It might interest you to know that we do eat wood when we eat that sprinkled parmesan or romano cheese in the plastic containers: It contains wood to prevent the cheese from clumping (and it counts as fiber)
The study that your article references is a mouse study, so the relevance to humans is questionable.
In addition, fiber is shown to be beneficial to humans primarily when comparing the standard American diet to a high-fiber diet. This is likely because fiber is mostly non-digestable by humans (as we’ve lost the ability to digest fiber more than 2-million years ago unlike our closest living great-ape cousins), and acts as a physical barrier to the absorption of sugars and starches which also helps to lower insulin spikes.
If you do not eat a high-carb diet (such as a ketogenic diet), then eliminating the undigestable matter (i.e. fiber) from your diet is probably beneficial because you’ll be able to absorb more nutrients and get rid of constipation-related issues.
Maple syrup is tree blood. Kind like tree vampirism.
I don’t think wood smells like food. But I wonder… apparently termites have a bunch of gut bacteria to digest wood. Maybe if you eat raw termites and bark beetles, you can then eat some sawdust. If you continue the process eventually you may be able to eat wood or paper with your own gut biome. Maybe start with a termite, sawdust, and banana smoothie and move up from there. Best of luck.
It only gets boiled down to pure sugar. You boil off or break down a lot of the aromatics and volatiles in the original sap to make syrup. It gets processed by boiling to concentrate the sugar and reduce the presence of the rest of what the tree was living on. Maple sap does not become “pure sugar” (maple syrup) until after it gets the good stuff processed out.
We can, and do, eat wood. It’s listed as “cellulose” in the ingredients, and it’s in everything. Your ice cream, your bread, probably up in yo closet doin your Mamma right now