Some of my Japanese friends blamed stomach enzymes for their redder faces when we drank. It could be that different enzymes also affect ability to digest seaweed:

"Microbes that dwell in the guts of Japanese people but not in North Americans have some of the same seaweed-digesting enzymes as [a] marine bacterium". They assume it evolved from centuries of eating raw seaweed. It could mean that Japanese are able to get nutrition from seaweed in ways that North Americans cannot. http://news.sciencemag.org/sciencenow/20...sushi.html

I cook a lot of seaweed bc my Japanese mom told me it was good for me. I wonder if this means I no longer have to eat the weird green veggies on my plate. :-)

(trivia - the article mentions that seaweed was used as currency in 8th century Japan. The counterfeiters must have loved that)

Interesting.

Also: Rice Responsible for Asians' Alcohol Flush Reaction, Research Finds

First, thank you Thora for linking the article, which brings up a major problem in popular science. Let me explain...

The article is hardly conclusive. A sample size of 18 North Americans and 13 Japanese people. Really?! Most likely, the research has just started and the article is hyping up the initial findings.

The hype of the article highlights the bigger issue of irresponsible popular science magazines and websites that report inconclusive findings as groundbreaking. This sort of journalism encourages misunderstanding and exploitation. I still hear people mention how kids are better at language learning and that one side of the brain is creative and the other is logical. And I can't even count the number of "health" products that have claimed that they offer benefits "tested by science," when in reality they are based on incomplete or poorly designed studies. For these reasons, I think it is best to approach popular science carefully.

Please excuse me for standing on a soap box. Deceitful journalism sometimes brings out the activist in me.

This can be useful research if it can lead to something that develops the ability to digest seaweed better.

Not sure of the after effects, but don't we have products to aid digestion of milk, beans, pasta and other foods that some people have a biological aversion to? Something to aid the nutritional digestion of seaweed sounds pretty useful.

However, I really really hate it when news shows take some scientific result that applies to a small but noticeable percentage then pimps it up like it's an across the board application.

[edit: @vileru] aww....killjoy. I just love a 3-paragraph story that goes from 8th century seaweed money to 21st century computerized genome matching! Especially when it stops along the way for some riveting miso soup strong bug competitions and bug gene jumping! (I just ignored all the speculative language.) But thanks for the heads up. I promise to keep eating my weird green veggies.

@Nest0r - Interested how they were able to connect it to the distribution of rice cultivation. Genetic adaptation to culture...hmm

Nukemarine Wrote:Not sure of the after effects, but don't we have products to aid digestion of milk, beans, pasta and other foods that some people have a biological aversion to?

I don't know if this is true, but I'd heard that milk-drinking cultures might have evolved to tolerate cow's milk. This was given as a possible reason for a higher incidence of lactose intolerance in Japan. Kind of the reverse of this seaweed story.

Thora Wrote:

Nukemarine Wrote:Not sure of the after effects, but don't we have products to aid digestion of milk, beans, pasta and other foods that some people have a biological aversion to?

I don't know if this is true, but I'd heard that milk-drinking cultures might have evolved to tolerate cow's milk. This was given as a possible reason for a higher incidence of lactose intolerance in Japan. Kind of the reverse of this seaweed story.

It's true. Some Eurasian groups (mostly Europeans, I think) developed a mutation that prevented them from ceasing production of lactase (?) (enzyme thingie that allows digestion of lactose) after they were weaned/grew up.

It would be interesting to see if these microbes exist in people from other seaweed eating cultures, such as Korea and... er... Wales?