Why can’t humans digest corn?

Corn has a means of surviving from plate to feces. The yellow tablets can appear, apparently, undigested, in the bathroom hours after they have been ingested.

This is why many wonder how corn survives the digestive system. And perhaps most importantly, should we eat hard-to-digest foods like corn?

And it turns out that the digestive system does more work than we think, so it doesn’t skip the corn, and the yellow kernels in the stool are actually just the outer husks of the corn kernel, according to Andrea Watson, a nutrition specialist at Ruminants from the University of Nebraska-Lincoln.

And corn kernels are seeds that contain valuable genetic material. The key to seed survival is the yellow outer waxy shell that protects genetic material from weather, pests, and transport.

The outer layer owes its elasticity to stiff fibers called cellulose, which humans don’t have the proper gut bacteria or enzymes to digest.

Even ruminant animals, such as cattle, better equipped to digest cellulose, can’t always fully digest corn, Watson told the Live Science website.

And while cattle don’t eat the same fluffy sweet corn that we do (they eat stronger, more mature corn that can be stored long-term), they also contain whole grains that appear in their manure.

The researchers selected the grains from the manure and analyzed their nutritional content. “It turned out that the core was digested a little bit,” Watson said.

The good news, Watson noted, is that cellulose makes up only about 10 percent of corn. So the other 90% is a beneficial food.

Corn is also a good source of dietary fiber, starch, and the antioxidants known as carotenoids, which give vegetables like corn and carrots their incredible color.

However, there are fewer carotenoids in corn compared to a typical serving of leafy greens, according to the 2019 Tufts University report.

And there is a way to make corn more digestible and completely disappear, which is processing, as Watson explained: “The more you process it, the easier it is to digest.” This applies to both humans and animals. He also noted that each processing step breaks down slightly more difficult-to-digest fiber particles, such as cooking and grinding.

In fact, most of the corn we eat is processed. Watson emphasizes that the best advice to avoid seeing whole corn kernels in the bathroom is to chew them carefully. The most important thing is that seeing corn in the stool, despite being strange, does not mean that there is any problem in the digestive system, and it is very normal.