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.
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.
tomiantOk, 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.