OK, I imagine one would need an energy source, let’s throw crackers in there as well, now what?
Vitamins and water? No. Add crackers, and you won’t survive, either. You’d lack essential amino acids and fatty acids, and die ugly & slowly. And unless the crackers had a lot of sodium chloride, you’d also die from hyponatremia.
Oh, and lack of potassium and calcium would get you, too. Also lack of iron.
None of those things mentioned are vitamins, so they’d not be supplied by your vitamin pills.
Of course one can! In fact, one can live without vitamins and water! Just ask the Breatharians how to do it.
–FCOD
You need calories too. Muscle movement is pretty sweet, just ask your diaphragm.
I’m fairly sure you can survive on steak and beer if you take a vitamin supplement. I’m up for an experiment, how do I get a grant for this?
I have the phrase “You can live quite happily and for some time on a diet of Guinness and a multivitamin” stuck in my head. I could have sworn it was from Cecil but I can’t find it anywhere. Am I going insane? (Don’t answer that.)
This topic keeps coming up and I’m pretty sure we always approach the conclusions that:
-Yes, it would be possible to formulate some ‘people kibble’ style foodstuff that contains everything the body needs and live off that plus water, plus perhaps a supplement containing the things that don’t keep well mixed with other stuff.
-There isn’t any simple diet consisting of two or three simple things alone (bananas and milk is the one I keep hearing) that would sustain a human in good health indefinitely.
Might you be combining this and this in your head?
Edit: Of course this thread would not be complete without a link to the Monkey Chow fella, now would it?
In grad school I knew a student who claimed he stayed alive on mixtures of vitamins and nutrients that he micxed up himself, along with bread. (They sold loaves of frozen bread dough where we were. You’d thaw out one of these dough bullets, let it rise, then bake it. Fresh, delicious bread, but not enough to live on, you’d think. He claimed he needed it for the fiber and carbs.)
He could have been cheating, I suppose, but I’d been to his apartment. He’d turned the kitchen into a vac-u-forming and solder dip factory for hissideline (but that’s another story), and his cupboard was bare of anything as mundane as foodstuff. I never saw him in any area restaurants.
It’s amazing how common the belief seems to be that the only reason we need to eat is to get vitamins, as proved by the fact that questions like this keep cropping up.
But of course you need bulk – fat, carbohdrate and protein – too. That’s what food is! Your digestive system might thank you for a bit of fibre, too – subsisting on a diet of pills and water would make going for a crap a pretty frustrating experience, I should think.
Vitamins and minerals are called “micro”-nutrients for a reason. They are complements to the “macro” nutrients that, as others have mentioned, include protein, carbs, and fat. I think lack of protein f’s up your muscles including that important one in the upper left quadrant of your chest.
If you wanted to get away cheap, given that you are taking the vitamin pills, I might guess that simply eating rice and beans would keep you going indefinitely (although, if you’re eating beans at every meal, “going” might be an unfortunate verb to use for a description). You get a complete protein that way, together with the carbs and fiber. You might wish for a fat source, but anything you added to make your diet tastier would probably provide that - say, some cheese.
Actually, you can get every essential nutritional element you need from fresh rare or raw red meat. Of course, you’re also going to get an overabundance of protein and fats versus carbohydrates, and a lot of cholesteral, but hypothetically you could survive indefinitely on a diet of rare steak…you just wouldn’t be the most healthy character.
I think you’re going to have to pick your pulses very carfully in order to get a complete protein source. “Wet” legumes and oilseeds like peanuts or soya are going to be more likely to supply complete proteins, and a reasonable amount of fats (though there are still some essential fatty acids that they won’t provide). However, you don’t need complete proteins to get all essential amino acids, nor do you need to combine vegetable proteins together in the same digestive cycle in order to “make” a complete protein. Quinoa (which is a fruit rather than a cereal, appearance to the contrary) does have a complete complement of essential amino acids (though not bound up as complete proteins) and will provide all essential acids as well as most common minerals. I believe spirulina food product also has a set of complete amino acids. These staples, combined with necessary “micronutrient” supplements (particularly sodium, phosphorus, and niacin) and essential fatty acids (nuts are probably the best non-animal sources) could provide complete nutrition indefinitely. I think you’d get awfully tired of quinoa, though; heck, I get tired of it on Day 2 of a backpacking trip.
Water, crackers, and vitamin/mineral supplements aren’t going to cut it, for reasons already stated.
Stranger
[QUOTE=CalMeacham]
. He’d turned the kitchen into a vac-u-forming and solder dip factory for hissideline (but that’s another story), and his cupboard was bare of anything as mundane as foodstuff. QUOTE]
What the HELL is “hissideline?” Google isn’t much help.
Ooooh…HIS SIDE LINE… :smack:
I thought that to get every essential nutritional element out of fresh meat you’d have to eat most of the different parts of the whole animal rather than steak? Was I mistaken?
Makes me despair for the state of general awareness and knowledge among the public. How can anyone not know this? Or, perhaps another question is in order–is the OP even in high school yet?
No, although you’re going to have to eat a lot of steak in order to get your nominal amount of carbohydrate. Your body can manufacture glucose from amino acids found in protein or fats, though not particularly efficiently and requiring excretion of toxic byproducts. Eating the liver or kidneys will give you a higher proprotion of carbs, though you’re still going to be overbalanced on proteins and fats; it’ll probably make you cranky and fiddle with your blood sugar regulation, but at least in the short term it’s not going to be seriously detrimental to health. (Long term I think it’s a poor choice, but we should shy away from debates about Atkins-type diets, since that always drags a thread down.) Fresh, uncooked red meat should have a sufficient quantity of even water-soluable vitamins that you won’t need a supplement for them, though it’s possible that you’ll need to balance minerals.
Stranger
Haha, Stranger, I think you and I had this debate like several times before. Remember, I believe the nominal amount of carbohydrates is 0 . I was referring to things like Vitamin C. How much Vitamin C is there in raw steak as opposed to say other bits of the cow/animal?
I seem to remember reading in the Guinness Book of World Records (some 1980s version) about a very obese man who went for more than a year subsisting on nothing but vitamin pills, water, coffee and tea as part of some diet plan.
Could a very large man sustain himself for that long on what he had stored up?
No.