Can one survive on a diet of multi-vitamins and water?

If so, for how long, and what effects will it have on the body?

Not looking to try it, just curious.

I’m guessing no. You still need proteins, fats, and carbohydrates. Some fiber and minerals wouldn’t hurt either.

A tyical person can live for about a month on stores of fat, carbohydrates, and protein in their system, assuming they get enough water, vitamins, AND minerals. With only vitamins, serious complications will probably wrise before the end of the month. Salt (NaCl) is a VERY important to the body (which breaks it down to sodium and chloride, very important electrolytes.) Assuming the multivitamin was a good one and had several minerals as well (such as sodium, calcium, potassium, etc.) then you could probably live for about a month. Obviously a heavier person will be able to last longer than a skinny person, but you get the idea.

Could you do it by pills alone though? Are such things available?

Or would it all become so complicated that ultimately the most convenient source for all the necessary stuff is just ordinary food?

I know you can certainly get pills for use as fiber supplements… as far as “salt pills” those are made too. My grandfather used to be issued them when he had a factory job and worked under extreme heat conditions. Getting carbohydrates and fat into pill form shouldn’t be too hard. Am I missing anything?

I agree with just about everything here. The dietary requirements of your body can’t be met with a multi-vitamin along with some water. Major requirements are, as above, protein, carbohydrates (interchangable with fats, broken down into less complex sugars). If the multivitamin contained the right amino acids, protein could be synthesized, but the lack of sugars from fats/carbohydrates would kill you very quickly, sped up by the lack of the proper ions (read: electrolytes) your nervous system and endocrine system need to survive. Let us know how it goes though.

So are you saying that if you can get all of the body’s requirements in pill form (with the exception of water - - I can drink water - lol), it could work? Are there pills for each of the requirements (multivitamin - yes; amino acids - yes; sugar - yes; salt - yes…what else?)? Electrolytes?

I’m curious, because (despite it sounding like something from a Sci-Fi movie), I’d rather take a series of pills each day for sustenance rather than decide what foods to eat when and how much, etc.

Hm - this is interesting to me, as in my biology class we’re moving from a unit on the nervous system to a unit on nutrition, etc.

I know that you need calcium for both bone density and your nervous system, and you also need sodium and potassium for your nervous system. What would happen, though, if you went without other minerals (or vitamins, for that matter?) I’m looking at the nutritional information on a PowerBar right now, it has 100% of my daily value of biotin, but only 20% of my DV of chromium. Are all these things really essential for life?

No. The above regimen has no food. Without food, one starves to death. Google “starvation” and you’ll find out what happens without food.

QtM, MD

<snort> Yer funny.

This kind of statement comes up quite frequently on these boards and I cannot for the life of me understand it; you’d rather swallow handfuls and handfuls (yes, that many, really) of tasteless pills every day than eat real food? The monotony would kill me before any malnutrition had a chance to set in.

In theory, I guess it you just put all you need into pills, it could be done, but that’s a LOT of pills. To put it into perspective:

Just today in my physiology class, the prof. showed us a bag which contained in it the amount of glucose your brain typically uses in a day. I’m not good with guessing weight or volume, but I’d say it was almost an entire CUP of glucose, and that’s just your brain! You muscles use much more than that. So, for just the amount of glucose (sugar) needed for just your brain for one day you would need to take almost an entire cup of pills. Maybe it’s just me, but I’d much rather eat a baked potato and a snickers.

Exactly - you’d need **lots and lots ** of pills. These sci-fi scenarios of a day’s food being compressed into one or two little pills are just ridiculous.

Even just for a 2,000 calorie diet, recommended amounts are still about 300g (11oz) of carbohydrate, up to 65g (2.5oz) of fat, 50g (2oz) of protein and 25g (1oz) of fibre. (Cite)

So that’s a whole pound of pills right there, even without allowing for the excipients (stuff that forms the active ingredients into usable pills).

I don’t know where the idea that it’s only the vitamins that you “really” need came from. Humans need lots of fuel!

No and why would you want to? I know two people who have to take dozens of pills a day for medical reasons, and it’s a royal pain in the ass.

Stick with food–it’s much more enjoyable.

Maybe people think they can just live off their fat stores, like camels do? :smiley:

I don’t know why people would want to live off pills either. Surely you’d feel hungry all the time due to the lack of mass in the stomach? Or would you get your stomach stapled down to the size of a postage stamp to prevent overeating?

Of course, if you just wanted to take one pill

Lord, I hope that’s not meant to be a suppository …

Wow! I haven’t killed a thread in a while …

We discussed this a bit a few months ago but I can’t find the thread. I dug up a reference from the Guinness Book regarding a man who under medical supervision, in a hospital, survived on a diet of water, tea, coffee and vitamins for just over a year, slimming from over 400 pounds to a more normal body weight (around 160-180 IIRC). If you do the math for the weight loss (in terms of what his caloric intake might have been before and what it went down to) then it works out about right given his starting and ending weights.

So yes you could survive for longer than you might think but that’s assuming that you’ve got a lot of body fat to burn through (so technically your diet isn’t just water and vitamins anymore). For a normal person I think you wouldn’t make it long, like Qadgop said.