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
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.
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