I read once that a person could survive indefinitely on potatoes and milk.
It’s true. Add oats and eggs, and they can thrive.
I know this is Lemmy and all, but, uh, beans.
You can survive off any single food item for some non-zero amount of time. Nothing we know of can allow you to survive forever. The question is always: how long?
Long enough to die of something other than a nutritional deficiency.
Cyanide
potatoes. indefinitely.
Breastmilk should be enough. Just difficult to source.
Peanut butter, jelly, bread.
But if I’m doing it healthy, then add eggs, spinach, blueberries, yogurt.
With enough body fat, sprinkle in a bit of electrolyte and maybe vitamins and that’s all you need.
I remember reading of a supervised case like that, many months of not a year. I couldn’t find it with a quick search.
What was the joke again…
“Humans can survive off a diet consisting of potatoes and butter, as demonstrated by a years long case study commonly known as Ireland”
Something along those lines.
Think it’s important to point out that they didn’t do that by choice.
yikes, scurvy much?
try brocolli and eggs
Potatoes are A ok against scurvy (unlike eggs alone who can come along for the ride though, because hash brown and fried eggs, yum)
If you could only have one food, potatoes would be a good choice.
My mum said when she had no money she lived off eggs, rice, spring onions (which you can just continuously regrow from the bulb) and dried fish.
I don’t know the nutritional facts of this meal, but it worked for her.
If you switch out the fish for chicken or something like spam or corned beef, and add onions and garlic, that’ll do me.
- Rice
- Beans
end of list
B12?
–Edit–
And on closer look also (at least) fatty acids, calcium and iodine.
You’re missing a bunch of micro nutrients which would cause problems over time with this. It has all the calories and protein you need though.
Add in some fat from somewhere like cooking oil, and a handful of vegetables like onions, carrots, etc. and you’d last a fairly normal human lifespan.
Vegetables often contain oil, the problem is getting omega-3’s, which our bodies can’t make.
In the sea, it’s algae who’re producing it: then krill, then squid/fish/etc eat them…
some plants make it, some don’t…
olives are good, olive-oil, etc…
but anybody who’s eating squash is getting omega-6’s or 9’s, even though it seems non-intuitive.
Any particular type of beans? Red? Black? Lentils?
Does the type of rice matter?
I’m intrigued by this possibility.
Afaik pretty much any kind of cereal with any kind of legume provide the essential amino acids needed by the body. Both of them have protein, but not the full set of amino acids that the body requires in a certain proportion.
Idk about vitamins, though.
Does the type of rice matter?
Yes; make sure it’s whole grain. White rice is essentially junk food, with most of its fiber, vitamins & minerals stripped in the de-hulling process.
I have a sack of white rice to eat through… I don’t really know what to do with it all. My partner got it from work. Would rather basmati rice really.
You might mix it with non-junk food rice. Shortgrain-brown might have a similar-enough cooking time that they can be mixed together. I’m hazy on that, as I stopped eating rice years ago, replacing it with steel-cut oats.
Or, who knows… maybe you could donate the sack to a food bank?
Cool - thank you! That makes sense. I know there are so many types of rice, so I’ll do some research too.
Potato
I’ve often heard repeated that a human can live on water, potatoes, and salted butter basically indefinitely.
Not sure how true, but seems plausible.
Before the 1840s, Irish farmers lived on.potatoes and milk, with the odd herring in winter when milk was harder to come by. Not a pleasant diet, and you’re buggered if the potato harvest fails, but definitely doable.
“beriberi” is malnutrition: it means literally “i cannot”.
You become … not very able to do what you need to do, to survive, on this kind of diet, fairly quickly.
Egg-bread & scrambled-eggs ( with a multivitamin every other day ) can get you FAR, ultra-cheap ( if you ever need to get through a month on nearly-nothing ).
( obviously this isn’t long-term, this is short-term-survival stuff )
add-in carrots, if you can.
A bit of broccoli makes a BIG difference in one’s health.
Do what you can to get some omega-3’s into you: our bodies can’t make them, & if our bodies have to make omega-6’s & omega-9’s, apparently they just run mitochondria backwards, to do it.
Even a tablespoon of olive-oil / day will help your body keep functioning.
Well, not rabbit, anyway.
Listen, taco bell has maybe 10-15 ingredients and has an infinite menu item…
For real, steak.
Its the ultimate elimination diet
Beef is very nutrient dense and contains all the nutrients a human needs
The carnivore diet is a thing, and it is just: beef, water and salt.
Most people who do this, do branch out after a while and add eggs, fish, liver etc
While you can get all the nutrition you need from eating animals, you have to eat the organs as well. Also the stomach contents of herbivores even. Wolves eat the stomach contents of deer and such to get their green requirements, everyone needs some green in their diet. But liver, kidneys, most of the organs need to be consumed if you live on only animals.
The germanics basically did for a long time. They ate meat, with a little cheese and milk products and a few veggies thrown in there, a negligible amount of grains, for a long time, including the years after they just appeared in central europe around the 1st century BC or so, there were celts and gauls before that in those areas, both broad terms of many groups to be sure.
But they were all giants for the day, the men were all 6 foot and above, while the romans were more like 5’2" and subsisted mostly on lentils and grains, along with seafood, but very little meat, at least on campaigns. That extra size and bulk obviously didn’t do the germans much good in war, organization means more than brute strength ever could.
I’d be worried about purines. A diet of pure steak would likely lead to an insane case of gout, which is a buildup of uric acid crystals in your joints… which ranks pretty high on the list of excruciatingly painful things you can be diagnosed with.
As long as you’re okay with being the least climate-friendly and probably having cancer by the age of 50. People need fibre.
You might want to have an orange now and then.
Sprinkle a bit of lemon juice over the steak.
If we are counting singular food items, surely haggis would be a better choice for mixed nutritional values. Both are probably lacking vitamin C though so I hope you like scurvy.
