Most people have thought about what they would do in the upshot of azombie Revelation of Saint John the Divine . You know where you ’d hide , what you ’d weaponize , and the destination you ’d attempt to reach . But few of us have ever thought about the scenario from the perspective of the zombies . Leaving aside the vulgarism and tragedy of their head - chomp lifestyle , is a brain - heavy dieting supply them with everything they need , nutrition - knowing ?
Food for Thought
Thanks to toss off cultivation , many multitude consociate brain - as - intellectual nourishment with zombies , or with motion-picture show likeIndiana Jones and the Temple of Doom , which presents amonkey brainas the grossest thing conceivable . But brains used to be on the menu for the non - undead a lot more than they are today .
Most culture have some version of mastermind dishes , fromtacos de sesostobrain’n’eggsto Ohio River Valleyfried mind sandwiches . The darling cookbookThe Joy Of Cookingused to featurebaked brains , boil brain , and sauteed brains(not monkey one , admittedly , or served cool down as a dessert directly out of a disembodied monkey read/write head ) .
While you may still find nous for dinner party here and there , boast as upmarket offal in " nose - to - tail " restaurants or showing up as less - upmarket farecanned in milk , it ’s a vastly less pop food than it once was . In part this comes down topeople having more choice and not everyone necessarily wanting to chow down on a chunk of goo that once housed a cow ’s thoughts , but there are wellness reason as well .
The emergence of variant Creutzfeldt - Jakob disease ( vCJD ) in the nineties did n’t do the brains - as - food industry any good . Like " mad moo-cow " disease ( a.k.a.bovine spongiform brain disorder , or BSE ) , vCJD is aprion disease , which is due to transmissible protein in the brain misfolding and causing other protein near them to abide by wooing . Today , there are much stricter natural law surrounding the storage and distribution of brains for consumption than there used to be .
Prion diseases are both very rarefied and very serious — there are only about 300 event per year in the U.S.—but they lead to neurodegeneration and death . The Fore multitude of Papua New Guinea , for example , havea tradition involving cook and eating the brain of a deceased do it one as a way offreeing their spirit . However , in the 1950s , this top to an irruption of the fatal prion diseasekuru , a neurodegenerative disorderliness characterized by tremor and uncontrollable laughing fits that stop in death .
While a slew of infectious or potentially infective cloth can be destroy by thorough cookery , prion can not . The only mode the Fore get the disease under ascendency was to give up cannibalism .
Would zombies be willing to give up consume brains ? It ’s hard to say . The approximation of the walking dead banqueting on gray matter isa newer tropethan many the great unwashed gain . George A. Romero ’s living dead film , which cemented most of the trait of zombi as we know them — shuffle , fatuous , groaning kill machines with sarcoid bit fall off them — feature them wipe out human flesh in general , with no specific part prefer . It was n’t until 1985 ’s unrelatedReturn Of The Living Deadthat the construct of zombie snacking on encephalon was codified , with one living dead specifically explaining that eating Einstein " takes aside the painfulness of being drained . "
The Problem With Brains
There ’s another progeny with brains : They ’re high in fat . This for the most part comes down to myelin , the coat on axon — those fibre that relate dissimilar parts of the brain — which mapping in a means not dissimilar to the plastic insulant on a telegram . learning ability are also very gamy in cholesterin ; Fitbit claims that1 pound of lamb ’s braincontains 20 times your daily recommended cholesterin intake .
Those numbers go right smart up for a human mastermind . " An grownup human brain weighs about 3 pounds . It would also be slightly fatty , " Monroe Turner , Ph.D. , a computational neuroscientist at the University of Texas at Dallas’sCenter for BrainHealth , tells Mental Floss . " The regions of the brain have different characteristics : grey affair is high in protein , for illustration . In white matter , the fibre tracks that connect the mental capacity cell are fat , and since there are more neuron to connect in human brains than in animal brains , it would be a fattier meal than an animate being nous . And cerebro - spinal fluid ( CSF ) might be salty . "
But brains do contain quite a lot ofvitamins and nutrients . There ’s vitamin C in there , plus B12 , iron , and niacin . " While eating a human brain would n’t aid your own mastermind , it might contribute to a balanced diet , " Turner tell . " To actually aid your mastermind , you should exercise it by apply cognitive scheme to your daily life . "
A brain is an incredible thing . you’re able to see why zombies dig ‘ em so much .
The Verdict
Which brings us back to the question of the nutritional note value of feed brains . The bottom line is , it ’s not really possible for a zombie to maintain a good for you lifestyle — well , as sizeable a lifestyle as an undead homo can have — by munching mostly on human brains . The high cholesterol will do them no favour prospicient - term , and evaporation will likely be an upshot give the salinity content of cerebrospinal fluid and blood . All of which really gives you something to think about while they ’re tear you apart .
