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Post by shaydeesnail on Feb 3, 2013 22:58:02 GMT
I have a bag of this to take as a supplement, I've read that bee pollen is so nutritious that water and bee pollen alone could sustain a person.
So I'm wondering, would a little bit be good for the snails perhaps? In mashes and for when I'm away for a few days. I'm not sure if they'd like it on it's own, but before I try it I'd like to know if anyone knows any reason why it might be dangerous?
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Post by pinkunicorn on Feb 4, 2013 8:39:26 GMT
It's unfortunately an urban myth that pollen could sustain a human. It's first of all very difficult to digest by most animals (even hummingbirds have difficulty and digest only a small amount despite consuming it regularly), you basically need to be able to crack the individual pollen open and suck out the contents in order to get nutritional value from it. Like some beetles do. Or stick your sucking needle thingy into a pollen to again suck the contents out, like some mosquitoes do. Or have the right kind of digestive enzymes in your gut to break through the pollen wall, or eat some extra trichomes to help crush the pollen in your digestive system, or pregerminate the pollen with enzymes before digesting it... all methods that humans lack naturally, which would suggest that pollen is not human food.
Second thing is that the nutritional contents of pollen have been wildly exaggerated. It sounds really good to say "60% protein and every nutrient needed to sustain life", but what the swindlers don't mention is that many other commonly eaten foods contain exactly the same. Nigh everything originating from plants contains "everything needed to sustain life", just in differing quantities. The trick is to pick the ones that meet your particular biological needs, whatever species you happen to be, beetle, snail or ape.
Pollen is really good for the species that evolved eating it and evolved to eat it (both always simultaneously). I can't find a trustworthy source of exact pollen contents*, but it's safe to say it does not have anywhere near the amount of nutrients needed to sustain human life over any periods (mind that humans can survive without any nutrition for a while in starvation mode; I'm talking of normal sustaining that includes maintaining a stable body weight). Often in our diet-crazed days people forget that calories are a necessity to life, and "60% protein" of something minuscule doesn't provide much calories at all; protein isn't an energy nutrient to begin with, it's catabolic (uses more energy to digest than it gives) on its own! With a reasonable amount of sugars included in the pollen you'd need to eat at lesst 625 grams (way over a pound) of pollen a day just to get the amount of calories a normal weighted, medium activity woman needs to maintain her weight and normal body functions (assuming 1tsp pollen is 16kcal), much more if we assume "up to 60% protein" as I've seen advertised. Men and very active people would need more.
And that's just the macronutrient side; I do recall reading reports that stated micronutrients of pollen have been grossly overstated as well, but I can't find a good one for reference right now (too early to engage my google-fu longer than one page).
Anyway, just the laws of thermodynamics (energy in / energy out, to put it simply for this subject) prove that bee pollen cannot possibly sustain human life. Beetle life, absolutely. It would be impossible for a human to eat the required amounts of bee pollen to gain enough nutrition to sustain life, the amounts are not feasible. And even then it's suspicious as it's difficult to say exactly what specific pollen contains without a well-equipped laboratory.
Sorry if I went off rambling there. Just wanted to put down some rational reasons for my statement "bee pollen being nutritious is an urban myth". It's a snakeoil salesman's dream come true, sorry. It does sound good but anything that sounds that good... rarely is.
I'm not aware of any snails that feed on pollen specifically, but I would not be surprised if there are species that do feed on pollen. I can't imagine pollen being particularly beneficial to species that don't feed on it in nature, for the same reasons as mentioned in my rant there. Snails unlike humans can digest fibre (cellulose) so they might get something out of pollen, if they can get through the other pollen walls, but the average garden snail does not have any obvious means to do so. You do see snails eating the centres of flowers, but since there are other things than pollen in flowers it's hard to say exactly what they are eating. Is it pollen in particular or by accident? It might be by accident; I recall now some research done on slugs' diets, by checking their poo for undigested residue such as pollen. The pollen being undigested says at least those slugs could not get much out of it.
What pollen might be good for is reducing allergies. It contains a foreign protein, which may trigger a reaction in your body. There's a hypothesis that purposefully causing the body a mild allergic reaction repeatedly might make the individual more resistant to "real" allergic reactions, meaning when you get stung by a bee for example it might hurt less and be less likely to cause serious symptoms. It's kind of like weight-training for the immune system; irritate the "muscle" by breaking it down and damaging it in order to make it stronger in the long run. But this isn't really applicable to snails of course.
* The reason for this appears to be the sheer impossibility of getting an average for pollen nutritional content. It can vary wildly, between countries, regions, individual hives and even in the same hive at different times of the day, every blob of bee pollen is different. Reason: different plants' pollen has different nutritional contents before collection, and it's impossible to make the bees collect only this or that plant. So any values given by manufacturers are pure and simple guesses. They do not have the resources to individually test every single collected batch from every single hive for commercial purposes, nobody has. So whatever a product claims to have has no proof whatsoever.
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Post by pinkunicorn on Feb 4, 2013 9:09:11 GMT
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