Eat your Marijuana or No Ice Cream!

[Medical Marijuana]

Feeding children marijuana seeds sounds like a pretty good idea to me. Firstly, they contain very little THC to get the babies all high and potentially do something funny to their rapidly developing brains. Secondly, seeds otherwise introduce an unforgivable harshness to the dubbie, dude. Why aren’t we giving infants this wonder seed? The answer is simple: because, in America and Old Europe, we aren’t all so starved that we have been reduced to feeding our children the seeds of discarded industrial sources of fabric and paper. In other fine nations struggling with the diminutive size of their buffet tables however, this may be more of an issue.



So, the burning question is, can we actually feed children hemp seed? The answer is of course; unfortunately they’ll die eventually of malnutrition if you don’t feed them something else. It is a very rich source of omega-3 and omega-6 fatty acids as well as polyunsaturated fats, so they’ll at least go out with gorgeous hair and skin. The protein content is very high, but is it high enough in all essential amino acids? Chuan-He Tang and friends explored that idea in their recent J. Agric. Food Chem article (2006, 54, 8945-8950). The results of their study indicate that feeding infants hemp seed extract as a sole source of food will deprive them of amino acids they may otherwise need to continue to live. Adults, on the other hand, can survive on hemp oils just fine, so long as they have some other source of protein, which they can easily get by eating other people. Apparently hemp seed is a great way to get all those good fats starving people need, but the protein in them doesn’t dissolve well and thus may not be biologically accessible. It nevertheless contains everything an adult needs with the exception of tryptophan and a few vitamins and minerals.



Modification of the Hemp plant to produce seeds with greater protein solubility and increased lysine would be a good first step in alleviating malnutrition around the world, though we can do this with soy beans just as easily. The conclusion? Well, if you’ve got the munchies from smoking part of the plant, you can eat the rest and it’ll keep you healthy for a little while.

Source: Eat Your Marijuana or no Ice Cream! | The Chem Blog