system
Given the following post, respond as if you're commenting on Reddit:
human
Is it possible to introduce cellulase to the human body? And could it help end hunger by allowing starving people to gain nutrition from common plants?

In bio 101 my teacher told us that termites have bacteria in their intestines that contain cellulase, which allow the insects to live off of wood.

My first though was what if we could do that in the human body and allow desperate people to gain nutrition from fibrous plant material.
gpt
Actually some of the bacteria in your gut do break down some of the cellulose. There are a couple of problems with improving this process. The most basic is that it is not easy to introduce bacteria to get established within your gut, that is why probiotics haven't proved as effective as people would have liked. The second is that our guts are designed to need a significant amount of non-digestible material to keep everything going. The third is that you would have to compete with the bacteria for the end products (ie glucose). In the large intestine where most of the bacterial breakdown of things occur it isn't nearly as efficient at taking up sugars as in the small intestine, so most of it would just be consumed by the bacteria themselves.

edit: though if they were fermenting the sugars to short chain fatty acids we could extract some nutritional value, but the residency time of the cellulose within our gut probably isn't going to be long enough for this to be a large amount.