Re: Sunday lunch for Vegans?
Originally Posted by
OldGreyFox
->
The appendix has not actually become redundant Xandra, just because we couldn't find it's use doesn't mean it didn't have one.
And here is the latest study as to what your Appendix really does......
Maintaining gut flora
A possible function of the human appendix is a "safe house" for beneficial bacteria in the recovery from diarrhea
Although it has been long accepted that the immune tissue surrounding the appendix and elsewhere in the gut—called gut-associated lymphoid tissue—carries out a number of important functions, explanations were lacking for the distinctive shape of the appendix and its apparent lack of specific importance and function as judged by an absence of side effects following its removal. Therefore, the notion that the appendix is only vestigial became widely held.
William Parker, Randy Bollinger, and colleagues at Duke University proposed in 2007 that the appendix serves as a haven for useful bacteria when illness flushes the bacteria from the rest of the intestines. This proposition is based on an understanding that emerged by the early 2000s of how the immune system supports the growth of beneficial intestinal bacteria,in combination with many well-known features of the appendix, including its architecture, its location just below the normal one-way flow of food and germs in the large intestine, and its association with copious amounts of immune tissue. Research performed at Winthrop–University Hospital showed that individuals without an appendix were four times as likely to have a recurrence of Clostridium difficile colitis. The appendix, therefore, may act as a "safe house" for beneficial bacteria. This reservoir of bacteria could then serve to repopulate the gut flora in the digestive system following a bout of dysentery or cholera or to boost it following a milder gastrointestinal illness.
Thats a ncomprehensive study of the appendix you posted OGF l
learnt quite a bit from that.
But l also thought that the main purpose of that organ was to help
us to digest raw foods, including meat in the times before we
discovered cooking, since we started cooking our food the appendix
has not had much work to do, and so has atrophied somewhat,
leading to the assumption it is unnecassary?
I suppose as humans become more sedentary and lazy more things
will fall off!
Donkeyman!