What are the effects of long-term cannibalism?

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For a human individual, what would be the short and long term consequences of cannibalism? I need this info for a school project...( I know it's weird.)

The worst thing is that when your food is finger licking good, sometimes you dont stop eating your own fingers...

Funny, but I needed real answers, and not even Wikipedia can provide them!!

For an individual person? Or for a society?

Edit: Also, do you mean health effects? Because I was going to mention jail time if you meant an individual.

Short term: Satiation of appetite

Long term: People stop coming to your barbecues

Semi-serious: Have a link http://www.impactlab.net/2008/08/31/why ... sm-is-bad/

Since this is in the Health forum I do believe it's looking from a health standpoint. I wasn't aware of there being any real reason to not eat human other than taboo.

If you ate enough NTs, you could turn into one.

Well, I assume the physical effects would be the same as when eating anything, you digest it then crap it back out again. And you will continue to do so everytime you cannibalise someone. What a strange thought, that someone's body could turn into someone else's excrement.

Nah, it's for an individual. And yes I'm talking about health effects. Beside there would be nobody to put the cannibals in jail in my school project, since it's a story set in post-apocalyptic Canada (emphasis on post-apocalyptic)...

There's a greater risk of disease when eating human flesh. Cooking it very well becomes more essential. Fleshes most resembling human tend to be most requiring good cooking to prevent disease. Pork is an example of such. Bushmeats are said to be more dangerous because often they're monkey or gorilla or something that's closer to human and the risk of deadly diseases increase.

A lot of diseases and infections cannot pass between species. But human to human is much more likely to spread. It's one reason human bites often end in infection. I assume that cannibals would be more likely to get seriously ill.

But that's just a guess.

http://www.rotten.com/library/death/cannibalism/
http://www.nobeliefs.com/communion/communion.htm
http://www.straightdope.com/columns/read/655/is-there-really-such-a-thing-as-cannibalism
http://www.straightdope.com/columns/read/1161/whats-really-in-spam
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kuru_%28disease%29
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vdtFk_V6A4M[/youtube]

Last edited by sgrannel on 06 Apr 2011, 8:09 pm, edited 2 times in total.

Hunger strikes?

This question has been eating at me for some time. ( rim shot)

Sorry, I couldn't resist.

Isn't there a disease similar to mad cow that can be caused from eating the brains of humans?

Yeah, that's what I was trying to think of. Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease.
Braaaaaaiiiiiiinnns

I see other people have already mentioned diseases, which was the only thing I could think of. I can't see how it would cause any other ill health effects, since it's basically just meat. Maybe constipation? Unless it was a nuclear apocalypse and you ate someone with radiation poisoning.

You'd probably get scurvy from not eating fruits, or pretty much any other nutrient deficiency that comes with only eating animal product. So what kind of crackpot psycho teacher assigned this? I would be creeped out if I was in that class.