Within the mechanistic worldview that shapes the way most of us view life, each human being and other living organism is seen as a discrete entity — a form that possesses and is animated by its own life.
Lives come into existence, go out of existence, and between times interact with each other, while all along retaining autonomy in varying degrees.
Human beings, as creatures whose powers have been extended and amplified through technology, supposedly possess the highest degree of autonomy, living lives steered by the exercise of our freewill.
Having become so full of ourselves we have mostly lost the sense of life forming a seamless whole. We fail to see that human being is a conceptual construct fabricated through a leap of imagination.
But this thing called life is unfathomably complex and the more we learn about it, the more we discover its interactive nature.
Just as people talk to each other and those conversations produce societies, it turns out that inside our bodies another kind of conversation — this one through molecular exchanges facilitated by exosomes — allows plant cells to “talk” to our cells and thereby regulate the homeostatic foundations of health.
GreenMedInfo reports: A groundbreaking new study published in Molecular Nutrition & Food Research titled, “Interspecies communication between plant and mouse gut host cells through edible plant derived exosome-like nanoparticles,” reveals a new way that food components ‘talk’ to animal cells by regulating gene expression and conferring significant therapeutic effects. With the recent discovery that non-coding microRNA’s in food are capable of directly altering gene expression within human physiology, this new study further concretizes the notion that the age old aphorism ‘you are what you eat’ is now consistent with cutting edge molecular biology.
This is the first study of its kind to look at the role of exosomes, small vesicles secreted by plant and animal cells that participate in intercellular communication, in interspecies (plant-animal) communication.
The study explained the biological properties of exosomes as follows:
“Exosomes are produced by a variety of mammalian cells including immune, epithelial, and tumor cells [11–15]. Exosomes play a role in intercellular communication and can transport mRNA, miRNA, bioactive lipids, and proteins between cells [16–19]. Upon contact, exosomes transfer molecules that can render new properties and/or reprogram their recipient cells.”
While most of the research on exosomes has focused on their role in pathological states such as tumor promotion, they were recently found to play a key role in stimulating regeneration within damaged cardiac tissue, and are known to be found in human breast milk, further underscoring how irreplaceable it is vis-à-vis synthesized infant formula. [Continue reading…]
