If we have pet food food that sustains pets, why do humans have so much trouble getting the right nutrients?
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We don’t usually. We could engineer (and many have tried) to make a food that contains all the nutrients we need, but people tend to get sick of eating the same thing every day. I mean, would you eat the same thing every day for your entire life?
People want variety and if you want variety you have to take some care about balance. This is not that big of a problem, but because people are also creatures of habit, they might orbit around the same few food items, which in turn might result in an imbalanced diet.
Calf liver is the most nutrional food for humans I believe but I wouldn’t want it for every meal. Cats and dogs seem happy to eat the same thing all the time.
Well, maybe not my cats…..
>If we have pet food food that sustains pets, why do humans have so much trouble getting the right nutrients?
Could you elaborate on what you mean by “so much trouble”? It’s not really more difficult to sustain a human than your average mammal pet. As omnivores humams can pretty much eat anything – including the pet food, by the way.
Its not that hard for a human to get the right nutrients, we just minmax the shit out of that.
If you eat regular normal meals you will not need any suplements or anything, the body tajes what it needs. People 200 years ago mostly only got scurvy on long ship trips.
There’s surprisingly much unknown about nutrition. Humans eat a variety of foods and have adapted to acquire different things from different sources so it’s extremely hard to research (no human experiments). Synthetic components on their own not always act the same as when ingested with other parts of the whole food. It’s a very complex chemistry.
I would assume with species who have naturally more monotonous diet like meat it’s easier.
Tbf cats might also benefit from eating a variety of rodents, birds and bugs if that was safe and sustainable imo.
We don’t. We just tend to care less about animals getting perfect nutrition, and tend to care more about humans getting satisfying flavours. It’s actually really easy to “sustain” a human, but we expect humans to be healthier than just being “sustained”.
Most of the problem with people is NOT not getting enough of the right nutrients, your body is excellent at extracting what you need from whatever you eat. The real problem with humans is that most of them eat too much and when you eat more than your body can digest, the body turns it in to fat, especially from excess carbs and protein. This is a mechanism left over from our prehistoric days where humans experienced a “feast and famine” cycle. Sometimes food was abundant so humans could eat a lot and make fat so they could push through the leans times. In developed countries humans do not experience true lean times anymore and food is readily available so many end up fat. There are still instances of people suffering particular forms of malnutrition in these developed countries but we usually find they have chosen to eat a very limited diet, in one instance I read about recently a man only ate white bread (like Wonder bread) and canned potatoes and suffered severe malnutrition (scurvy) but there are documented cases of scurvy among ship-bound people because of the lack of fresh food especially vegetables.
Pet food is… easier. And yet, still, sometimes the food for pets has proven toxic due to problems at the plant. Or the pet happens to be allergic to a main ingredient. I’ve known a number of cat owners whose cats can’t eat anything with chicken. Koalas eat only from a few kinds of eucalyptus trees, but then, they are not pets.
Human beings are far more difficult because we know about nutrition. And sure, there are those like myself who couldn’t go vegan (and probably not vegetarian) for the simple fact that then I’d have to figure out how to get all the right nutrients. We like what we like. We like certain flavors. We dislike others. For the life of me, I can only imagine utter starvation behind the discovery that natto was not only edible, but darned good for you.
The native Mesoamericans figured it out a long time ago. Corn, beans, and squash, along with maybe a little meat now and then, is a healthy, nutritionally complete diet and agriculturally efficient to coplant. Potential problems: the agricultural method might not work in every climate, produce doesn’t store super well so it’s difficult to transport it to cities, people choose cheap food of poor nutritional quality because they lack the money / time / understanding to have even this fairly inexpensive straightforward diet.
We did it already. Soylent, Huel, Feed are brand specialised in this kind of food. There is different “recipes” and they all contain at least 30% of everything needed per serving.
But humans don’t eat food only to live but also as a pleasure and social construct.
I often drink this kind of food when I don’t have time/I’m too lazy to prepare something. It will drive me insane to only eat that!
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