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Bode Miller recently uploaded this photo to his Instagram account with the caption, “This is what they took out of my back. The doctor wouldn’t let me eat it. Looked like nerds.”  Well it looks like MensHealth had the same question we did: What the hell is that stuff? 

“So we called up Dr. Stu McGill, a professor of spine biomechanics at the University of Waterloo, and as his title suggests, one of the world’s foremost experts on the human spine. “It’s definitely curious stuff,” he says. “And I have to tell you, that’s an unusual amount of it.”

McGill says that your spine’s vertebral disks are made up of two parts: collagen fibers that are arranged in rings to form the outside of the disk, and a gel-like inner core. “Repeatedly bending your spine under load can cause those fibers to loosen and delaminate from one another, creating an opening. If repeated often enough, the inner-gel squirts out into the space for your spinal cord,” he says. “The gel is then attacked by your immune system, which turns it into that crabmeat-like substance.”

If you’re wondering why Miller’s crabmeat is blue, it doesn’t come out like that naturally. “The medical staff dyed it for some reason,” says McGill.”

You can read the full article here: MensHealth

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