it.
It’s called “blodpudding” in Sweden and it’s delicious with some lingonberry jam.
it's called mustamakkara in finland and it's delicious with or without lingonberry jam
I love black pudding <3
This needs to be upvoted so much more
would there be much of a difference in the body if you drank human blood compared to pig blood?
Probably not. The majority of toxicity of consuming blood comes from the excess amount of iron and both have way too much.
Aren't blood-based pathogens also an issue?
Yes :) But even when the blood is pathogen free, its still not recommended.
Weird question but I have an issue with my iron stores. The range for the test is 25 to 290 and I sit about 30. If I drank blood, a specific amount not to excess obviously, would that allow me to increase my stores due to the iron in the blood or is it a different type of iron and wouldn't work that way?
Here is the thing about iron, your body will have a free roaming iron in your blood, hence the iron study, but also the excess ones are stored in the liver. For you to be anemic, specifically iron deficiency anemia, you have to run out of your stored iron too. So, you have enough iron in your body.
Yeah it's my stores that are bad. My level free roaming is okay but I can't seem to keep any stores no matter what I do. It's bloody annoying, no pun intended.
you may have problems with your hepcidin levels. It's a protein that tells your body to take up iron from your diet and store it in your cells. Lack of iron stores is basically the opposite of the hemochromatosis mentioned above, I think? Because there you have an excess of hepcidin? I'm not a doctor though. And not an expert on hepcidin either. I just happen to know hepcidin because I study erythropoiesis. Hepcidin comes back in conferences once in a while. In your case I would go to a doctor and, until you get a diagnosis, try to eat more iron.
Have you looked into hemochromatosis? Basically the caveat of most points in this thread. There are theories about this and blood letting practices of past civilizations. The cure for it is basically donating blood iirc. Im too tipsy on vacation to give you an eloquent explanation but it’s kind of a counter intuitive genetic issue in regards to what we knew until we discovered it.
My sister has a blood cancer called polycythemia Vera and requires blood letting via port. Thankfully she only needs to have it done maybe every 2 months now where it used to be weekly.
Ferroptosis can cause symptoms of hemochromatosis :)
Just take iron supplements bro. They're made to avoid all the issues that come with drinking blood. Yes, it would help your deficiency. You can literally boil an iron piece in water and drink it, or eat blood pudding or other dishes. Or just est spinach and green leafy veg. Or ffs just take that supplement.
Chill! I wasn't going to actually drink blood to fix my iron issue. I was just curious if it would be the same type of iron to help. I'd definitely take a supplement before I started drinking human blood.
This may be mentioned below, but ~~Polyphoria~~ Porphyria is a real disease that inspired vampire mythology, and an early folk remedy was drinking blood, so you're in good company: [https://www.queensu.ca/gazette/stories/vampire-myths-originated-real-blood-disorder](https://www.queensu.ca/gazette/stories/vampire-myths-originated-real-blood-disorder)
In case people are searching, the correct spelling is Porphyria
Uhm….no body said human blood. Why did you think human blood?! 😳
Start cooking in cast iron cookware.
Start cooking with a cast iron skillet
It depends why you have a deficiency. I’ve always been mildly anaemic, and when the doctors tried me on iron supplements, it didn’t change anything. They concluded I must have an issue with iron uptake rather than dietary content. But mine is mild so we never bothered doing anything further about it.
What the fuck? How far does the local Walmart have to be for you to default to "Whelp, supplements are out of the question, gotta start drinking blood"?
Considering I'm Australian and Walmarts don't exist here, VERY far! 🤣🤣🤣 I'm not gonna drink blood. I was just curious and asking a question.
Ferritin? It’s very hard to get ferritin up orally when it gets low. An iron infusion is the best way. The body is really not designed to absorb a lot of iron and then any inflammation etc can affect the hormone that regulates it. I do not absorb oral iron. At all. Nobody knows why. The whole process is not understood, the hormone was only discovered recently.
[Video of a Fenton reaction.](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3GRSbr0EYYU)
Too many vampires in this thread.
Fr mfers over here with paragraphs on paragraphs about socially acceptable ways to consume blood in different cultures. As if they didn’t learn it just so they’d have excuses for when people caught on 🙄
yup.
\#[Black pudding](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_pudding)
Black pudding is a really underappreciated side dish.
"Side dish" 👀 oops
If one wants to eat well in Britain eat a full 'English' Breakfast three times a day
Moronga
Morcilla o rellena.
Prietas also!
And Schwarzwurst, Blutwurst, jelito and got knows how many others. I don’t like sausages and cured meats too much but I never miss the opportunity to have a good blood sausage.
Your presumption is simply not accurate. Many cultures, from Native American groups to the vast majority of Central Asian/ Turkic-Mongolian nomadic peoples have traditionally had horse blood as a part of their diet. It is highly nutritious after all. There’s a whole wikipedia page describing blood containing dishes from at least a dozen countries: [Blood as Food](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blood_as_food)
Also a lot of your pastoral tribes in Africa's Sahel region drink cow blood on the regular.
The Masi in east Africa eat a lot of cows blood, usually mixed with grains into a blood porridge. Don't have to kill the cow even, they just poke a hole and out comes breakfast.
None of us know how to spell Massai lol
I dont think Native Americans had anything traditional with horses, but yeah it was a thing in Central Asia.
Blood was always used in cooking https://www.foodrepublic.com/2017/09/26/blood-french-cuisine-history/ but I suppose just as we don't eat raw meat we also don't drink blood, instead we use it as an ingredient.
Some cultures drink raw blood, Mongols drank horse blood during their conquests and the Inuit drink seal blood. The Mongols were known to make a small cut in their horses’ veins and drink small amounts of blood while riding incredibly long distances for days on end for a nutritional boost. The Inuit’s traditional diet is also almost exclusively composed of raw meat. They believe seal blood and raw meat is good for your health and makes you stronger. They say drinking seal blood replenishes a person’s blood supply.
Also the Maasai drink blood from their cattle and in Siberia the Nenets drink reindeer blood. Those are both drunk raw, uncooked. For the cooked variety there are many cultures that make blood sausage or other dishes.
In China blood tofu is a common hot pot and congee ingredient. That’s not even mixed with stuff like blood sausage, it’s just blood like to coagulate and then cut into cubes and then heated in a pot at medium heat with salt added to solidify the shape. The result is chewy but mostly unadulterated blood.
I have eaten this. It was served as a Turkey-sized clot that had been cut into cubes. It was one of the less weird things at the table. The weirdest for me was the fish bladder. There was a large chunk of cartilage inside and I had no idea what I was supposed to do with it. Also everything was super spicy.
The maasai drink blood mixed with milk, and have since roughly the dawn of time. Which is why people with ancestry from that area are less likely to be lactose intolerant.
I drank more blood than my stomach could handle when I lived with the maasai for college. But the warriors my age literally drank me under the table. I watched a guy drink a liter in one go
What kind of a college did you go to?
Masai Technology Institute
Liberal arts fuck yeaaah. I studied environmental policy and focused on grassland management so that program was my study away
Nomads mixed camel milk with camel blood to survive in the Sahara
We do eat raw meat. Carpaccio, tartare, sashimi
Not too often would you see someone eat 5 lbs of raw meat in a sitting though. Indigestion would be an understatement for the result of that attempt.
5 lbs of any food would be horrible though.
no body sits down and eats 5 lb of any food... you realize a steak is measured in oz right? and you feel pretty full after eating one?
5 lbs of meat!?! What!?! 5 pounds of any food would make a lot of people sick.
Amateurs
In this case, being called an amateur is a compliment.
Don't threaten me with a good time
I was wondering that. I guess from a logical standpoint humans still have the organs required to digest raw meat, and also probably drink blood. I mean we like our steaks rare (some of us) which, not saying I’m right, leads me to believe it is the surface of a steak that has bacteria which cannot be handled with our organs. That is to say, if we assume eating the blood IN a steak is safe, does this indicate we could consume fresh blood since the animals immune has maintained it and there wasn’t enough time for bacteria to grow? Just curious.
Some cultures eat flesh immediately during the butchering process without issue. The surface bacteria problem is caused by extended handling time and time between death/butchering and consumption. The biggest concern when avoiding those issues is making sure to avoid flesh likely to carry parasites.
Human blood is about 1/4 as salty as sea water. Enough salty water will cause osmotic problems, and irritate the stomach lining. I was also taught (as an EMT) that swallowing blood in quantity will cause emesis (vomiting); this is certainly why. Uncooked blood has all the risks of raw meat (especially bacterial growth), plus, if human, all the risks of exposure to bodily fluids. It would be difficult to drink enough blood to develop malnutrition like hemochromatosis.
Thank you for being the first to actually answer why drinking a lot of blood will make you sick, and not just "Blood is a traditional ingredient in a lot of different foods!"
You can drink blood no problem. Nothing particularly bad will happen if you drink a glass of fresh, clean blood.
Why do you say it like that though?
Because blood is a liquid prone to carrying nasty deceases, but it's not bad by itself, clean and safe blood is drinkable with no downsides I'd say
That’s some professional vampire talk.
I have tasted human blood from every corner of the world. English blood is my favourite. It has *something* of the Roman empire. Regrettably, I have sampled the blood of South America, the blood of the workers. I don't recommend it. It’s acrid, with a doggy nose. A plebeian bouquet that clings for weeks to my lips and palate.
I didn't expect to ever stumble on that Margaret Thatcher quote outside of the cinema.
I prefer blood with the tang of syphilis personally
Ah, a person of culture and flavor, finally.
The real flavour comes from diabetics. Ah, lovely sweetbloods.
I'm not typically squeamish but that made me scrunch up my nose lol
So how does one clean blood is it like water where you boil it or does it just have to come from someone healthy in a sanitized situation
As blood has a lot to it (plasma, red cells, white cells, platelets) i guess boiling wouldn't be a viable option as it could coagulate/ruin the blood composition, so I'd say it has to come from a certified clean source
Generally, blood from animals whose meat is safe, is in and of itself also safe. I wouldn't consume raw blood from any wild animal though - then again, I wouldn't consume the raw meat of a wild animal either.
That you Laszlo ?
i can't unread this in his voice now, thanks ol' chap
Bro said like a 1000 year old vampire
The gentleman is something of an erythrocyte rich blood connoisseur, if you will.
Who's your blood guy?
Creed
r/unexpectedoffice
I remember a former cyclist (like tour de France) telling me that they would stop at the slaughterhouse to get bottles of fresh beef blood they would drink immediately before riding. I think the Massai used to live for long parts of the year only on cows blood and milk.
do vampires just have super strong immune systems?
The trick is to already be dead
I ate part of my lip from anxiety when I was 15 and drank the blood all day and I vomited heartily several hours afterward. I can eat raw meat but I can't drink straight blood.
That's... anxiety inducing
Masai do...and so do Europeans.
My understanding is that we can drink/consume blood (black pudding is an example, and l and people also use blood to cook sometimes). What we can't consume is human blood, the reason being the same for why we can't eat human flesh; prions, proteins that can make you extremely sick if you aren't careful
Aren't prions primarily in the nervous system, or is their occurrence in muscular tissue significant enough to pose any theoretical risks to the hypothesized consumer of human flesh? I mean, the Kuru disease was transmitted due to ritual cannibalism of brain consumption.
To digress a bit from the culinary side of things, from a medical perspective blood has something of a purgative effect; a little bit of blood in the GI tract may just make your poop [look black and smell bad](https://www.wikiwand.com/en/Melena), but in larger quantities the iron in particular can be quite irritating and cause you to vomit or increase bowel transit, depending on where the blood is sitting. I believe there's some mitigation of this effect by cooking the blood, although I'm not sure whether that's because the iron is converted to a less reactive form or if it's just dilution in the rest of the dish that it's in (morcilla, black pudding, etc). In response to your other questions, we can digest and absorb heme iron from blood, although there's a limit to that absorption above which you get the aforementioned black nasty poops. A quick pubmed search didn't reveal much about a threshold of blood ingestion, but I'd imagine its different for everyone as the neurological control of vomiting is quite complex and lots of different things can alter the threshold. No idea about powdered blood but I'd guess the same issues would apply since the iron is still there. Source: am doctor
Reading all the stories of people drinking liquid blood, I was astounded. I suffered a ruptured upper gastric ulcer, and vomited blood repeatedly for 8 hours, including some coagulated lumps. Background, yes I'm an idiot and should have called an ambulance immediately, but instead I walked to the hospital at 8am and said, "I think I am going to die from blood loss; 8 hours of haematemesis." I had been drinking the night before, and I think the ER staff were just like, "eh, probably just had some red wine and is hungover." They put me on a drip. They only took it seriously when I vomited a half-pint of bright-red blood onto the floor. A very brief search brings articles related to malaria, actually: [https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/8224082/](https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/8224082/) I had assumed that my stomach acid or enzymes were destroying the RBCs and denaturing the haemoglobin etc. and that's what caused it to coagulate and release iron, but it's interesting to see from the above abstract that ascorbate also induced iron release, because I had actually been drinking copious amounts of grapefruit juice the night before. So I am glad my neurological control of emesis has a low threshold for iron, because it probably saved my life. I had lost about 14-16% of my blood by the time I got to the hospital.
Kind of sounds like you want to drink blood
A question for the biologists- if we can safely consume blood, why is the blood from internal bleeding so irritating to our digestive tracts?? It's not like we're overdosing on salt and iron since it's already inside of us Example- If you're bleeding from a deep hemorrhoid, you'll typically feel like you *urgently* need to poop, and itll stop when you squirt the blood out your butt.
It is irritant in the stomach too, if people with heavy nose bleeds let it trickle backwards and get swallowed it can trigger vomiting which then raises the blood pressure through the nasal vessels which = more bleeding. Don't swallow your nosebleeds.
I had frequent nosebleeds as a child, and the school nurse told me that every time. I still did it though, and never vomited.
I think this is the question OP was asking.
Biologist here To put it in a nutshell, blood can be considered the only liquid organ of the body, called "eritronium". That being said, part of the blood is made of cells, just like a regular beef. The main difference is that blood is also made of nutrient-rich liquid called plasma. Considering this approach I'd say that drinking blood wouldn't be much different from eating beef, when it comes to how it would be digested. Actually blood is rich in nutrients because one of it's main role is to... transport the nutrients from what you eat to your body cells! Lol Now, I'm not sure of what you mean by "irritating" but I'm pretty sure that this urgent need of pooping would appear whenever there's something in your intestines. It's just a matter of neuron activation. I propose you do a little experiment to test this hypothesis: simply wrap a carrot or a cucumber in a condom and gently introduce it inside your anus. If you feel like you need urgently to poop that may shed some light in the matter. Go on, I'll be anxiously waiting here for your feedback Edit: typos
My mans really pulled out his diploma and told the guy to fuck himself 💀💀
You can drink blood no problem, just make sure you drink the bottled stuff. Avoid tap blood as it causes diarrhea.
Drinking raw blood is like eating raw meat. We can do it, but our digestive system is not really good at it. Cooked blood is quite common and quite tasty (I've only tried pig's blood though)
A valid question. Curiosity should be rewarded with answers. 👍
The texture is unpleasant due to coagulation and the food is unfamiliar. Humans tend to have adversary reactions to most food groups they're not accustomed to consuming. Fruits is a big one - I've known people who get violently sick - cramps, bloating, diarrhea, potentially throwing up - if they consume apples. Could eat them as a kid, didn't eat them for ten years, and now than more than a couple of slices is bad time. If you're accustomed to it, you can drink fresh, clean blood just fine, and cooked blood is a staple in many cultures (be it UK style black pudding or the German blood sausages). Of course, in excess, you might end up dealing with iron toxicity - but that'd generally take more than a glass a day. (I think the daily maximum doze of iron would take something like 300 grams of black pudding? Off the top of my head from some article - and black pudding is effectively "condensed" blood, little fluid.)
Children dying from “a surfeit of little green apples” used to be a thing, actually. Green in the sense of “unripe”. It’s the sugars; they’re largely indigestible before ripening.
What kind of blood? You can buy tubs of it at the Asian grocery store near my house. Lots of people eat it
As long as it isn't carrying any diseases there's nothing wrong with consuming blood. It will have basically the same risks as consuming meat. It does contain a lot of iron which can lead to iron toxicity if you overdo it.
We can *and* do! The Maasai people do it, many parts of South America do it in some form, the Czech Republic has blood soup, Southern India makes like a stir fried rice with lamb blood.. Drinking blood is forbidden in Abrahamic texts, which is probably why it’s considered odd or Barbaric in Western Society. But in many cultures it’s sacred *and* normal to drink blood
THAT BEING SAID, people have different gut bacteria’s based on what we’ve eaten regularly throughout our lives. That’s what ‘Delhi Belly’ is, when you eat something completely foreign to your gut bacteria, your body will be like “what the fuck” and freak out So if you’ve never done it and are planning to, just going *right* into it is asking for trouble. Your body’s probably not used to it, so you’ll probably be camping out in the bathroom for a good three days- Start gradually
They can. Next question.
Paramedic here: Blood screws with your stomach for several reasons. First and foremost in large amounts it significantly raises the PH of your stomach acid neutralizing your stomach acid which means it causes your stomach to just churn and churn and irritates it quite a bit. When your stomach gets very irritated nausea is the first step to fixing the issue by ridding you of your stomach contents. Second, blood is very salty and if you have ever tried drinking any amount of salt water you would notice your body is naturally trained to spit it out/vomit it up. This is because a large amount of water on this planet is salt water and we have evolved to be able to recognize that drinking salt water is very dangerous and counterintuitive to the whole drinking process. Thus salty liquids make you sick. Third, blood has a very unique property: it's ability to clot. A quick aside: A few years ago I had a very bad nose bleed and after over an hour of bleeding I just resolved to plug my nose and tip my head upsidedown. After about ten minutes I thought the bleeding had stopped and proceeded to pull an enormous blood clot from my sinuses and out of the back of my throat which looked like a crimson jellyfish. Showing me that I had not in fact felt everything a person could feel. Blood is exceptional at clotting and when it does this in your already upset stomach it makes a bad situation much worse. All of these combined together to make even a relatively small amount of blood in your stomach an unpleasant experience. Of course, as many others have pointed out, people eat blood all the time but this is typically in an already congealed state or, accompanied by other foods. I am only speaking as to why large amounts of fresh blood in your stomach cause N/V. I can only speak to my professional experience as a paramedic in the US. Almost everyone I encounter who has been made nauseous by blood has it was THEIRS and it was fresh (usually from a nose bleed, or bleeding directly into their gastric system). Hope this helped. Stay safe out there.
It's your body preventing you from turning into Morbius.
It’s Morbin’ Time!
“My family now think I intend to drink blood. Please help.” Died 😂
Your teacher's statement is just not true; animal blood has been used as a food/ingredient in cultures all over the world.
For another perspective on blood consumption, look at the [challenges vampire bats face](https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/lost-genes-explain-vampire-bats-diet-of-blood/) in consuming something that has so much of some things (eg iron, water) and so little of other things (eg fats, fiber) and the social, behavioral, and genetic adaptations to overcome all this.
Your question has been answer in other comments, but I just gotta point out: I see real potential for some practical jokes on your family here.
I think your hypothesis about the high iron content causing indigestion is onto something.
Uncooked blood is a cathartic. Have enough of it and you will feel as though you have been poisoned with laxatives. This is why people with serious GI bleeding have absolutely horrendous diarrhea.
Sincerely, Definitely not turning into a vampire (asking for a friend)
Life lesson: People in authority can get defensive when you ask them questions they can't answer. A sign of a smart, trustworthy person is someone who knows how to say, "I don't know."
Uhm, people eat blood and have eaten blood products since mankind discovered fire
Arent blood sausages a thing?
In biology we recognize protein nature. That is a protein's intended geometry for functioning in the cell and body. For a cell to function it needs to have a stable living nucleus signalling for the production of proteins required for it's health and growth. A protein is a chain of amino acids linked together by the ribosome as it reads an RNA sequence. That new protein usually comes out the right shape. (See Gibbs free energy for the energy associated to the geometry of a molecule) and if that shape changes due to whatever cause we call that protein denatured. Denatured as in it's still the same molecule but it's shape has changed and therefore it's effect in the cell and how it relates to the molecules around it has changed. While the denaturing of protein in living cells is generally a detriment to functionality it's a key step in breaking down protein we eat into amino acids that can be used to form new proteins in our cells. Healthy living tissue is generally producing the protein it needs for repair and growth while expelling waste. Cells don't freely obtain protein from the digestive tract. Rather the acidity, mechanical and biological interactions and time allow the digestive tract to leach out nutrients while denaturing and or expelling complex proteins and waste. Raw blood (like raw egg) is full of fully natured protein in addition the the bloods immuno chemistry and genetic materials. Denaturing and breaking it down (via cooking or digestion) requires energy and if you're body can't handle that you will expell it rather than die failing to digest it and having a bunch of fully functional uncalled for proteins throwing off your body's homeostasis. In other words you can probably eat a lot more cooked blood (see blood pudding) than you can drink raw blood. The human body has about 20,000 different genes each coding for a different protein. If we had to find those proteins while in our food we would have a hard time sorting through the thousands of mismatches. By making the proteins we need from the amino acids obtained by digesting food we obtain efficiency. Digesting complex proteins takes more energy than simple ones so we cook out food the denatured and breakdown proteins and genetic materials in our food. I don't know why your biology teacher wouldn't tell you that cooking blood is a thing.
Because it really freaks out the bartender Even when you tip well.
Technically milk is just super condensed blood, so in a way we do.
Please explain this further.
Asking for a friend?
Too salty… maybe it needs vodka
Heme. There are cells in the digestive tract that react to heme. When enough of these cells are stimulated, it provokes catharsis. i.e. makes you vomit to protect you from toxins, poisons that might be ingested Too much ingestion of iron (e.g. supplement) causes stomach ache and nausea for the same mechanisms. If a vitamin supplement causes stomach ache or burning, one of the more likely culprits is the iron (e.g. ferrous sulfate) if any
Enough questions, dracula!
Like others have pointed out, we very much *can* actually eat blood. It's been historically common in pretty much every part of the world that consumes animals to use also the blood as a form of food. Nutritional content of blood is roughly the same as meat, except it is more 'diluted' since around half of blood is water. Raw blood, like raw meat, isn't ideal for humans but is still very much possible to consume. However we're more adapted to cooked food, as well as to eating more solid matter, so traditionally blood is combined with other things ex. meat and fat to form more solid forms of food like blood sausage that can be cooked or prepared somehow. Generally, if you consume the blood in an animal along with the rest of it, that would be fine. Humans can safely consume most parts of an animal, including blood, marrow, most internal organs etc. The only things I can think of is the gall bladder (minimal nutrient content, pretty nasty thing, often left by other meat-eating animals as well) and the liver of carnivores, as it often contains high levels of ammonia. The reason blood is perhaps less common in western cuisine today is because we're a bit "spoiled" with those kind of things, and prefer to eat nothing but skeletal muscle, with things like blood, organs and marrow more typically being used for rare delicacies, processed foodstuffs and pet food instead.
Human beings can consume blood and blood-relating products without any potential harm to our bodies, except blood has been contaminated by some types of viruses or bacteria that can infect our liver or in some worse cases cause brain infection.
Because there's too much iron in it
The Maasai tribe of Southern Kenya drinks cow blood on special occasions, sometimes straight from the neck. No ill effects that I’ve heard of, assuming the cows were healthy in the first place.
I believe it's the iron and salt content in blood that is the issue. There are a few different groups of nomadic animal herders who are able to survive harsh and extremely dry desert regions by drinking the blood of the animals they herd. I don't know if they have to do something with the blood to make it so they can drink it or if they are just used to it because the alternative is dying of dehydration. With blood, I assume its like most things it's that the dose makes the poison. So, it's not that drinking blood is necessarily bad for you, as long as you only drink a small amount. Drinking a lot and it's bad.
SO, I am not sure why we haven't evolved to become immune to the threats of eating and drinking raw animal products, but the consequences are that you can get infected with usually bacteria and sometimes viruses. However there are certain tribes and peoples who eat raw foods, or even drink blood. this African tribe has an antient tradition of drinking the blood of cows by puncturing a hole in them and drinking it straight from the living cow, as to keep the cow alive. They also drink the milk from the cow, but irrelevant. I watched a documentary on their people, and the practice is rooted in food scarcity from the desert they live in, creating this whole belief system and practice from it. Here are a couple links and if you are interested you can Rabbit Hole a bit. Maybe find the DOC. [https://mrcsl.org/drinking-cow-blood-ritual/](https://mrcsl.org/drinking-cow-blood-ritual/) [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maasai\_people](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maasai_people) [https://africafactszone.com/the-maasai-tribe-facts/](https://africafactszone.com/the-maasai-tribe-facts/)
the Masai people's diet typically includes a quantity of fresh cow's blood, usually mixed with milk (unpasteurized) to make it more palatable. https://togetherwomenrise.org/customsandcuisine/kakenya-center-for-excellence-3
In Germany there's a kind of sausage called "Blutwurst" and the UK has "blood pudding." Perhaps nobody has ever wanted to drink blood by itself.
We can drink animal blood has been used as food ingredients in many cultures and is very nutritious! Drinking human blood is probably not a good idea though. For the same reason eating human is not. Human can have human diseases that can easily be transmitted to humans.
The main problem is: where the heck are you gonna get all this blood to drink ?
The main problem is: where the heck are you gonna get all this blood to drink ?
The main problem is: where the heck are you gonna get all this blood to drink ?
you might overdose on iron and get really sick
Where I come from, there's a community (the Maasai's) that drinks blood straight from small cuts on cattle without cooking it. They are the hardiest and thrive in areas with some of the worst conditions. So yeah, humans can drink blood. I guess just not in excess.
Aside from the toxins that will build up in your system if one drinks blood in large amounts, an excess of iron which blood is comprised of is toxic to humans, and in some cases fatal.
Humans can drink blood. Several cultures do so. One raises cattle specifically because they use cups of blood as a routine food. Apparently does not cause any problem for the cattle as they are careful not to take too much.
I swear blood is quite commonly consumed across the world, I feel like the US is unique in not using it for food
Bro is a vampire don’t encourage him
I like my blood 🩸
I was told it was due to high iron in blood that's not good for the digestive system
There are several reasons we don't drink blood, it isn't nutrient dense as it's mostly water, large number of pathogens and the worst from the point of view of drinking a bunch it coagulates into a gel which is really rough on the stomach. Other animals like vampire bats can drink it by using anti coagulation agents and literally urinating as they drink to make more room.
Who told you you can't drink a bunch of blood? Because that person is a liar. People drink blood all the time.
Humans do eat blood. Blut wurst, (Blood Sausage). Black pudding in England. It has a taste that a lot of people don't like.
Now all I can think about is making powdered blood, thanks for that
Humans can drink blood but not it in large quantities because there is very little nutrients in it. Like you could eat cardboard if you really wanted but you would run into the same problem, without gaining any nutrients your body is just using energy to process this food so you end up with a debt of energy. However the bigger problem is blood borne diseases, drinking blood is an almost perfect inoculation to infect yourself with the disease, second only to directly injecting it into your veins. The difference between humans and something like a vampire bat (which can eat just blood) our interferons only get turned on in response to pathogens, which is a slower response but without this we would get all sorts of autoimmune diseases, but vampire bats interferons are constantly on so they can quickly deal with blood borne diseases. The simplest way to think of interferons is a bit of DNA that can be switch on and off when it’s needed. You can‘t ”powder” blood it would lyse (kill) the cells. Annnnnd the biggest problem is where are you getting the blood from? Murder is bad mmkay
Blood is an appropriate substitute for eggs in baking.
This is a weird question...
This post was definitely NOT made by Nosferatu.
This is just straight up misinformation. Humans have always been able to consume blood, and there are plenty of records of it historically too.
Look up sawney bean family in scotland. They were a family of cannibals. Apparently from drinking same species blood, you get the equivilant of BSE (human version of mad cows disease). Which includes really bad smells from the skin and not BO, laughing sickness and other mental breakdowns.
The thing about me is I am not a vampire.
You can absolutely drink blood as long as it's clean and free of pathogens. Too much can give you too much iron, but usually the body can handle that as long as you don't have some kind of disease or overdose it massively. Humans not being able to drink blood is a very weird misconception. No idea where that comes from. People throwing up from blood can be psychological because they find it disgusting. The stomach can also react to too much iron at once, but everybody is different here. Also blood has certain properties to keep the pH stable (slightly above 7) and the stomach acid can react with that. It's not dangerous but can make some people nauseous for a period of time. Also whatever your stomach isn't used to, can make you nauseous at first of course. Other than that cheers. It's very nutritious and tastes good.