Over What Time Period Must a Person Eat a Balanced Diet?

Factual Questions
1

I’ve always assumed, despite a lot of contrary information on PSAs and the like, that you don’t really need to eat balanced meals and are certainly OK if you balance things out over the course of a day. But how far out can you stretch it without negative consequences? A week? A month? Several months? I assume after a while you run into two problems.

  1. Once you reach the point where nutrient deficiencies are actually causing problems it gets harder to reverse.
  2. The body will have a hard time absorbing/processing too much of a particular nutrient at one time.

So what’s the limit? I imagine it would depend on the type of nutrient, the level of imbalance, and other health factors. But is there any rule of thumb?

2

What I’m guessing that you are talking about is a situation where a person eats 5 limes, 2 oranges, and a glass of lemonade for lunch (and nothing else), getting a lot of Vitamin C, then goes a whole month without consuming anything with Vitamin C, chowing down on lots of carbs the next day, etc., and wondering to what extent you can average out the nutrients and expect the result to be the same level of health had you eated balanced meals at every meals.

3

I asked a similar question a couple of months ago, and got a few responses.