Cecil did a column once on whether or not man could really live on bread alone. He can’t. But what about peanut butter? Say I survive the zombie apocalypse, but I can’t leave the house or someone will try to eat my brain. I’ve run out of all foods in my house except for peanut butter. What would happen to me if I ate nothing but that for, say, a month, before the last of the zombies runs out of food and rots away? (Everyone knows that’s how long it takes.) What necessary nutrients would my body be lacking? Would I get very sick? Would I die?
I don’t know how well you would be feeling, but you certainly wouldn’t die ( barring a peanut allergy) People survive on nothing but water for as long as a month. All things considered, a high protein, high fat, high calorie food like peanut butter sounds like an ideal candidate for a single food source over that period of time.
An 18-oz. jar of peanut butter provides between 3,000 and 3,200 calories and I keep a jar of it as an emergency ration in my bug-out-bag figuring it’s a very calorie dense food in the event of an emergency. Cheaper than Mainstay bars and denser than MREs. It’ll keep you going but I wouldn’t make a steady diet of it. Googling found this: What if I ate only peanut butter for the rest of my life? by by Katherine Neer:As it turns out, your diet of peanut butter would supply 21 grams of fiber – very close to the DRV at 25 grams. It would also provide enough Vitamin E and more than twice the RDI (Reference Daily Intake) of Vitamin B3 (Niacin), but you would be receiving less than one third the RDI for Vitamins B1 and B2 (Thiamin and Riboflavin). Furthermore, supplementing your diet with the required RDI of Vitamins A, C, D and K would be necessary. Night blindness, scurvy, rickets and poor blood clotting or internal bleeding have been associated with deficiencies of these vitamins, respectively. You would not be getting enough carbohydrates, either. The DRV of carbohydrates for a 2,000-calorie diet is 300 grams. The peanut butter would only supply 88 grams – less than a third of the recommended amount.
While your intake of copper and magnesium would be in-line with the DRV, you wouldn’t be getting enough calcium, iron or potassium. OK, so you might be thinking that you’ll simply take a multivitamin – problems solved. Not really – let’s take a look at fat.
The DRV for fat is 65 grams for a 2,000-calorie a day diet. There are 168 grams of fat in 21 tablespoons of peanut butter. So that’s more than two and a half times the DRV. Yikes! While a certain amount of fat is necessary for a well-balanced diet, a number of serious conditions, such as heart disease and certain cancers, have been linked to over-consumption of fat. Given that, you can see that a peanut-butter-only diet is not ideal.
Just looking at the nutritional information on a jar of peanut butter will give you a pretty good idea of this. Looking at the jar I have in my kitchen, I see it contains low amounts of iron and riboflavin (4% and 2% of your recommended daily allowance per serving, respectively) and higher amounts of vitamin E (10% per serving) and niacin (20% per serving). A serving is two tablespoons, so while you’d need to eat a lot to get your recommended amount of iron and riboflavin it wouldn’t be a totally absurd amount. My 40 oz jar contains 35 servings, so you’d need to eat most of a large jar every day to avoid iron deficiency and about 1.5 jars a day (total) to avoid riboflavin deficiency. This would mean consuming several times the recommended daily amount of fat, which would be a bad idea long term but I am guessing wouldn’t kill you in a month.
However, the label also says “Not a significant source of vitamin A, vitamin C, and calcium”, which I take to mean it has some trace amounts of these but not enough that you could plausibly get all you need just by eating peanut butter. Then there are all the things not listed at all – vitamins B6 and B12, vitamin D, potassium, and magnesium spring to mind – that peanut butter presumably does not contain even in insignificant amounts. If you were healthy and well-nourished to begin with then I doubt a month on peanut butter alone would prove fatal, but you would eventually begin suffering the effects of vitamin deficiency.
Damn, here I thought I’d come up with an original question and there is already an article written about this exact topic that I could have found by googling. I’m going to have to get more creative.
I posted the following in a thread just moments ago:
“Cecil did a column once on whether or not man could really live on bread alone. He can’t. But what about peanut butter? Say I survive the zombie apocalypse, but I can’t leave the house or someone will try to eat my brain. I’ve run out of all foods in my house except for peanut butter. What would happen to me if I ate nothing but that for, say, a month, before the last of the zombies runs out of food and rots away? (Everyone knows that’s how long it takes.) What necessary nutrients would my body be lacking? Would I get very sick? Would I die?”
As it turns out, peanut butter is probably one of the best foods I could have chosen to eat exclusively. Also, it’s delicious by itself. So, same question, but what if instead of peanut butter the only non-perishable food item left in my house was ketchup? I feel like surviving the zombie apocalypse shouldn’t be so easy. This should be much more interesting.
[Moderating]
I don’t think we need multiple threads on different foods, so I have merged them and edited the title.
Colibri
General Questions Moderator
Cool, thanks.
It has zero protein so you’re definitely going to lose muscle mass. But assuming you’re talking cases and cases of ketchup (ie, enough calories to sustain you) plus clean water, you’ll make it a month on almost anything. After a couple weeks you’ll feel pretty shitty, but you’ll make it.
I know of a child who ate nothing but parmesan cheese and drank milk, nothing else. He has severe artheritis, some kind of catarac in the eyes, muscle weakness and sees the Dr. twice a week for some kind of injection. He did this for years because the parents could not tell him no. Skinny as a rail at 12 years old and too weak to walk more than a few steps. Heartbreaking to see.
There was a thread here that said that humans could survive on Purina Monkey Chow. Apparently the dietary needs of monkeys are close enough. Makes sense as we are all primates. Are there any zoos or research labs nearby that have primates?
Also, getting an insufficient diet might be ok if you eventually get rescued or you eventually find other food. People can survive without eating every single required nutrient every single day. Eating only peanut butter might extend your life by a few months while you seek out other food while just eating nothing because you don’t have a full meal might result in you dropping dead two weeks later. There are nutrient deficiency diseases like scurvy but they don’t kill you overnight.
Was this permanent or did he regain his health after fixing his diet?
He is still suffering, his father claims he fixed his diet but I am not so sure. The milk is loaded with vitamin d which absorbs calcium and the parmesan cheese which he at by the box is the righest known food in calcium. I am almost certain he is overdosing. The Dr thinks he has a rare condition, I have to wonder if the parents ever clued the Dr in on his eating habits. I know a full year into his treatment the eating habits had not changed.
But what did he eat at school? Did his parents dutifully pack him a lunch consisting of only parmesan cheese and milk every single day for years on end?
I found this website:
http://www.helpguide.org/harvard/vitamins_and_minerals.htm
which would indicate that I don’t need to worry about vitamins A, D, E, K or B12, because the body can store them for a long time. I’ve also read in the past that it takes at least a couple of months to develop problems from lack of vitamin C or folate.
But now I’m thinking about minerals, too. I know calcium, magnesium and phosphorus are hanging out in my bones, so I can use those if absolutely necessary, correct? Sulfur’s in the amino acids in my muscles, no? What are the consequences of getting all of these from breaking down my own tissues instead of from food for a month?
And I’ll definitely be getting way more than enough sodium on either diet - is that going to become a problem in the course of a month?
According to his father he ate nothing but the parmesan and milk, so he probably did bring a box of parmesan to school with him.
And nobody had the presence of mind to call child services? Unfuckingbelievable.
I told him I was going to call his medical building and advise them and not to take it personnal. Thats when He told me he had corrected the diet. Like I said I still have doubts and am strongly considering doing what you suggest.
Going back to the peanut butter part, I would imagine if you packed enough peanut butter and added enough bottles of the missing micronutrients to cover the rest you would be more or less bored out of your skull but fine. Perhaps the cases of peanut butter, cases of MRE crackers to spread it upon and bottles of pills. I can’t imagine eating peanut butter by the spoonful, I can barely eat it in PBJ or on crackers.
Though I would be willing to bet that there is the occasional person that does the refuse to eat anything but 4 foods that would love this diet … :dubious::rolleyes:
If human diets were as rigid as some folks seem to think, we’d have died off ages ago. Yeah, it’s best if you get certain amounts of certain things, and in the long run you’ll have some health problems if you don’t, but you can go an awfully long time on just about anything as long as you’re getting Calories from it.