Let’s imagine the country of Doperstan has decided that the cost of providing the food to the prisons is not expensive, but the labour necessary to serve the prisoners is. As such, the chief of prisons decrees that from now on prisoners will get 1 meal a week, may not take food back to their cells, but may eat their fill whilst in the dining area.
How likely is a life sentence prisoner likely to survive/keep healthy assuming that for a 3 hour period every Tuesday afternoon (s)he has the ability to eat whatever (s)he wants from a good selection of meats, fruits, breads, grains, vegetables etc. but the rest of the week can only consume water? This is likely to happen for the rest of their life.
The rest of their life is going to be pretty short.
You can live on one meal a day, but one meal a week isn’t going to work. The human body just doesn’t store enough energy from meals to go that long without eating. After about 24 hours, the body’s immediate reserves of energy are used up and the body will start to go into starvation mode.
I’d expect some rather dramatic weight loss ending in death in a few months at the most.
I do not think a three-hour sustained meal once a week will keep you alive very long. Humans cannot store nutrients; they require regular replenishment. The body will also shut down between those meals, making it more difficult for the body to take in that much food and absorb what is needed to sustain life.
Personal anecdote. Take it for what it’s worth.
I just got over respiratory flu the past two weeks. I was drinking all the water I could (not much) and a can of 7-Up every day. I was able to only eat a bowl of chicken noodle soup a day. Nothing else. I didn’t feel like eating and I wasn’t hungry. My exercise was limited to little movement around the house, and plenty of sleep, when I wasn’t wracked with severe aches and pains.
I dropped 20 pounds, and no, the bulk was not water weight loss. My doctor said I have a very healthy immune system and a strong disposition. He also said most others with the strain of flu I had would either be hospitalized, or dead.
Surely the person would die within weeks or months.
If the body requires 2,000 calories a day, and a week has seven days, that’s 14,000 calories required a week. It’s quite hard to consume more than, say, 6,000 calories in one meal, and that would already be a super-gorging meal. That’s a deficit of 8,000 calories per week. That’s a path to starvation and death.
Plus, as others mentioned above, human bodies don’t store energy like polar bears preparing for hibernation, or camels in the desert. People need constant meals. So one way or another, the subject in Doperstan will die pretty soon.
The problem here is that it is protein that can’t be stored, and some species cannot recycle proteins very well … proteins are the structural part of the body and in humans there’s a need for a constant supply of the amino acids to which the proteins are built …
Sure, a week’s worth of protein can be eaten in one sitting … and this will be used extensively that day … but the excess it then eliminated leaving tomorrow’s need unfulfilled …
It doesn’t matter how healthy and effective Duckster’s immune system is during his recent illness … without the thrice daily input of protein then such immune system won’t have the basic materials to build the antibodies needed to fight the infection … the flu bug is trying to kill you, so of course it’s telling you not to eat …
Also, I don’t see any accommodation to making sure your one meal a week contains an adequate provision of micronutrients, like vitamins and minerals. Not a nutritionist, but I have to wonder of you can eat enough in a single 3-hour sitting per 168 hours to absorb and store all the vitamins you need. Vitamin C can’t be stored, for instance; any significant overload is pissed out. Your one-meal-a-week would leave you C-deficient several days of the week. Hello, scurvy!
Not to derail the thread, but I thought that the lack of appetite during illness was the **body **trying to focus attention on killing the infection and not spending energy or resources on things like digesting food? That not eating would be better for countering an illness than eating?
The flu bug definitely isn’t trying to kill you. It’s trying to reproduce and find more hosts. Your possible death is just unfortunate collateral damage, and generally, not a good thing for “bugs” who will be happier in your hot and comfy lungs throwing out their kids and grandkids each time you cough than in your cold, dead body buried under 9 feet of soil. The most successfull, like the common cold viruses, will barely affect your health, while propagating like crazy.
Some parasites need their host to die in order to complete their life cycle, but I’m not sure it’s the case of any bacteria or virus.
This is nonsense. Reduced appetite during a flu bout is a defense mechanism which allows the body to devote additional resources to the immune response. Influenza does not tell the body “not to eat.”
This may be true though defies common sense. Yes, digestion takes some energy but if it took more energy than it provided then none of us would be here.
Short term priorities don’t need to be the same as long-term ones.
Also, your body can’t necessarily tell what the problem is. It’s not like it diagnoses itself with the flu and goes about a specific process to defeat the flu. There are just lots of chemical pathways that get triggered and do their thing, and some of those pathways are actually useful for other purposes.
Lots of ailments kill your appetite because they might be caused by tainted food, and it’s better to go without than to not.
Like the reason you get nauseous when you get dizzy is that being dizzy is something that can be caused by ingesting neurotoxins, and your body isn’t taking chances, it’s getting whatever you just ate the hell out of there.
If (numbers plucked out of air) your 1000 calorie meal takes 200cal and an hour to process, but slow-releases 100cal an hour for the next 8 hours, you will indeed have a 100cal deficit while it’s digesting, even though overall you benefit.
That’s certainly what I find - if I try to eat when exhausted, my body will make me get rid of it at once, even if I’m not officially “sick” with anything
This is false. It takes about 4 days at least before the body enters ‘starvation mode’, which is the point where your fasting starts to become detrimental to your health. You could extend this period of time with practice.
But unless you’re a short and naturally thin woman, eating the maximum amount of calories your stomach could handle in one sitting, whilst simultaneously covering your nutritional basis to the best if your capability… and literally did nothing but meditate and sleep 16 hours a day… you’ll end up resembling Christian Bale in The Machinist…
He ate an apple and a tin of tuna a day for a few months to lose 65 pounds. You could definitely surpass that in calories in a 3 hour sitting, but then again, his health was on the rapidly downward spiral side of things…
If you burn 3,000 calories a day, you need to eat 21,000 in a week. Nobody except the best competitive eaters can put down 21,000 calories in one meal.
Also, if you are only eating one day a week I would assume your digestive system would become bad at handling food, so bingeing once a week could cause issues after starving for 6 days.
Nobody can eat 21000 calories in one sitting/day. You’d need the most amount of calories in the smallest mass possible; or in other words… something like 30 Big Macs in a day?
The digestive system actually prefers less meals. Our typical ‘eat little and often’ approach to dieting, or the ‘3 meals a day’ mantra is basically not allowing our digestive system a chance to recover - it’s always working.
If we could theoretically consume enough calories and nutrients a week via one meal, our shits would pass through without fuss and the smell would be undetectable.
fasting, or going the majority of the day without eating is a way to prevent/mange IBS and other such illnesses.
It’s also common for the ‘flu’ to mess up your sense of smell & taste, enough that you don’t get the normal reactions that trigger your appetite – you don’t get that wonderful smell of food cooking, and nothing seems to have much taste – so your normal appetite is suppressed.
Right - there’s nothing “malicious” about the bacteria or virus; it’s just doing what it does. It’s not intelligent enough to purposefully want to kill a human.