Tag: Grass digestion

Over 90% of cotton and a significant portion of plant biomass is made of cellulose, the very substance that makes grass inedible for humans. While many animals can thrive on a diet of grass, the human digestive system is fundamentally different, making our grassy lawns and meadows nutritionally useless to us. This inability to digest grass reveals a crucial difference between human physiology and that of true herbivores.

Approximately 75% of the food consumed by humans comes from plants in the grass family, such as wheat, rice, and corn, yet we cannot derive nutrition from eating leafy green grass. This paradox of why we can eat wheat but not grass is rooted in our digestive physiology, the types of carbohydrates each plant contains, and millennia of human evolution.