So I’ve been doing a bit of recreational reading about nutrition, mono-food diets, and the like, and what I’ve found is that apparently (minus vitamins A, C, and D) peanuts might sustain a human adult essentially indefinitely at the rate of a pound per day. Admittedly, that sounds awesome while you’re snacking on a handful of dry-roasted peanuts… but imagine eating a pound of them a day, every day, for 30 days or longer. Ugh?
Still, it seems that when most people think of sustainable nutrition (or at least bare subsistence calories), they point to bags of wheat or rice or whatever. So this is a two-fold question:
Are peanuts (aside from the aforementioned deficiencies - buy a jar of multivitamins) a true mono-food super food?
Are there any other food items that might more closely fit the bill, or at least supplement a peanut-only diet?
Why, if peanuts are so awesome, do we not send C-130s full of peanuts to starving villagers?
I use toasted bread and either strawberry preserves or hot giardinera peppers (never tried them together, though jalapeno jelly should work well) to supplement a peanut butter based diet. Plus a multivitamin. And coffee. Or diet pop. YMMV, depending on what you consider edible.
Peanut protein is missing or low in certain essential amino acids, most significantly methionine, I think. (That link is about chickens fed on a peanut diet, and the same amino acids are not necessarily essential for chickens as for humans. However, it seems clear that the chickens were not getting enough methionine from the peanuts alone, and methionine is definitely essential in a human diet too.) An all peanut diet would probably also be missing some important vitamins (although rich in others).
There is such a thing as Purina Ape Chow, used by zoos, and it can support a human just as well as any other ape. It’d be an extremely boring diet, though, and one might also debate whether it counts as a “single food”, given that it’s made from a mix of other ingredients.
Heck, you could take everything that a normal human eats in a month, put it all in a big blender, and separate it out into 30 daily portions. That’d definitely give you everything you need, but I don’t think I would count it as a single food.
Yeah. I came in here to add that the health authorities of some countries recommend including potatoes in your diet on a daily basis. Not a “superfood” insofar as something that will cover all your needs, but they’re nutritious, cheap, tasty and a good source of fiber.
I’ve heard that apples and cheese provide a lot of required nutrients. Hardly worth mentioning in GQ, I suppose, as I have no idea if it’s true. I saw in an old film (“The Story of Alexander Graham Bell”) and have heard it from a few non-experts over the years.
Not a mono-food but I’ve heard that the Native American “three sisters” - beans, corn, and squash - provide all the basic nutrients for a long-term diet.
Sustainable nutrition is a lesser goal than healthy nutrition, it should probably be pointed out. Nearly every nutrient has a lower bound AND an upper bound for optimal health. (As I understand it, by missing the lower bound, you die within a few weeks or months. If you exceed the upper bound, you shave some years off your overall life expectancy.)
Since there’s 29 vitamins and minerals, each with their own requirements, the odds that a single fruit or vegetable is going to exactly match the profile of maximal health is pretty minimal. You can think of it like a key to a door, with 29 positions. What are the odds that a randomly generated key is going to get all of those correct? So even if you find something that has all 29 in above-minimal bounds, some of them are probably going to go over the maximum recommendation.
I believe that the only way to actually meet this sort of profile is to eat a wide variety of foods that, on average, hit all the body’s needs, or eat something like Ape Chow, which has been engineered to provide an optimal balance every single meal.
I’ve heard from a friend (who I believe is fairly knowledgeable in these areas, being a microbiologist by profession) that ALL vegetable food sources contain at least some of ALL the necessary amino acids – but not necessarily in very optimal quantities, nor in optimal proportions to one another.
Thus, you should (sort-of, theoretically) be able to subsist on peanuts alone, or rice alone, or beans alone – but the combination of rice and beans gives a more complete, and more completely optimal, combination of the necessary amino acids.