All corn is not sweet corn although the corn people eat is sweet corn.
Dent corn is a type of corn that is not sweet.
Dent corn has a high starch and low sugar content, which means it's not sweet and juicy like the corn you buy to eat from the grocery store or farmers market.
Because it's not meant to be eaten fresh, dent corn is harvested in its mature stage when the kernels are dry and then processed.
You can eat corn raw although most people prefer to eat corn cooked.
Eating raw corn is healthy, tasty, and completely risk-free.
Just make sure to source the freshest possible corn and clean it thoroughly before you put it in your vegan dish or munch it straight from the cob.
We can digest some parts of corn but not all of it and corn still is nutritious to eat.
Although we cannot digest corn fully we still eat corn as the corn does have other nutrients and compounds that our bodies can and do breakdown and digest.
So while our bodies don't fully digest the corn we do still get some benefits from the corn and it does provide us with some nutrition.
Corn is high in cellulose, which is an insoluble fiber that the body cannot digest.
However, the body breaks down the other components of corn.
Chewing corn for longer can also help the digestive system break down cellulose walls to access more of the nutrients.
Corn might look untouched when it passes out in your stool.
But your body does digest parts of it.
The outer skin of the kernel contains cellulose, which your body can't break down.
The fact that it's hard to break down corn is actually ideal for the plant.
The outer coating owes its resilience to a tough fiber called cellulose, which humans don't have the proper enzymes or gut bacteria to digest.
Nutritionally speaking you could not survive on corn because if you tried to survive on a diet of nothing but corn you'd soon die of malnutrition, initially succumbing to diarrhea and mental deficiencies, depression, skin lesions and over a longer period of time, developing full-blown pellagra due to a lack of niacian/Vitamin B3.