Naked Science Forum

Life Sciences => Physiology & Medicine => Topic started by: JessicaH on 19/02/2009 09:30:02

Title: Do we need DNA in a healthy diet?
Post by: JessicaH on 19/02/2009 09:30:02: JessicaH asked the Naked Scientists:

Naked Scientists,
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Thanks for the informative and entertaining shows (http://www.thenakedscientists.com/HTML/podcasts/) each week! Â
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Is DNA an essential part of the diet? Â You always hear that proteins are important in your diet so you can make your own proteins, but does the same logic work for DNA? Â
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Could you have a DNA deficiency if you somehow could subsist on synthetic sources of Â fats, proteins, carbohydrates, and vitamin pills?
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To lapse into some Â science-speak, I mean does your stomach Â break down the DNA of the fruits, veggies, and proteins we eat into nucleotides and re-use them?
Â
Jessica
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South Carolina, USA

What do you think?
Title: Do we need DNA in a healthy diet?
Post by: Chemistry4me on 19/02/2009 09:36:45: I don't see how DNA can't be a part of the diet [???][???]
Title: Do we need DNA in a healthy diet?
Post by: Jessica H on 08/09/2009 19:58:02: I meant this more as a hypothetical situation, but that's actually interesting to think of how you can eat without eating DNA. Here's my menu:

Take a bottle of Sports Drink and add some purified vegetable oil and protein powder mix. Drink with a complement of vitamin pills. Perhaps for dessert, eat purified lard.

In this case you'd get carbohydrates and electrolytes from the Sports drinks, fats from the oil and lard, protein from the powder mix, and hopefully most of the essential vitamins and nutrients from the pills.

So could someone live very long on a totally synthetic diet like this?

And I'm still wondering where nucleotides come from!
Title: Do we need DNA in a healthy diet?
Post by: Nizzle on 11/09/2009 13:40:59: Human beings have all the necessary proteins for a complete nucleotide synthesis and breakdown.
In other words, no we don't require DNA in our diet.