What's in Matrix goop? - a nutrition question

Dozer describes the “breakfast of champions” served on board the Nebuchadnezzar as “…a single celled protein combined with synthetic aminos, vitamins, and minerals. Everything the body needs.”

I don’t care what it tastes like (tasty wheat!?) - I want the recipe!

Is there a single food item one could make that meets all nutritional requirements?

My guess is no single meal is universally nutritious - what is “right” for one may not be sufficient for another. If that’s so, how do I discover what’s right for me?

It would make healthy eating so much easier if there was some uniform baseline for meal planning (although bookstores would not be too happy - diet books sell like hotcakes. Mmmmm… hotcakes). You know, something I can eat on a day to day basis - no brainer - then sensibly treat myself once in a while by enjoying the sinfully yummy stuff (then go back to the goop for subsistence).

I suspect the answer wil be along the lines of “it’s more complicated than that” The real question I have is: What is the simplest way to shop for and feed myself, get the correct amounts of all of the nutrition I need with none of the crap I should not have, be healthy, attain then maintain a proper weight, and have time and energy to enjoy life?

This idea of one single food that provides everything comes up pretty frequently. The answer always seems to be that monkey chow is your best bet.

I really don’t believe there’s that much variation in nutritional needs for healthy adults. Only those with specific conditions would need something substantially different.

As for the description in the Matrix: it’s technobabble. That combination of words just doesn’t have any logical meaning, kind of like how the equation 2+2=5 combines mathematical symbols in a way that does not make sense. Two examples: Proteins aren’t single-celled, and proteins are composed of amino acids so it’s redundant to list them separately.

Reminds me of “mudder’s milk”, from the Firefly episode “Jaynestown”:

Jayne: All the protein, vitamins, and carbs of your grandma’s best turkey dinner, plus 15% alcohol.

Wash: It’s horrific.

Simon: Well, it worked for the Egyptians.

Jayne: What’s that?

Simon: The ancient Egyptians, back on Earth-That-Was. Not so different from the ancestral form of beer they fed the slaves to build their pyramids. It’s liquid bread. Kept them from starving and knocked them out at night so they wouldn’t be inclined to insurrection.

There was a huge thread on this many years ago, I think that is where the “Primate Chow” idea first appeared. I loved that thread!

Nutraloaf?

To be fair, nutraloaf isn’t a single food item but rather a pureed blend of many food items. The nutritional requirements of the human body are pretty well understood, so it’s not terribly hard to create a food product that meets those needs. There is some person-to-person variability in nutritional needs, but it should be possible to create a foodstuff that has a sufficient excess of nutrients such that virtually any human being would be able to live on it indefinitely.

I have heard that white potatoes contain just about everything you need to keep alive. Not optimal eating, but you could survive on nothing but.

How true is that?

Quoting myself, here’s the thread in question: Why don’t they make People Kibble?. It’s a classic, if only for Muffin’s cat food story.

Not sure if it’s entirely true, but the devastation of the Great Famine (a.k.a. the Irish Potato Famine) was due to several million poor Irish farmers who were eating potatoes as their primary, if not sole, source of food.

Given that they have no Vitamin B12 (only found in animal-based foods) and trace amounts (1% per 299 gram serving) of Vitamins A and E, no. A bit lacking in several other nutrients as well, although probably enough to keep you from getting a deficiency; the protein is shown to be complete (also listed as inflammatory, although I think that rating is bogus, given that they list some truly unhealthy foods as anti-inflammatory).

A bit off topic, but I have to say that as a biologist, this sentence makes my brain bleed. It’s so wrong it’s hard to know where to start explaining how wrong it is. I mean, “single celled protein”??

The problem with that is that most “Chow” products (e.g. industrially produced dry food products) are not designed for maximal nutrition, but rather to provide an acceptable baseline nutrition level in a product that is relatively non-perishable. As a result, the products are processed to remove many of the nutrients that are beneficial but do not store well (either break down or become rancid). To provide satiety that is lost by the removal of saturated fats and oils, a filler of dietetic fiber and durable carbohydrates is often used; in other words, the additions are basically cardboard and sugar, which even the FDA would not describe as nutritionally complete. In addition, because of the emphasis on commodity farming (corn, wheat, and soy), these products are used as inexpensive filler even if they are nutritionally inappropriate for the diet in question.

A single food item that would satisfy essentially all nutritional requirements would be raw or rare, or slow roasted/stewed red meat. Of course, that means consuming every edible part of the animal, including fats, organ meats, and connective tissues (common in much of traditional cuisine) in order to obtain the perishable micronutrients and adequate carbohydrates, not just the rump and ribs. A better modern solution is to eat a moderate amount of animal protein (including some fats and connective tissue) along with fresh vegetable matter and sufficient complex carbohydrates to that provides the essential nutrients without passing through the intervening food chain. Any highly processed foods are likely to have some degree of nutritional deficiencies.

Stranger

Pumpkin pie: wheat, eggs, milk, vegetables.

Which brings us back to Soylent Green.

I imagine that human flesh would be ideal nutrition because it is made of the same stuff your body is, assuming that you ate every part, perhaps a bit lacking in carbs, the only macronutrient not found in large amounts in meat (although there are people, like the Inuit, who lived off of mostly meat without problems).

You’re assuming you’re able to absorb 100% of the nutrients, or, more precisely, the same proportion of each nutrient you need. Let’s say that you can absorb exactly half of everything you need when you eat a human, except for Vitamin W. You can only absorb 10% of the Vitamin W that goes through your system. Thus, when you eat two humans, you’ve absorbed everything you need to make your body, except for Vitamin W - you’ve only got 20% of what you need of that.

The point is, there’s a difference between what you need being present in your food and being able to get what you need out of your food.

It is a misnomer that the Inuit ate an entirely meat diet. It is known that the consumed both seaweed and algae as part of their traditional diet, albeit in quantities that are much smaller than most cultures which live in areas where tubers, fruit and nut bearing plants, and edible pulses naturally grow. It is possible to live on a minimal carbohydrate diet provided that adequate fats are available, but the consequence is that the capacity of muscles to store glycogen will be minimized with a corresponding lack of anaerobic endurance.

This rationale is only true for water soluble micronutrients that are not stored such as the B complex and C vitamins. For other nutrients, although you may not absorb the entire amount in a given piece of food, you don’t need the entire quantity at once, repeated every meal, unless you are depleted of that vitamin.

However, the point of absorption is a valid one; just because nutrients are available in a food doesn’t mean that you can efficiently absorb them. This is a particular problem of balanced vegetarian diets; it isn’t just enough to look at the nutrient content; the available nutrition (and balance of nutrients) needs to be considered as well, and supplementation of plant sources with eggs and dairy is crucial to maintaining good health in the long term. The same can be true of diets with a large amount of hydrogenated oils and (maybe) nitrates, which are found in most diets (omnivorous or vegetarian) of modern industrial societies.

At any rate, consuming your neighbors is contraindicated; not only is it unsociable, but it also increases the chance of conveying species-adapted pathogens, as if we don’t have enough trouble with trans-species viruses from pigs and aves.

Stranger

This has always interested me. Here’s what I have found:

Rice and beans - Rice and beans practically cook themselves. All you have to do is boil and steam rice, or soak and boil beans. Find your own preferred seasoning. I got quite into bowls of rice and beans and garlic powder over the summer.

The chicken lifecycle - Eggs and chicken breasts are also trivially easy to cook, and they’ll supply you with meat if you start to miss the taste of, you know, meat.

Potatoes - Potatoes are the best.

Stamppot - A Dutch dish, mainly a huge amount of mashed potatoes combined with fresh greens and some cheese and meat. Fairly involved to prepare however.

444 paste - A blended paste of equal quantities of four vegetables, four fruits, four grains. Good for being frozen and reheated (re-slurried).

Fast food dollar-menu sandwiches without mayo are actually sort of nutritionally balanced, especially chicken sandwiches. It’s the mayo and sauces that will get you.

Prison loaf - Famous for being reviewed by a food critic who said it had so much in it yet tasted like nothing. I’ve been putting off making prison loaf although I may do it over the Thanksgiving holiday.

Pre-made burritos - You can spend an hour over the weekend pre-cooking whatever you think might go in a burrito, mix it all into a paste, and then refrigerate, reheat, and make burritos out of the paste. I did this with black beans, scrambled eggs, potatoes, diced tomatoes, spinach, beets, jalapenos, and cheese. It felt like it rolled around in my stomach but it never gave me any trouble.

Protein shakes - The health foods section of your grocer most likely has tubs of powdered whey or soy protein. You just mix some into water and drink. It doesn’t get any simpler than that.

Multivitamins - There’s a lot of woo out there about vitamins but Harvard School of Public Health still recommends taking one.

This has been another episode of “Sustenance with drew870mitchell”…I’ve been eating the above (plus eating out once or twice a week) for about half a year and I’m still alive, spending maybe $1-$2 and 5-10 minutes prep time per meal. I’ve been able to approach close enough to people chow that it’s good enough for me.

The evidence is that the workers who built the pyramids weren’t slaves though.

Subsequent documentaries set in the 'verse have shown that there may have been some factual inconsistencies in the quality of Alliance education, even at the most prestigious academies.

I’m pretty sure the “single cell protein” is supposed to mean that the protein is derived from single cell organisms–that is, algae or yeast or whatever. So it’s “single cell protein” in the same way you’d speak of “soy protein” or “whey protein”. I agree that if you’ve got protein then the amino acids are redundant, unless the yeast/algae protein source is deficient in some essential amino acids and those particular aminos have to be synthesized and added to the porridge to make it just right.