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
Sigh.
There’s a difference between minor malnutrition over a long period of time, and instantaneous certain death.
Stop drinking water, and you’re “supposed” to die in 2-3 days. In fact, your food has more than enough water in it to keep you alive for far longer than that.
Stop eating vitamin C and you’ll get scurvy, right? Yeah, it takes about 12 weeks (3 months) to start showing up.
And in all that time, if you eat sufficient vitamin C, it will likely not show at all and you’ll “reset the clock”.
Your RDA (recommended daily amount) is well named. That’s what they recommend daily. In fact, you can average almost all of it over a year, so long as you don’t go insane and try to eat nothing for 364 days and then catch up on the last one. Your body retains nutrients from food and keeps them to tide it over when you’re eating meals without that nutrient.
And almost ALL food has such a surfeit of nutrients that it’s hard to malnourish in this day and age, even if they are not foods renowned for high levels of a particular nutrient. Potatoes have calcium, magnesium, iron, phosphorus, zinc, 6 B vitamins and vitamin C, not to mention 77g of water in 100g of potatoes.
Most living things – and that includes foods which are all living things! – have nutrients of all kinds in them to survive themselves, and humans are just eating things that already needed their own nutrients to survive. Any vaguely rounded diet has more than enough nutrients to avoid malnourish and make you thrive. If it didn’t, your ancestors would never have got this far in the first place!
Toddlers are fussy, mostly because there are times in your life where certain tastes “kick in” and vegetables suddenly taste extremely bitter to them compared to later in adult life, or when they were babies. But nutrients are in all foods in some varying amounts, so pretty much everything they DO actually eat will contain what they need, on average, so long as they’re not just eating one thing all the time. Some vegetables are just an easy way to get a particular concentration of certain nutrients in bulk.
Encourage them to eat them. Make sure they are eating a varied diet no matter what (because a mono-diet is what will malnourish them, not merely choosing to eschew broccoli). As they get older they will start to like them more than they do now. But in modern life if you are malnourished it also means you’re literally being abused in terms of diet – it’s deliberately negligent to be malnourished in a developed country with access to a supermarket, even if you choose not to eat many vegetables.
And, sorry, but the grown man who isn’t eating any vegetables? Yes he is. He just doesn’t realise he is. Which is apt, because that’s what you do to the toddler as well… you hide his vegetables in his food and he doesn’t know he’s eating them. You’re telling me that guy hasn’t had a curry or a potato or ready meal or something with vegetables in it that he doesn’t even know is inside the recipe? Yeah, right.
A varied diet is easy and visible to do. But even if you don’t try – or even actively avoid – vegetables, there are more than enough nutrients (and likely more than enough vegetables!) in your diet anyway.
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