How are we all still alive? Whats the physiological effects of not having veggies in the diet?
Asking as a new parent who’s toddler used to eat everything, but now understands what “greens” are and actively denies any attempt to feed him veggies, even disguised. I swear his tongue has an alarm the instant any hidden veggie enters his mouth.
I also have a coworker who goes out of their way to not eat veggies. Not the heathiest, but he functions as well as I can see.
In: Biology
Plenty of toddlers eat veggies, baby food is usually vegetable based. Nursing infants get their nutrition from breast milk which has pre-digested vegetable nutrients in it, just passed on from the mother.
Your coworker will be fine but may not have optimal GI health if he never eats fiber. You can get vitamins here and there from the foods you eat, veggies are the most accessible/plentiful. And the fiber really makes the difference over many processed foods
Surviving doesn’t mean living healthily. Sailors survived often on toast and water, and some of them even survived the worst effects of scurvy but there are nutrients that meat/wheat diet simply cannot provide (among other things VitaminC) or provides minimally and your body stumbles along the best it can.
Supplements, veggie juice, etc. can help and there’s often other sources for many of the things veggies are full of. They just aren’t going to have the same amounts.
But there’s probably some hidden veggies they get anyway (lentils, beans, potatoes).
So you can survive but it is associated with worse health outcomes to avoid veggies (cancers, heart disease, mental health, metabolic disorders, etc)
Just because something contains necessary nutrients, doesn’t mean it’s an *exclusive* source.
For example, many kinds of meats contain essential amino acids we can’t make ourselves, so we need to eat other animals to get them… If you ignore beans (who knows why they have it) and many kinds of edible mushroom (which are weirdly enough a lot closer to animals than plants, so that makes a certain kind of sense).
Another way is just through supplements; you know gummie vitamins? Things like that but usually a bit more specialized. Doesn’t apply to a toddler probably, but potentially to your coworker.
Being omnivores, humans are adapted to eating lots of different kinds of food, and relying on a mixed diet that often happens to have multiple, overlapping sources of nutrients.
I don’t know *exactly* which nutrients are almost-exclusive to plants, and hence I can’t give you a more specific answer, but this hopefully gives a general idea of how broadly distributed our nutrition sources are. Just imagine if they weren’t; all our cuisine would look eerily similar, and there would be swathes of otherwise habitable planet we just don’t live on without imported foods (or bringing seeds and planting them to farm there, similar ideas)
My brother is 58 years old and has never eaten a vegetable in his life other than a bite of trying them a handful,of times. He’s never been sick or suffered from any disease and is an average weight. There are many people who eat a carnivore diet and are perfectly fine.
I will add that many of the vitamins in veggies can also be found in fruits. Even the pickiest kid on the “grey diet” as our pediatrician used to call it, will usually eat cantelope, watermelon, bananas, oranges, and berries.
It’s because the vitamins and minerals that are in vegetables are not unique to vegetables generally. Also, many processed foods are enriched with vitamins and minerals to make it harder to suffer from malnutrition. Not to mention there’s hundreds of various multivitamin options that are OTC.
You don’t need vegetables to live. You can (and many people do) not eat vegetables and live perfectly fine.
Short version is that vegetables aren’t the only source of the required nutrients. Grains will generally have fiber, and vitamins can usually be found in lower concentrations in other foods. Some processed foods (notably breakfast cereals) might even go out of their way to inject nutrients that wouldn’t normally be there!
Source: 95% of my diet is fortified soy beverage and biscuits. Haven’t noticed a significant difference from when I used to eat actual prepared food so far.
Most nutrients from vegetables and fruits are B and C (aka water soluble) vitamins. At least in the USA, the government fortifies LOTs of other food products with those to prevent dietary deficiencies (as surplus can just be eliminated via the urine so it takes much more to achieve toxicity).
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