Can you taste memories

well they would certainly destroy your brain

It's easy when you put your mind to it.

It's a prion disease. Mad Cow, Creutzfeldt-Jacob, Chronic Wasting (so far only seen in deer), and Scrapies (known of for a long time and so far limited to sheep and goats) all start with a misfolded protein and gradually break down the brain till it looks like a sponge.

It resembles mad cow disease because they're both prion diseases, which are more or less only spread by consumption of brain.

Some of the other nasty ones that keep my a little freaked out are Chronic wasting disease, aka the zombie deer disease and Fatal Insomnia , which just sounds like something straight from a horror film.

…. Just why would they do that tho?

Boofing brain

It would still go through the liver for metabolism. The only thing "boofing" effectively does is skip the stomach part of the digestive process. To take up anything from the digestive tract, it gets transported through the intestinal lumen and into the mesenteric and hepatic portal system. The liver filters everything that gets into the blood from the gut before it goes into the inferior vena cava and into the rest of the circulatory system.

Correction to clarify: the lower gut/colon mostly only takes up water and certain vitamins that are released by gut bacteria, and very small molecules like ethanol can sometimes get through as well. The very lowest part of the colon does have a vascular supply that can bypass the liver, and there are some medications designed to take advantage of the select receptors and transporters down there. However, neurotransmitters and peptide hormones (which is what OP was asking about) would likely not get taken up until it was much higher up in the digestive tract, and at that point it would go through the hepatic portal system.

Thank you to those that corrected me. Intestines are actually fairly complicated.

The liver "conjugates"/metabolises a bunch of stuff, its been almost a decade since I studied this stuff but bassically it will remove or add functional groups on/off a given compound. Most of what you eat heads straight to the liver for "processing" where food (and orally administered drugs) get altered prior to circulation. Its part of the first pass effect.

We don't actually promote higher levels of dopamine as far as I know. Dopamine agonists work by mimicing what dopamine does to your nervous system. It doesn't actually produce any more. Also you can be given dopamine intravenously. It is mostly used to raise blood pressure in newborns. But you are right. For other uses, its smarter to mimic it, because of how short it lasts.

We do, however, promote a higher concentration of serotonin with SSRIs. We do that by blocking natural inhibitors that destroy serotonin after being used. This way we can use them more before they die off.

I used to think that these hormones might break down in stomach acid as well, but then I discovered melatonin fruit gummies, which supposedly help you sleep. These gummies are what really inspired this question. (The ones I have are mango flavored, not brains flavored, btw, in case you were wondering)