Can you live off of only rice and water? I think in China the monks only eat rice and drink water but I am not sure. Thanks for any help =).
Nope, you can’t live off rice and water. Rice protein is incomplete, meaning it lacks a couple of essential amono acids. Without some alternative source of these AAs you will die of various nasty malnutritive diseases. Rice also lacks several important vitamins such as B12.
China is a big place with several diverse cultures, but in general the more traditional Buddhist monks beg additional food, accepting whatever they can get. This will quite often include milk, beans etc. So although I don’t doubt their are some monastaries that only grow rice they have an alternative supply of essential foodstuffs.
IIRC brown rice has complete protein. That fact is what led to the macrobiotic fallacy that one can live on rice alone. One problem is that the complete proteins are a very small percentage of the mass of the rice. The other, already noted by Gaspode, is that rice, brown or white, is a poor source of vitamins. Some vitamin B-12 can be added to one’s diet by eating dirt. I don’t know about other vitamins in dirt. Personally, I’ll stick to fruits, vegetables, and vitamin supplements.
I can’t imagine that rice, brown or white, could be that high in vitamin C. Without it they would all die of scurvy.
Brown rice does contain trace amount of AA’s not available in most other grains, but the levels are very low. Added to this the amino acids are contained largely within the bran, making them exceedingly difficult for the human body to digest. ‘Macrobiotic’ rice products are usually treated with special enzymes to digest the bran and release the AAs, and entirely by accident the enzymes themselves are left behind during processing, increasing the AA levels still further. Unless things have changed dramatically in the last 10 years then it is considered at best highly unlikely that a person could ever eat enough rice to obtain sufficient essential AAs. For all intents and purposes rice is an incomplete protein source. Incidentally there is no such thing as a truly incomplete protein source, all whole foods contain at least trace amounts of all essential AAs, the term incomplete refers instead to the ability of the body to obtain these AAs.
Uncooked rice is sufficiently high in vit C that scurvy could be prevented, at least in theory, but cooking will destroy it. Uncooked brown rice is largely indigestible, and the essential AAs would be even less accesible. This means you would need to eat large amounts of both uncooked and cooked rice. However their are alternatives, including extracting the germ by milling, which is inherently higher in protein and vitamins, or sprouting the rice and eating the sprouts. Howver the Op was concerned with eating only rice and water, not rice germ or rice sprouts.
Eating dirt for vit B12 is not recommended. It’s a vitamin, not a mineral, and the trace amounts extracted from soil are from microbial and nematode production. You’re eating whole uncooked microbes and roundworms that have been in no way screened for pathogens. Not a good idea, particularly considering the quantities you’ need to consume. And eating fungi and other microbes is kinda cheating anyway. You could just as easily eat a pound of mushrooms, three pounds of morel, a couple of truffles, 2 large plates of kelp, a bowl of spirulina and still claim to only be living on only rice, water and microbes.
I heard a claim you could manage for a long time on just bananas, bread and orange juice. *
- as long as the boredom didn’t get you…