Re: Can bugs crawl into your mouth while sleeping?

Hi Tracy,

Bugs are edible treats

All over the world people eat insects and spiders, which are quite nutritious. In southern Africa, termites are extremely popular and when they emerge at the beginning of the rainy season, many people go out to collect them. The termites are then cooked and sold on street stalls. In China they eat silkworm larvae and, in South America, indigenous people eat tarantulas. There are many more examples that I could provide for you. All these animals contain large amounts of protein. In the West, we disregard these animals as a source of food and this is our loss.

Do we eat bugs without knowing it?

The fact is that we are eating bug bits all the time in our food. In the USA, the FDA allows a certain level of insect fragments to be present in food and you can check this out at this out at the Center for Food Safety and Applied Nutrition.

Rumours to fact to garbage

It often happens that a totally crass scientific-sounding statement is made, which then becomes repeated over and over again, regardless of whether there is valid scientific evidence to support it. Sometimes such statements become accepted as fact until someone debunks the statement and it then becomes accepted as scientific garbage.

I have read elsewhere about humans eating eight spiders a year in our sleep without knowing it and I think this fits into the rumour to fact to garbage model. I find it hard to believe that a group of people in different sleeping situations have been filmed for a year or more to validate this statement. It is possible for a spider to walk into your mouth and trigger the swallowing mechanism started at the back of the throat. I would not be surprised to find out that this did in fact occur on a rare occasion. It may even be true that there are a few people out there who have unknowingly eaten eight spiders in the last twelve months. This still would not make such a generalisation be considered as reasonable.

Why vacuum up spiders when we can just eat them?

In my humble opinion, I think your breathing would most likely put off any spider from entering your mouth. You also move around a fair bit in your sleep, which would be enough to ensure that spiders did not generally remain in close proximity to you. Therefore, I consider the above statement to be most unlikely and if anybody can prove me wrong on this, then they should pose a question to me through MadSci Network. Such statements only help to perpetuate phobias against maligned animals.

By the way, I welcome spiders in my sleeping quarters because they eat up other unwanted bugs.