User blog comment:LuffyPirateKing/Luffy and his belly/@comment-1595565-20121021173205/@comment-1595565-20121021201032

Teach taking Whitebeard's powers proved that what CP9 said was meant to be taken literally. Eating, as in physically taking a bite out of the actual fruit, vs what Teach did, which is absorb the powers, yields different results. We know how devil fruits respawn, and there's no way he could have extracted the actual fruit.