In Texas we eat a lot of Mexican food, but there is one dish that has not caught on very well north of the Rio Grande: Menudo. A loose translation of Menudo is: cow’s stomach soup. Sound appetizing? I’ve tried it and it really isn’t too bad… but some North Americans just can’t bring themselves to eat stomach or “tripe”. If you ever decide to put some stomach in your stomach make sure its 2nd stomach tripe and not 1st stomach tripe… well... I’ll save the rest of that discussion for another day and move on.
If my stomach can digest stomach then why doesn’t it eat itself? In fact, why don’t the enzymes our bodies produce to break-down our food breakdown the very cells which produce them? These cells are made up of the same cellular structure as our food. So it stands to reason that our stomachs should digest themselves.
Well… God created a little cell that lines our digestive tracts by the millions. It’s called a Goblet Cell (pictured) and it releases a Mucous substance (blue in picture) to protect our internal organs from harmful substances including digestive enzymes. This cell also secretes anti-biotic and anti-viral proteins and enzymes to further protect us from what we ingest. Which do you think came first: digestive enzymes or goblet cells? Neither... they were created at the same time so we could eat without being eaten. Isn’t God amazing?