DNA in chocolates, not in your blood

A Coalition of Muslim NGOs have asked for Cadbury to pay for the ‘cleansing’ of the blood of Muslims to remove any traces of Pig DNA they might have consumed from having eaten Cadbury chocolates.

I’m not going to debate the religious and legal implications, just the scientific aspect. The aspect which says that the DNA of what you eat doesn’t enter your blood–and cleansing your bloodstream is an absolute waste of time, not to mention precious blood.

Every living thing on the planet is made of cells that contain DNA. Think of DNA as the instruction manual you get when you buy IKEA furniture–only this one is more complex and for your body instead of the Sofa. So obviously Pig DNA, is different from Human DNA–but not by as much as you think. We’re both mammals, which means we both have hearts, lungs, blood, give birth to our young…etc etc, and all these commonalities are encoded in the same way into our instruction manual–or DNA.

When you eat anything that lives (and plants are living creatures), you’re consuming their DNA directly into your digestive system. Don’t worry, your digestive system has a special enzyme called DNAes that works to break the DNA you consumed into tiny pieces to be shipped to different parts of your body. Once we break down DNA, the DNA of humans, pigs or even plants is almost indistinguishable from each other, because they all share the same 4 building blocks.

If you built a House and a Car out of the same Lego blocks, and then you smashed the two up, there’s no way for you to distinguish which pile of legos were the house and which pile was the car. Legos look like Legos, and the DNA building blocks are the same for Pigs, Cows, Lamb, humans–even Kangkung and Houseflies.

The Pig DNA you might have consumed from eating the Cadbury chocolate doesn’t go your bloodstream, it’s the sliced up lego blocks that go to into the blood, and those lego blocks are the same as if you had eat anything else that comes from earth.

I donate blood  3-4 times a year, and obviously I eat pork and drink beer–is my blood than ‘Haram’ for Muslims? Are the hospitals who are already short on blood going to have to make sure my blood isn’t donated to a Muslim for fear of contamination?

It’s a valid question, but one that loses its merit after you analyze the science–which these people haven’t, but SHOULD.

Your blood doesn’t need cleaning–but if you want to sue Cadbury for a whole bunch of dialysis machines–go ahead and donate them to kidney failure patients afterwards, but don’t teach bad science, there’s nothing I hate more than bad science.

I’m not debating the feelings of betrayal, there’s definitely a point there–the situation is similar to the British finding horsemeat in their food, I don’t understand why Horsemeat or Pigs are considered ‘unclean’ but food is something psychological. The emotional feeling of consuming something you consider ‘dirty’ can’t be ignored.

What’s not understandable, is bringing in the concept of ‘making the blood unclean’, that’s just bad science. And as always guys–trust the science.