Born to sushi

This is interesting. It appears the Japanese are genetically better equipped to eat sushi than the rest of us. Porphyra, the red algae used to wrap Japanese sushi. It's cell walls the polysaccharide porphyran. The breakdown of porphyran requires an enzyme, porphyranase, which is produced by some marine bacteria that decompose the algae. New research appearing in Nature indicates that porphyranase is produced by gut microflora. In Japanese. Not in North Americans. This likely results from a long history of sushi-eating, through which the Japanese people have introduced this particular gut flora into their digestive tract.