I think if you want to live of an animal solely, you have to eat the intestines and their contents, and that way, you get any grain and other fiber the animal has been eating. Humans can’t digest grass, but given the kinds of things people in places like the pale of settlement ate over the winter, I suspect that once a cow has ruminated over grass, and it is in the intestines, humans can then eat the contents of the intestines and get fiber that way. “Kishkas” was a dietary staple for Jews in places where there wasn’t much food to be had, and they had to use every part of the cow that was kosher. So they baked the intestines with seasonings, and it came out as something with a bread-like consistency.
Personally, I think it’s disgusting, but then, I think the same thing about tongue, chopped liver, and gefilte fish, and a lot of other traditional Jewish foods that are the result of eating what was available.
Cats eats the entirety of the small animals they catch, and get fiber from the intestines and indigestible parts of the animal.
I’ve been a vegetarian since I was 19, though, so I’d rather go another route.
Dog food is way to low in Vitamin C, for one thing. You’d die of scurvy. Dogs, like most mammals, are able to make their own Vitamin C, but humans and other primates cannot. Dog food is also low in fiber and high in protein for humans. There’s no such thing as a generic complete food for mammals, because different mammal species have radically different diets. What would feed an aardvark isn’t going to work for a zebra.
Just because dogs don’t need Vitamin C doesn’t mean dog food is devoid of Vitamin C. Many commercial dog foods contain significant amounts of Vitamin C containing ingredients, certainly more than the miniscule amount necessary to prevent scurvy.
Also, fiber is definitely nice to have but there are many people walking around right now who currently eat 0 fiber in their diets and, while they’re not the healthiest individuals in the world, they’re also not dying on the streets.
I think a lot of people have this mistaken impression that the human body is this finely tuned machine which needs to be fed the exact optimal mix of fuel in order to even run. In reality, humans are more like walking garbage disposals which can pretty much take any weird ass random diet and do something with it. That’s how we managed to expand to every corner of the globe.
If you look at some historical primitive diets, you have examples of objectively awful diets which societies have managed to survive on for thousands of years. Diets where 80+% of calories came from yams, or plantains, or seals or potatoes. If you look at modern day people with severe food issues, you see a crazy range of severely limited diets which people nonetheless manage to be able to survive on for 30+ years. There are people who only eat McDonalds Big Macs, people who only eat french fries and ketchup, people who only eat cereal and milk.
Meh. The op was asking for diets that would allow people (and I assumed meant a majority of people) “to live a healthy life not shortened by malnutrition” … not diets that we could survive on enough to reproduce enough kids that would survive childhoods of malnutrition that our group would at least replace its numbers. The bar set is a bit higher than merely “not dying on the streets.” We can survive and reproduce with anemia and with neurological deficits from various deficiencies, heck, many can not even have a problem with a diet that would lead to a large number of others having serious issues with, but those diets wouldn’t hit the target set by the op.
In fact most historical primitive diets were not so “objectively awful.” Most were pretty diverse in make-up, and they differed from each other significantly. Inuit and the related groups are really the far end of lack of diversity in the human diet from a “primitive” historic fashion. For most hunter-gatherer societies the gatherer side collected a very wide selection of plant-based foods. It was actually agriculture that resulted in a much narrower selection of food (albeit more plentiful) for human societies, and a wide variety of nutritional deficiencies emerged consequent to that. Farmers had more calories and had food security but they also had more anemia, more cavities, and were shorter; they were prone to more infectious diseases too. But short anemic people with cavities and more infectious diseases but with enough calories can have lots of kids. Farming won.
The exercise of this op demonstrates that diets of limited diversity can stave off malnutrition but limited diversity increases the risk of missing something. Yes, the Yanomami tribe in the Amazon traditionally survived on a diet that was 75% plantains and bananas … but the much of other 25% was meat (including marrow and organs) and fish, and some smaller portion was mangoes, papaya, and grubs grown on palms they cut down for the purpose.
I never said most. I said, when you consider the diversity of circumstances in which humans have managed to cram themselves into an ecological niche, you end up finding a lot of examples of objectively awful diets where people not only survived but thrived. Yes, a lot of them involved farming communities because farming was devastating to diet diversity. But they also involved hunter gatherers like the Inuit. Even on those objectively awful diets, you had plenty of people performing athletic feats that would impress a modern man, plenty of people who showed signs of great creativity and intellect and plenty of people who survived till an advanced age.
And again, we can look at modern examples in the form of picky eaters to similarly demonstrate the effects. here’s a woman who only eats milk, bread and potatoes and she’s 54 with a cholesterol of 174 for example.
Humans are walking garbage disposals. We’ll pretty much take anything we toss into it and cobble it into some kind of functioning human body. Yes, there’s many steps we can take to marginally improve our health in various ways. But unless we avoid a small number of nutritional building blocks that are known to actively cause deficiencies, we’re not in any danger of acute health problems.
Yes true you could leave the rice out of my suggestion and just have potato curry dhal on its own. Since it’s also made with Ghee (clarified butter) it really just comes down to potatoes, some type of lagume and a diary, just a more tasty combo than potatoes butter and oatmeal.
There is a type of west african curry which is commonly made this way, just big chunks of potato and no rice, but I’m failing to find it on internet searches.
I agree with this covering just about everything. Perhaps the spinach or avacado could be replaced with peas and tomato.
Also, Someone correct me if I’m wrong but I’ve read that canned salmon always comes from deep water fish in Alaska/Canada and is one of the cleanest fish to eat and contains no mercury.
Some people correctly interpreted the question correctly, which I probably didn’t state well enough, which was a ‘fully healthy’ diet with the minimum variety or number of ingredients. I am genuinely interested in the responses as I’m looking to add some of these foods to my own diet, but not animal intestines. Maybe kale, almonds and more potatoes. Does deep frying potatoes into chips diminish their nutritional content much?
It really seems that a nutritionally sufficient diet would be dead basic for anyone with money and access to a supermarket to achieve.
It will diminish the vitamin C content and add a lot of calories, but otherwise no.
You’d think, but many people are clueless about nutrition and the amount of disinformation and just plain woo-woo making the rounds doesn’t help.
Once had a rousing argument with someone who argued that Aldi’s was a terrible grocery because you couldn’t get enough different things there. I argued that you could find everything you need for a healthy, cheap diet there even if there would be less variety than most people are accustomed to these days.
Most things mentioned here - potatoes, butter, rice, salmon, greens, lentils, peas, fruit - are readily available there. Actually, having fewer choices at Aldi’s probably makes it easier to eat healthy there in some respects (not all - they do sell junk food and you could fill up on chips and pastries).
I thought we already covered that somewhere here. For Montechristo style one dish diet, mashed potato should do the trick (has enough of all vitamins if served in right proportions). And beer (if two dish diet). My solution.
Yes, this thread early established that potatoes are an almost complete nutritional package themselves and adding milk and a grain (such as oats) will make for a long term survivable diet.
But if she dropped the bread, or the milk she’d eventually get chronic problems.
Very restricted diets do not automatically get cobbled together into complete packages. There are some combinations that complement each other enough that they won’t be deficient but many that would not do so.
OTOH it does not take all that much diversity of real food to avoid deficiency. It shows how silly the multivitamin industry is.
Purina Monkey Chow [repackaged as Purina Bachelor Chow?:p] Are we close enough to monkeys to be able to get a bag of their chow and live on it?
Honestly, I think we have discussed bachelor chow here previously.
Though the potato curry dhal is tasty, and I really enjoy the spinach paneer over rice so if you combined them by alternating days you could get a bit of variety. I think I would go for the potato curry dhal and have a nice salad of spinach and mixed greens for the sharp vinegary contrast to the softer curry. Though I really like fresh fruit, so adding an occasional orange or banana would be nice. In the right growing zone you could have a fairly complete diet in an acre or two [I remember that you can get enough potatoes from half an acre to supply a family of 4] if you can be in a zone that allows citrus, avocados and certain vegetables like potato, lentils, spinach, onions, garlic - like California’s central valley.