Both of the terms in the title are in use for different purposes than I mean, so let me define them for this thread:
Inorganic Foods: Foods that do not contain the carbon atom.
Low-Carbon Diet: A diet that is low in carbon atoms.
I had noticed, some time ago, that adenosine triphosphate (ATP) doesn’t have carbon in it. (ATP is the gasoline of the human body, being the target output of the digestive system for powering our cells.) On the other hand, fat does.
Given that we live in the real world, this strongly implies that your body can’t produce fat if you eat no carbon but, in theory, it could continue to be powered through carbon-free foods. You could gorge yourself with a cornucopia full of carbon-free items and it wouldn’t do anything to your waist.
Obviously, your body is always replacing itself - skin dies, bone wastes away, etc. - so not replenishing your carbon in order to prevent fat production would also mean no anything-else production. I’m not proposing low-carbon as an actual diet, it’s just a thought-piece.
But, anyways, the question is: What all foods that provide energy are inorganic or low in carbon? Any?
ATP is more of a energy vessel then a ‘gasoline’. It’s energy storage that uses carbon based fuel and oxygen (Though there is a anaerobic pathway that can be used if needed). More akin to a battery in the cells that are recharged by ‘burning’ carbon based molecules, and that battery self discharges very fast as ATP has a very short duration before breaking down. Or even could be considered an engine rather then a fuel.
It appears that even eating ATP wouldn’t provide energy as it’s not in the correct place to be useful and would break down before it gets there if it even could. So with that:
I don’t recognise your definition of ‘inorganic’ as it related to food either. The dictionary says
1, not consisting of or deriving from living matter.
synonyms: inanimate, not living, lifeless, dead, defunct, extinct, inert.
2, Food - not organic, where 'organic means food which is the product of a farming system which avoids the use of man-made fertilisers, pesticides; growth regulators and livestock feed additives.
AFAIK there are no proven health benefits from the consumption of organic foods.
I cannot imagine any “food” that is not carbon rich. If there was a carbon-free food, we could not make any protein, repair any tissue, or carry out any other function of life.
Incidentally, the chemist’s definition of organic changed at some point (probably 19th C) from meaning derived from living beings to containing carbon. This has nothing to do with the grocer’s entirely different definition.
Not always the best place to look for definitions, especially when the concern is how words are used in specialized fields. The following is more relevant here:
There is if we are going by the first entry in your quoted definition.
I’m sure boffking knows that and meant intentionally and in isolation (and not part of a supplement). We are more likely to sprinkle salt on our food than phosphorus or magnesium.
Aside from some other minerals we consume in trace quantities (and almost all in other foods or as dissolved salts in beverages) there are no “carbon-free” or paricularly low carbon foods. All protiens, lipids, and carbohydrates contain significant amounts of carbon, and we exhale and excrete carbon in measurable quantities continuously.
The premise of the o.p.–that one could “gorge yourself with a cornucopia full of carbon-free items and it wouldn’t do anything to your waist,” is completely false on the face of it.
I don’t know specifically what diagrams you are looking at, but in organic chemistry they often show just the bonds, with carbon implied at every corner that doesn’t have a different atom’s symbol there. Example: Steroid - Wikipedia is full of carbon.
Hydrogen gets suppressed even more – any corner on the carbon backbone that has fewer than four bonds leading in is implied to have hydrogens sucking up the extra bonds.
It isn’t clear which diagrams you are referring to, but adenosine triphosphate is made of adenine, which is a purine derivative (purine is comprise of a pyrimidine ring joined to an imidazole ring) attached to ribose (a pentose monosaccharide) which is joined to a triphosphate group by hydrogen bonding of a methyl group. Carbon rings and chains are fundamental structures in organic chemistry so in biochemistry it isn’t really considered necessary to call out carbon in the naming structure of molecules, but aside from salts and trace minerals (iron, chromium, copper, zinc, iodine, manganese and selenium) there isn’t a functioning molecule in biochemistry that isn’t built around carbon (and nitrogen).
Asking what kind of food you could eat that didn’t have carbon is like asking what kind of atmosphere you could breathe that didn’t have oxygen.
There aren’t any. We are carbon-based life forms, just like the science fiction writers say. CHON - carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, and nitrogen, are the elements of life as we know it.
I suppose we could be silicon-based, since silicon also forms lots of bonds, but we’re not.
