eli5 : Why can’t we (humans) eat wood? It contains glucose, and termites can eat it for example! (Even if raw wood would be pretty hard to chew, we could mix it down into some kind of paste or powder, so idk)
In: Biology
Wood consists mostly of celulose. Our digestive tract cannot digest cellulose. The calorific value of anything else in wood makes the material a very inefficient fuel, from a human perspective. Only certain animals (like termites and beetles) can digest cellulose and metabolize it into useful energy.
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