Something articles like these make me wonder is what would a single "perfect" meal look like? Perfect as in a meal that provides all the essential nutrients the average person needs to stay healthy over the long term? The goal would be to make it as cheap as possible, easy to mass-produce, and have a decent shelf life. It might not be the most exciting food, but it could address serious issues like malnutrition and food insecurity. Food banks could always have something reliable to offer, combine it with a supplement to make up for any lack of micro nutrients and no one would have to worry about not having access to basic nutrition. It feels like a solvable problem, but it's likely harder than I imagine.
Interestingly, potatoes contain almost everything a person needs (all essential amino acids, carbs, etc).
If I recall correctly, you get complete nutrition from: potatoes, a small amount of dairy (vitamin A, calcium, fatty acids), and a small amount of ... oats? (or maybe some vegetable? I forget.) to cover the few trace nutrients potatoes don't have. I think selenium is one.
They're cheap, and dried/flaked potatoes last forever. The Incas already solved this problem for us (:
Comparison of essential amino acid, to meet the Total Recommended Daily Intake: about 100g of beef or about 2 kg of Baked Russet Potatoes, according to:
Just entered in 2 potato's and a litre of milk into chronometer. I think the last ingredient is probably gonna need to be 2 things, a dark leafy green for vitamin K, and something for vitamin E, tho I honestly can't find any good candidates besides like sunflower oil (and you'd need like 3 tbsp worth)
Buttermilk and potatoes can get you close to 100% nutrition.
Plug 4 large potatoes and 6 Cups of whole buttermilk into a site like Cronometer. 2000 Calories and 100+% of everything but Vitamins E and K, which you might get from foraged greens.
> meal that provides all the essential nutrients the average person needs to stay healthy over the long term
There's a simple and intuitive answer, and I am still surprised that even rational people are conditioned to dismiss it (as I used to be).
What are you made of?
Animal flesh provides exactly all the nutrients required for your own flesh, in exactly the perfectly balanced proportion. Just think about it for a second. So, the simple answer is just fatty meat. As a good extra, you can use some liver/kidneys, a good idea is to also throw in some cartilage and skin into your ground meat for perfect nutrients balance. Eggs/fish/cheese for variability.
Imagine the careful measured portioning and chemical purification required to collect necessary nutrients from soy and vegetable stems — to make them right for building and sustaining your own animal flesh. Imagine how many things we didn't know 50 years ago about what nutrients are required for our flesh, and how many non-obvious things we will discover in the next 50 years from now, which would completely re-define best practices for synthetic vegetable food many times.
It occurs to me that this “exactly balanced proportion” argument doesn’t explain how animals turn vegetables into the meat you crave. The argument would dictate that cows should be fed meat, which regresses into absurdity.
Most people should probably cook their own food, avoid most ultra-processed foods (twinkies, not flour) and eat a healthy balance of food types.
From a documentary: cows are about 30% carnivore. They grow bacteria in their guts, on low quality food (grass) and then that bacteria gets devoured with the rest of the food when it's pushed in the next stomach (or intestine).
They had a hilarious setup, a cow with a plastic flap attached to the side. They would open the flap to get instant access to the guts of the cow to collect samples of food.
Consuming prokaryotes i.e. bacteria as part isn't the same thing as eating the tissue of animals. By that definition, just about every living animal is a carnivore, which would erase the relevant distinction (eating plants versus animal tissue).
Cows have huge digestive system, and chew all day long — to be able to extract nutrients from plants. You, as a human, probably have more productive uses of your day.
I'm not saying that you shouldn't eat veggies. I am just saying that staying long-term healthy on a vegan diet seems to me much more complicated than just eating meat. Of course, eating a single product all the time is unhealthy, no matter what product — every living organism requires variance.
> This is a very different statement than "the simple answer is just fatty meat," which is what you originally claimed.
It's a different statement, but it's not contradictory. Simple answer is: eat fatty meat. Complex answer is: just like everything in this universe, it depends on many factors, and no single answer is correct in every single context - but eating fatty meat will get you 90% where you want to be for 10% of effort.
We could look at the diet of the species most closely related to us chimps which is mostly fruit nuts, tuberous roots, insects, and opportunisticly meat (about 2%). You could bump the meat up a few percent to avoid bugs or add more nuts/legumes and acheive a healthy diet.
It's a good point. As I understand, it is still debated whether increased meat consumption allowed our bigger brains — though I agree that a balanced and varied diet of natural unprocessed ingredients is likely the healthiest, although not the easiest to maintain, I think.
This doesn’t pass a basic sniff test. We mostly don’t eat food to replace our physical form. We mostly eat food to fuel the processes of our physical form. Big difference. Like trying to put steel, rubber, and plastic into a car’s gas tank.
If cars were constantly 3d-printing themselves from the inside to replace every single part with a new one every day (as living multi-cellular organisms do), I'm pretty for them consuming other running cars as a source materials would be best (as cars would contain the necessary rubber and steel in proportions that are perfect for cars). You don't even need to consume fuel separately — your car would re-cycle fuel from the consumed car's tank — sorry for continuing your metaphor.
After I posted, I wished I hadn’t added the car metaphor. You’re right that it doesn’t map to the body well. That said, it’s still true that most of what food is doing is fueling activity and not replacing parts of the body. Carbs work really well.
This is a hypothesis, but it doesn't bear out in human out come research no matter how popular it might be on social media. No "perfect meal" would be high in saturated fat.
Animal flesh also doesn't contain all of the nutrients. Just plug 2000 calories of steak into Cronometer.com and look.
What's wrong with saturated fats though? You're probably thinking of the same debunked papers which said that sugary cereals are the healthy way to start your day
Well, instead of getting into that, the simpler debunk is that fatty meat only gives you a fraction of your daily nutrition. Even when you add in eggs and dairy.
But only in diet camps (usually "carnivore"/"keto" camps) on social media do people tell you that research on saturated fats is debunked because it condemns the foods they wish to eat. We know that, for example, saturated fat increases apoB concentration in the blood which is independently causal in atherosclerosis.
We have converging lines of metaanalyses that show this connection which is why reducing saturated fat and LDL cholesterol are unanimous guidelines, not social media fringe positions. ;)
> the simpler debunk is that fatty meat only gives you a fraction of your daily nutrition
I have tried the hyped-up "carnivore" diet myself for over 1.5 years and counting (started at a tender age of 35), with different levels of strictness (diary/no diary, no cheat days / once a month / twice a month / once a week), while doing blood tests every month. My wife thought I would die, but I was curious whether I would die, or how quickly my health would deteriorate.
Happy to report that you're wrong (based of my own anecdata), and not only fatty meat (even without diary) does provide enough nutrients and energy, but it noticeably _improves_ the blood work results and _lowers_ blood cholesterol.
> apoB concentration in the blood which is independently causal in atherosclerosis
I am pretty sure you're unintentionally mixing up 'causal' and 'correlated'. Correlation is not causation. For example, atherosclerosis might be causal in in increased apoB concentration, or something else completely might be causal in both atherosclerosis and increased apoB concentration, but apoB concentration by itself could be independent from atherosclerosis, or even inverse causal.
> We have converging lines of metaanalyses that show this connection which is why reducing saturated fat is a unanimous guideline.
If you're a US resident, I'd like to let you know that your newly elected administration is allegedly going to change the unanimous guidelines soon. Not saying whether it's a good or bad thing, just that your argument from authority is much weaker in our discussion than you think it is.
I reject this line of reasoning because by it the best meal is other humans. If you accept that eating other animals is OK and eating fellow humans is bad then you are halfway to the next step, where eating fellow animals is bad and eating non-animals is OK. Just be smart about your diet. Call yourself sapiens not for nothin'!
The original question was about a "meal that provides all the essential nutrients the average person needs to stay healthy over the long term"
The simplest, easiest, and the most correct answer is "just eat animals".
Of course, one can be "smart" about their diet, spend a lot of time on carefully balancing vegetables, fruit, grains and tofu, while also making sure to consume proper blend of vitamin and mineral pills and doing regular blood tests. BUT that's far from a "single meal", far from "easy" and "simple", and consumes a lot of time and mental capacity which many humans might not have a luxury to allocate in order to be fellows with farm animals, I think.
> The original question was about a "meal that provides all the essential nutrients the average person needs to stay healthy over the long term"
> The simplest, easiest, and the most correct answer is "just eat animals".
Stop right there. This is playing switcharoo.
You devised a hypothesis that elegantly goes like "healthiest simplest diet is what is closest to your own body". (And that you used as a justification to eat other animals)
But hey I guess the closest to your body is other humans. So seeing as you now backtrack and are not suggesting humans eat humans, thankfully you understand that the original question implies some norms about what is acceptable and what is unacceptable to eat even if it is contains all you need.
Now you just need to see why growing numbers of people think about eating not only fellow humans but fellow animals who are conscious, feel pain and suffer, especially the ones who grow up for consumption and suffer entire life tortured as unacceptable and you're all set.
In addition there is another "little problem" with your argument and that is that humans don't eat through by absorbing stuff like some sort of amoeba. It goes through complex digestive process that extracts some stuff from other stuff. And a bunch of stuff a human body can/should synthesize. Remember healthy eating is also NOT getting stuff you don't need and synthesize. And if you find the closest thing to what's in your body, that'll be a whole lotta stuff you do not need.
So no "just pick what's the same as your body" is not the most "simple healthy meal". On more than one level. It's just an excuse to justify a existing taste for meat.
As I understood your argument, you primarily don't like the idea of eating animals based on your beliefs, and you would oppose it even if animals were the healthiest food available ever. So I don't think we contradict each other here — I've heard you, and I understand your ethical position.
> And a bunch of stuff a human body can/should synthesize
You're 100% correct here, I am aware of that. For example, if you only eat meat, your body will synthesize glucose which it would be otherwise lacking (which technically means that meat does not contain the "optimal amount" of sugars).
> Remember healthy eating is also NOT getting stuff you don't need and synthesize
And also getting stuff that a body cannot synthesize enough. Like the notorious B vitamin pills that vegans pop like candy.
> It's just an excuse to justify a existing taste for meat
No excuse needed, god (or nature) made cows delicious — what do you think is the reason for that?
> Like the notorious B vitamin pills that vegans pop like candy
Anecdotal like a lot of this but I take a single 2000mcg B12 pill once per week and have never been deficient in 19 years as a vegan. Once a week is pretty far from popping like candy.
> No excuse needed, god (or nature) made cows delicious — what do you think is the reason for that?
Again elegant but broken theory to justify a taste. Have you tried eating cow as it appears in "nature"? Let me know how delicious raw meat is. If you manage to kill it mano el mano as "nature" intended of course ;)
And of course apples are delicious. Beans. Avocado. Nuts.
Stuff can be very bad for you but taste very good. How do you know this is not that case with animals? If you think "god" made them tasty check maybe it was the satan actually? Animal conditions make me think of that guy more;)
The simple healthy meal is not eating animals. Coincidentally not the most tasty by a long shot but taste is subjective and always changes depending on what you get used to
As I mentioned in the other place, I've tried the carnivore diet, and I think you 100% can just eat fatty meat for months (and likely years), and you will feel great, and you blood work will improve.
Am I saying it's what you should do? No, primarily because I am not your mother, and also I don't know your current focuses in life.
To continue this, the next step is eating fellow life is bad and eating non-life is OK. Just use an Instagram filter to recolour your face away from grey.
It's meant to digest anything it can digest. Morally I would disagree with someone who says "eat anything but conscious beings" because that would include eating people who are asleep or passed out, or dead.
So you think your gut is meant to digest human flesh? Fun worldview
> eat anything but conscious beings
"conscious" here means "possessing consciousness" not "conscious right now".
> include eating people who are asleep or passed out, or dead
The point is we eat what we think is acceptable to eat not just any random thing we can digest. Because we have some norms about what is OK to eat. Most norms say eating humans (dead or alive) is bad. Other norms say eating animals is also bad. QED.
Obviously don't do that for two obvious reasons (which I am highlighting just to be technically correct and to entertain ourselves):
1) Socially, not good idea. We are social creatures, and want to be accepted as a part of healthy group of our own species.
2) Eating your own kind more likely to transmit diseases, so less healthy.
Also cows and sheep have 99.99% same chemical composition as you, you don't really need to go that far, and any additional benefits (if any) are below statistical noise, but two downsides above are huge.
Afaik almost all of the actual malnutrition in the world now comes from political causes rather than literal lack of volume of food (and actually a lot of historical famines were politically caused as well- the great leap forward, Irish potato famine)- there's probably some underlying political condition that prevents the normal functioning of the infrastructure needed to grow food and get it to people- water, roads, etc., because of war or simple mismanagement of money or resources.
So making a supply of this nutritionally complete food isn't the hard part, it's basically getting it to people who would eat it.
The other sad and ironic thing is that in America, both food insecurity and obesity basically exist side by side. It's definitely not the composition of the food that contributes to those issues.
The great leap forward happened in communist china. Probably communism and centrally planned economies have starved at least as many people as capitalism. Neither system seems particularly concerned with feeding poor people.
It’s not a feature of any specific political system. It’s a function of power.
The British stood by and allowed the Irish to starve, whilst Ireland was exporting record amounts of food that wasn’t potatoes, as they were concerned about charity being a corrupting influence on the Irish wretches.
You are correct. The reason is that neither has any compassion, to this very day.
OTOH, either system could be structured to be based upon compassion, if the people in charge made the choice to do so. Any human system could be altered to incorporate compassion into its motivations and mechanisms.
I'm a fan of fettered capitalism with socially-conscious citizens, but that requires the wealthy, middle class, and poor to be compassionate. What is important is to internalize the currently external costs corporations impose upon the environment and populace to make their profit.
For now, it's 'by the wealthy for the wealthy', no matter which system is dominant, no matter which religion is in power, no matter which ethnicity to ruling class represents. That is because compassion is sorely lacking in this world's peoples, especially its rulers.
You might be interested in Michael Lustgarden, a scientist whose hobby(?) is extending his healthspan by optimising biomarkers. In practice he mostly tests and tweaks his diet extensively: https://michaellustgarten.com
His meals are essentially a massive variety of vegetables + some sardines. It's fascinating work even if I wouldn't replicate it myself.
My main concern is people having to skip meals and kids facing developmental issues due to malnutrition. I get that the idea of feeding people something like Soylent isn’t exactly appealing, but if we could bring the cost down to nearly free for those in need, it could be a really effective safety net, (maybe not Soylent as it exists now but a product like that).
We don't really have a problem with quantity, or quality, of food. We have a logistics problem. Which is nice way of saying that starvation can be a policy.
Example most people don't know about: Sudan. There is a civil war there, for two years now, millions of refugees, hundreds of thousands dead, terror, whole villages wiped out. And now the refugees starve. And why?
Because the fighting sides don't let aid trucks across their lines.
As the sibling comment says, that's a distributional poverty issue which is downstream of a lot of other policy, rather than something fundamental to food.
You're presenting it as a solution, but if dystopian sci-fi has taught me anything it'll become the cheap standardised food for the poor while the rich get to eat proper food.
I mean Soylent's naming couldn't be more on the nose. At least it's not made of people (as far as I know).
