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.
I think your body can compensate for nutritional deficiencies as long as you’re young and reasonably healthy. It will affect you eventually, though, if you spend your whole life avoiding all vegetables.
For example, my dad is 81 and generally in good health – active with no chronic conditions. However, he is unusually fragile – gets viruses constantly, everything upsets his stomach, and he’s often running a fever for no known reason. He has literally never eaten a vegetable other than iceberg lettuce salads, and I think that, combined with aging, has had a major effect on his immune system.
You can thrive on meat alone. The carnivore diet is not a gimmick. However, humans are adaptable creatures, and very genetically diverse. We can adapt to almost any diet, but how long you live is another story.
Veggies are not the only source of all the necessary nutrients, even if they’re a much more convenient source of fiber and most vitamins. You can actually get vitamins A, B, and C, E and K from various meats. Between meats, fruits, and grains, veggies are not entirely all that necessary, even if it’s not all that optimal.
With that out of the way, you might want to probably talk to your kid and find out what it is about this or that particular dish that is repulsive. If he can tell the thing he won’t eat by putting it in his mouth rather than looking at it, then whatever he’s not okay with is not just being repulsed by the concept of eating grass or whatnot.
Also find a good way to educate yourself about parenting/developmental psychology/education. You already found out that the rabbit-hole of dealing with a little human goes deep, and there is an entire science studying that rabbit-hole that’s useful to be acquainted with. Including teaching kids to do things they don’t like, to not sacrifice responsibility for pleasure, and everything else that makes a productive lifecycle.
One of the things that happens to people like this is colon cancer. If you never eat fiber it tremendously increases the rate of colon cancer which is very lethal. I don’t know the mechanism behind it, if I were to guess it is a combination between having bad bacteria in your gut and oxidative stress not being buffered by the antioxidants in vegetables.
Vegetables are not necessary. An animal based diet (which includes both muscle and organ meat) contains all of the nutrients and micronutrients you need to be healthy and many of them are in a more bioavailable form than in most veg.
The real problem is that so much of our food in western society is processed to the point of having low nutritional value with a high calorie count.
Eating whole foods is the answer. Eating out of boxes or through windows is a sure fire path to being unhealthy.
This is interesting to me because alot of marketed baby/toddler food is pretty veggie heavy and usually vegan. It’s odd for me to think about babies can start out vegan (without parents necessarily trying) and then by the time there what 5 (?) A ton of meat is added in and veggies are lessened. Idk.
Another answer could be that yes there are adults who get stuck on…let’s say eating only chicken nuggets. That’s it. That’s their food and sure they don’t die but I’m skeptical that they are “healthy” I honestly think when that happens those individuals probably are taking supplements as well
Eating poorly is like not changing the oil in your car. It isn’t like you hit 5001 miles and the engine bursts into flames.
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