CodenameDarlenWhy does cats (and similar animals) can live with the exact same food every day, but we (humans) need a variety of food to survive?
Asked my GF who’s an aspiring crazy cat lady:
It’s because cat food is engineered to contain all the nutrients they need. While it looks like a bland mush of only one thing, it’s more like the cat equivalent of having several full nutricious meals run through a blender. The required variety is built in.
I’m convinced you could create such a food for humans too, it’s just not many people want that.
That’s true, but we’re not cats.
It’s can be difficult to change a cat’s food. You have to gradually introduce the new food mixed in with the old food, or the cat may just refuse to eat it.
tomiantThere are powdered meals that are supposed to offer balanced nutrition. I’ve heard of people living off Soylent, Huel, etc. I don’t think it’s good long-term, and the lack of chewing could cause problems. But it is feasible in principle.
originaluciferlack of chewing
this is also a solved issue with a mature industry
I ate only soylent for a long time, and the lack of chewing did cause me some issues: first was bad oral hygiene. I brush and floss twice a day (after breakfast and before bed), yet I still got a cavity. Chewing normal food also cleans off plaques on your teeth, so when you’re not chewing anything those plaques just sit there fucking your shit up. Second (*and this is just my conjecture) chewing causes activity in a certain part of the brain to spike, so if you’re not chewing anything that part atrophies and causes depression. I forget where I read the chewing part though. So, along with the cavity, I also felt generally sad about everything. I would still definitely have it for lunch everyday because the nutrients are there, but yeah, unfortunately you have to chew stuff. I thought about just chewing gum, but those are all chock-full of microplastics so…
I did a long period of time where Solyent was my main nutrition source and I ate different food if I went out to eat socially with people (which to be fair was several times a week). As far as I can tell, the only problem was getting used to the high amounts of fiber
I’m convinced you could create such a food for humans too,
You could, and it would be very simple to do so.
1: Take all the food you’d eat for, say, a week. Absolutely everything.
2: Blend it. Maybe add some extra vitamins to make up for the ones that will be lost due to processing.
3: Dehydrate it. (To make it more compact and less likely to spoil.)
4: Compress it into pellets.
Done. You have now created ‘human food’.
That’s what I find so absurd about the “humans need variety in their diet” mantra. If we need some vast unknown combination of things, how is it that letting people loose on supermarkets and choosing their own recipes somehow achieves that, compared to at least some first pass attempt based on macro nutrients?
Because many of our modern staples are fortified with essential vitamins and nutrients.
Ok, what we’ll do is, we’ll take some sort of kibble, A, fortify it, call it “Vegetable Delight”. Then another sort of kibble, B, fortify that, call it “Ox Fondue”. Then another, just like the previous ones, call it, say, “Mystery Surprise”. All fortified. Then you just alternate them. Mondays, A. Tuesdays, B. Then Wednesdays you think C but nope! A again. Then B, then A, THEN B, and then, finally C, so you have something special to look forward to on Sundays.
SchmooWe also get cravings for specific foods when our bodies are lacking in a nutrient that food contains. I don’t think we have them for every nutrient our bodies need, hence why people can get nutrient deficiencies by accident even when the nutrient they need is available, but there’s some instinctual failsafes for certain ones that must have been scarce or intermittent enough for cravings to confer an evolutionary advantage.
They keep making solya t/bachelor chow…
Nobody buys it.
But you can 100% meal prep something and just eat it everyday as long as it’s got everything balanced. That’s what pet food is. It’s not like there’s an animal whose flesh is cat food, it’s processed and fortifiex
Not sure that’s a universal thing with cats. Unless she’s really hungry, the current feline resident of my household most definitely will turn her nose up at a dish if it’s the same as she was fed in the last meal.
How is it that I find everything cute when a cat does it?
I have a low burnout rate with food, and there are probably meals that I could just keep eating repeatedly. Note that these are multi-ingredient foods so could theoretically offer balanced nutrition and be flavored to a preferred taste.
I don’t do so for several reasons: cost, availability, convenience, sharing meals with others who have different food preferences, and simply because I still prefer variety.
Cats and similar animals are adapted to specific environmental niches, but humans are generalists. One of the drawbacks of being generalists is that we’re not specialized enough to fully subsist on any single food source.
We can definitely subsist on a single food source if it’s been engineered to be nutritionally complete like pet food has.
We don’t need a variety of food to survive. But, generally, we have choice, so we choose to vary our diet because it’s more interesting.
Pets do not have a choice. They eat what they’re given. Or they choose not to and die (a lil cat I was sitting chose that route).
seathruHe was well fed and offered different foods. His owners played with him and kept him clean. He didn’t want to eat. They had him tested for allergies, etc but the vet didn’t find anything wrong. They put him on something to increase his appetite. He ate a little. Then he stopped.
Wildcats (tigers, lions, bobcats, etc) will take down a prey animal. We think they just eat the muscle. In reality, they often go for the stomach of the herbivore they just brought down to get the vegetable matter there. Then they eat other internal organs (liver, spleen, kidneys) so they aren’t just eating muscle.
For our pets, well, we all know they don’t eat the same thing every day. Firstly, the the thing they do eat every day, pet food, has various nutrients included so it’s a balanced meal for them. Secondly, we give them treats which may or may not be beneficial.
As for we humans wanting variety, it’s exactly that. We want but don’t need as much variety as we get. We enjoy the different flavors even if the items containing those flavors aren’t exactly good for us (twinkies, 8 year scotch, etc). Our pets and wild carnivores don’t get the opportunity to try these other flavors (well, our pets get some opportunity but not to the extent we have granted ourselves).
There’s that tech bro that has a super strict diet for longevity. Its basically enough protein for him and veg, fruit to fill out the rest of his calorie goal along with some supplements. I wanna say Bryan or Ryan Johnson. its basically same everyday with a workout plan to live as long as he can.
MothraYou as a human could also live with the same food every day if it covered every dietary need. Especially if you depended on someone else to acquire it and had no choice.
There is an evolutionary push for a rich variety of nutrients obtained from a variety of sources, but the mechanism driving that daily “need” for variety is force of habit and desire for novelty. On top of that, some people are happy to eat nothing but junk and have very narrow tastes. How come?
Also, I can assure you, a lot of cats will periodically stop eating a certain brand or flavor and go through cycles. Does it mean the food isn’t really covering their needs or are they just bored of the same flavor every day? Hard to know, but I would argue your assumption about humans being too different from their pets when it comes to variety in their menu.
need a variety of food to survive?
It’s not true.
Boredom feels terrible while it lasts, but it doesn’t kill you. In the end, humans usually start to get creative after boredom.
Oh, and yes, some food industry has found out things and told you things… yes, they were creative :-)
What about the British? They were starving, and they didn’t get creative. They just kept eating brown goo for centuries.
I had heard that British cuisine was much more robust before WW1.
Also, if brown goo is meat-flavored, I’d be down for it.
Got a recipe book for the British working class that was written in the 1800s, even that has curry in it.
Are you saying that the brown stuff is curry? I am a fan of curry, but the stuff I make at home is green or yellow.
People ate brown rice back in the day, and people wonder why butt cancer rates are skyrocketing now that everything has had the fiber removed. Eat fiber!
Yah, sure, we are making our curry with lentils and parsnip. I was just wondering what the curry has to do with brown goo.
starlingukI like British food. I live in Germany again and if I see another Maultasche I’m going to scream.
Not when it’s the only thing served at restaurants (plus bad frozen schnitzel).
I did make the comment in jest, though I appreciate the candor lol
That aside, I don’t have an idea if it’s even a viable approach considering the potential expiration dates and storage condition requirements, assuming one would even be willing to pay the exorbitant price to buy it as their main source of nourishment
Im just pointing out we can make a human food just like we make cat food and dog food and indeed have. Soylent sorta started it but there are a variety of other things now doing the same thing with twists (all vegan or organic, etc) and even before then we had meal replacement shakes and bars and actually there is this emergency food called plumpy nut that is actually made to nurse someone back from severe starvation. All sorts of bunker survival ration bar things to which are fairly common as boat things.
Damn you. Another new white t-shirt with coffee and snot stains. Take my upvote.
VanthIf you think about it, for the past hundreds of thousands of years we’ve been regionally locked in our areas so variety is a loose term.
