My misunderstanding of oil and calories

Factual Questions
1

Since I am pretty skinny and can’t eat much, I am trying to find foods to eat that have as much as calories as possible.

In this quest I came across cooking oil, which is not a food, but it made me wonder what if I drank 100ml of cooking oil or 900 calories. It turns out that you can only consume 25ml of cooking oil, which is barely 200 calories and all the rest would just go into making your stool soft and would basically be wasted.

I want to know exactly why and why wouldn’t the same thing happen if I drank 10 times as much milk or soda or something, but it does with oil? Also, if I ate 100grams of peanut butter shake , which contains 50g of fat, would that be used or would I also use up only 25g and would the remaining be wasted?

unrelated question, but I don’t want to open another thread, if I make a liter of peanut butter milkshake and want to use it over 2, 3 days, can I keep it in the fridge or do I have to make it fresh every time? Ingredients would be PB, Banana, sugar and milk, and maybe something to add flavor, but that’s optional.

2

Your digestive system is developed to deal with a varied diest of meat and vegetables. Faddy diets - only eat fruit or only cabbage soup - will not be good for you in the long term. You should seek advice from a qualified nutritionist and stop looking for advice from random people on an internet forum.

Of course, it’s perfectly possible that there will be someone on The SD who is qualified, but it really needs a more detailed investigation than you can do here.

3

I would assume that it’s simply because, well, oil is a lubricant. Sliding right through a tube is what it does.

4

Where did you get this from? Can you post a link to your source?

It is very common for Appalachian Trail thru hikers to bring olive oil and add it to almost everything for the extra calories. It would be great for them to know that it really doesn’t work and they can save the weight. Also if what you say is true I think that would make alcohol (Everclear) the most calorie dense food available to carry.

5

As long as your pancreas produces enough lipase to break down the oil you’ve consumed, your small intestine will absorb more than 95% of it. Malabsorption of fats/oils generally is only seen with pancreatic/liver/gallbladder dysfunction or massive fat ingestions. Healthy adults can easily handle well over 100 grams of fat a day.

Failure to absorb fat results in steatorrhea, or foul, floating, frothy, fatty feces. You can often see the oil slick on the surface of the water in the toilet in such cases.

6

When I am on a “bulk,” I add MCT oil to my protein shake.
You need to ramp the volume up, or your will not like what happens…
But, as long as you slowly increase the volume consumed, you can take quite a bit of it with no problems.

7

I thought that was called aliteration

8

It is possible to overwhelm the absorptive capacity of the gut by ingestion of large enough amounts of oil, especially in the absence of other foods that might help to slow the transit time. As an example, consider the woo ‘gallstone cleanse’ practice of drinking 8 ounces (~200 g) of olive oil mixed with lemon juice. This results in soapy fat globules rocketing right out of your bottom end. Even that extreme an amount of oil might be digestible if it was combined with fiber to slow its passage.

Please note that the OP said that they are ‘pretty skinny and can’t eat much’. There may be other health issues here that would be relevant to a recommendation of exactly how much oil the OP can absorb.

9

The human body is a water based system. Everything moving through it needs to be water soluble. Milk or soda is almost entirely made up of water, with some sugar and stuff dissolved in it, not much different from what flows through the body. (But it does need some processing, do not try to take in intravenously!)

Oil on the other hand is entirely made up of liquid fats. There is no water. To be absorbed into the body it needs to first be dispersed into tiny droplets and kept as tiny droplets. Have you ever tried shaking oil and water and seen the droplets of oil float back to the top and rejoin into a layer of oil? That happens in the body as well unless you produce the emulsifers (they’re like soap, but don’t drink soap) that prevent that, and there’s a limit to how much and how fast you produce those.

The tiny droplets can then be digested and absorbed.

I too have had issues with gaining weight and what I found was a recipe for a weight gain drink that is basically liquid ice cream:

1 egg
3.5 ounces of orange juice
2 ounces of heavy cream
1-2 tablespoons of sugar

That gives you about 400 kcal and 10 g protein

10

That’s likely to be fine as long as you don’t use milk that is already close to spoiling.