If you’d be able to afford all suplements for all vitamins, carbohydrates, fat, proteins,
phytochemicals and all the rest, why wouldn’t be able to survive like this? I always hear people saying you can’t but I never understood.
In: Biology
a diet consisting entirely of supplements will be lacking in carbs and therefore Calories.
sure you all the materials you’d need but your body doesn’t run on hopes and dreams, you need energy too
on a furnace example:basically you have the stuff you wanna smelt, but you forgot to get the fuel for the furnace.
In theory you could, but it would take a lot of work.
Your body needs a lot of things. Calories, fats, proteins, vitamins, minerals, sugar, and probably some others I’m forgetting. Most food comes with a LOT of that stuff all together. A cheeseburger might not be the healthiest meal, but it has most of the things above.
Getting the amounts right would be tough. Some vitamins are absorbed by your body better when they are in the presence of other things, so if you just take a supplement pill and nothing else you don’t actually absorb all of it! You’d have to carefully consider doses at every “meal”.
Some things don’t have good substitutes or are hard to get as supplements, like fiber. It’s important for your digestive health, and you need quite a bit of it. One safe way to get more involves dissolving it in water, but you need to drink a LOT of water to make sure you don’t plug your throat with it. There are pills, but you need to take lots of them, sometimes more than half a dozen pills per dose.
Calories kind of stump me. I’m not sure there’s such a thing as a “calorie supplement”. You can get a lot of calories from sugars, but eating too much of that is pretty bad for you. There might be something I don’t know about that would solve this problem.
So I’m pretty sure a nutritionist and some food scientists could figure out a regimen that lets a person live a healthy life on supplement pills. But for a person to do so, they’d have to spend so much time calculating doses, counting pills, and taking pills they’d probably spend more time preparing “meals” than if they just ate food!
And most people would rather eat a nice meal than spend 5 minute swallowing pills.
There are products that are meant to be complete meal replacements. There’s one called Soylent (yes really) that’s a shake mix that has all your necessarily macro and micro nutrients. I don’t know what it’s like actually trying to eat just that though.
When most people hear the word “supplements”, they are thinking of vitamins and minerals, not the carbohydrates, fats and proteins we need to survive. Yes, if you drank a shake like “Huel” or “Soylent” that provides all of your nutritional needs, you could survive on just that.
You can’t just live off of micronutrient supplements, but if you are getting the macros you need too, you can live off of them just fine. Protein, fat, and carbs all necessarily have calories, which your body needs to live. This is basically the concept behind products like Huel and Soylent.
No reason why you can’t. Hard thing is sourcing all the ingredients and it is generally not a pleasant experience. Soylent was a big hype a few years ago a lot of people living on shakes, some for all meals because eating was to much of a chore or something.
With enough money/will you can even skip the digestive track and ‘live’ without eating and get your nutrients totally intravenous. This is usually done for terminally ill people who can’t use their gastro intestinal tract, https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parenteral_nutrition
It has a lot of complications and risk so it won’t be easy or healthy tho.
Sure you could, but what would be the point? You can’t live off “a couple of pills” because we can’t get enough energy into that format. If your supplement includes 1/4 of a stick of butter rolled in sugar, you’re closer to maximum energy density. If your supplement contains enough fiber to keep your digestive system operating, it could be tablets and a glass of water, or it could be sticks of celery, there’s not much difference except celery is a lot cheaper.
Supplements generally don’t include fats, proteins, and carbs, aside from very specific ones like fish oil (omega-3 fatty acids). Under that assumption, supplements of all the necessary vitamins and minerals won’t provide your body with enough calories/energy to keep running.
If you “supplement” (heh) your supplements with sufficient calories in the form of carbs, protein, and fats, then you can live off of it. But at this point, you’re just describing a balanced diet; it’s not a “supplement only” diet anymore if you’re eating regular food.
You could, the body is incredibly resilient, it would just be impractical.
When food is “put together” in nature it’s easier for us to digest. We share a lot of structures with other plants and animals, eating them helps us replace those structures easier.
Iron is the best example. Iron from spinach is much harder to absorb than heme-iron (like hemaglobin, heme means blood) because we use it in that form. so does anything with a blood supply. With spinach, we have to extract the Iron molecule from the spinach (takes a lot of work/acid/just consume vitamin C with spinach) then convert it to heme Iron.
Obviously heme-iron is a supplement you can buy, but I’m just trying to say.. buying a car with a manual transmission is MUCH easier than buying a car with an automatic transmission and trying to convert it to a manual.
Aside from all that, only eating supplements will NOT be very satisfying. Unless you took all the nutrients and bound them together or something.. but that would just be “food” at that point 😉
Your body is a locomotive that needs fuel to burn. Calories are the coal that keeps your locomotive body running. Without Calories you won’t have energy.
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