Today, I’m wondering about the first question… could a rich person have this done within the law? Once someone has the concept and gets the appropriate legal waivers drawn up, and finds a physician and persuades them to do the procedure, are there any other obstacles?
Are there any laws preventing someone from getting this type of modification? Does it involve traveling to a certain part of the world with more permissive laws?
Speaking from personal experience here—ten years ago I had my stomach surgically made much smaller. About 85% of the greater curvature was removed in what’s called a vertical sleeve gastrectomy. I still have a fully-functional stomach that does everything my original equipment did, except hold a LOT of food, and stay hungry all the time. I find that I get far more pleasure from a small amount of food now than I did from huge amounts of food before, perhaps because I now actually do get a sense of fullness and satiety.
Parenteral nutrition can cause liver damage. You have to find a way to do it w/o damaging the gallbladder, liver, etc.
Plus if you bypass the digestive system you run the risk of causing loose stools if the food is not digested properly and just passes through.
If you can figure out those (and I’m sure a lot of other problems) it would be cool. The ability to eat whatever you want would be nice, but what would also be nice is being fed a more or less macronutrient and micronutrient perfect diet via TPN. You could determine what macronutrient ratios of very micronutrient dense food to pump into your system. It would make you much healthier and energetic while you eat donuts and cake all day. Sign me up when it happens.