When Can You Start Giving Your Baby More Than 1 Food at a Time

Could you survive on merely ane food?

We're constantly told near the benefits of a varied nutrition. But what if yous had to survive on simply ane food – what would y'all continue you alive the longest?

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Human cannot alive on bread alone – not least because man would develop scurvy nearly a month or so into that little experiment.

The best diets take plenty of diverseness in them, making sure you get everything from vitamin C to iron to linoleic acid without even having to think. Fifty-fifty fad diets that focus on only a few foods or on eliminating certain things are usually varied plenty to be reasonably nutritious. All the same, in the extremely unlikely scenario that yous had to alive on only one nutrient, are some nutritionally more complete than others? Could you get what you need from, say, simply potatoes, or simply bananas, or just avocados?

One affair is for sure, the candidates would not include meat or most fruits and vegetables. Meat doesn't have fibre, nor does it have primal vitamins and nutrients. Fruits and vegetables may have vitamins, but they don't have anywhere close to enough fat or protein, even eaten in quantity. The trunk does not need equally much as you might think to stay live, only you omit them at your peril.

Potatoes, it turns out, take plenty of protein as well as vitamins (Credit: iStock)

Arctic explorer Vilhjalmur Stefansson wrote about a phenomenon amid the peoples of northern Canada called rabbit starvation, in which those who consume only very lean meat, such as rabbit, "develop diarrhea in about a calendar week, with headache, lassitude, a vague discomfort." To avoid death from malnutrition, rabbit starvation sufferers must consume some fat, he writes. Jon Krakauer, in his book Into the Wild, suggests at showtime that ill-blighted free spirit Chris McCandless died from rabbit starvation. Information technology'south thought that getting most all one's calories from poly peptide, and almost none from fatty or carbohydrates, may overwhelm the liver'southward ability to process protein.

Nevertheless, if meat and virtually vegetables are off the table, somewhat surprisingly, potatoes are not every bit bad an option every bit you might recollect, says dietician Jennie Jackson of Glasgow Caledonian Academy. She wrote concluding twelvemonth about Australian Andrew Taylor, who spent a year eating just potatoes as a well-publicised endeavour to lose weight and build healthier habits.

The affair that makes potatoes special is that for a starchy nutrient, they accept an unusual corporeality of protein, and that includes a wide variety of amino acids, says Jackson. Still, even eating 3kg (6.6lbs) of potatoes a day would only get upward to well-nigh two-thirds of the recommended amount for someone of Taylor's size.

Potatoes also don't have the recommended amount of fat, and though Taylor included sweet potatoes, garnering him vitamins A and East, atomic number 26, and calcium, Jackson noted that B vitamins and zinc and other minerals would be in short supply. Only he seems to have gotten through his year relatively unscathed. In fact, he lost quite a bit of weight.

As an aside, potatoes accept a habit of coming up in these kinds of conversations. Some years ago a reader wrote to The Chicago Reader advice column, The Straight Dope, asked whether it was true you could live on but potatoes and milk. After all, it's been said that before the Irish gaelic Spud Dearth, people in that location were living almost solely on potatoes. Cecil Adams, the erstwhile columnist, claims to take run the numbers with his assistant and establish that a whole lot of potatoes and milk would go you about of what you need – with the exception of the mineral molybdenum. But you can get all you lot need of that by also eating a scrap of oatmeal.

Avocados are packed with nutrients - only non every bit many as potatoes (Credit: iStock)

Hearing this, Jackson laughs. "Oh, that's our diet – that's the Scottish nutrition from a hundred years agone. That fits right in. Potatoes, milk, and oatmeal, with some kale in there, too."

But beyond pure nutrition, there are other barriers to narrowing one's diet to a single food. Humans have built-in mechanisms to avoid but such a state of affairs (probably because it eventually leads to malnutrition) – specifically, a phenomenon called sensory-specific satiety: The more y'all consume of one thing, the less you lot can tummy it. "I phone call this the pudding scenario," says Jackson, "where yous go out for a meal and yous're blimp, you couldn't manage another seize with teeth. And and then someone brings out a pudding and y'all can manage a few more calories." At that place's the danger that eating the same thing day after day for a long time would make it more difficult to swallow enough of information technology to proceed you lot going. (Three kilos of avocado a twenty-four hours, anyone?)

Furthermore, the logic that it must be possible to eat a unmarried-particular nutrition rather than a varied ane, and suffer no ill furnishings, every bit long as all the vitamin, mineral, and calorie boxes are checked, doesn't quite work out. To sympathise why, consider how nosotros got our modernistic grasp of nutrition. Researchers in the early 20th Century deprived rats of sure nutrients and kept track of whether they got sick or died. This is how nosotros learned about the beingness of vitamins, for case. It tells y'all what rats will dice without, at least in the short term.

Rabbit meat contains such picayune fat that it tin can crusade digestive problems (Credit: iStock)

Nevertheless, information technology'south probable that some of the health benefits of a varied diet — which play out in the long term — can't be picked upwards in reductive experiments like this, says Jackson. (And of course, humans are not rats.) Epidemiological information on people has fabricated it clear that a variety of vegetables in 1'due south diet is healthier than just a few, for instance, but information technology isn't exactly clear why.

Maybe a nutrition that includes no green vegetables ways that somewhere down the line, you'll have a higher run a risk of developing cancer than you might take otherwise. "Nosotros don't really know which foods are causing which effects," Jackson says. "So while you could work out what exactly you needed from macro nutrients, you lot won't know exactly what you might exist missing."

Cutting down your daily diet to just one ingredient might salvage time and hassle, only information technology'd be a quick way to get ill as well every bit bored.

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Source: https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20170224-what-food-would-keep-you-alive-the-longest

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