Is it possible to live off of vitamin, mineral, carbohydrate, and protein pills? --Cosmic Cat
I could just Google food pills and see what comes up, but who wants to do that? That would be boring.
Let's deal with vitamins and minerals first. There are already pills that provide these. A random example includes Vitamin A, some B Vitamins, Vitamin C, Vitamin D, Vitamin E, Omega 3s, iron, calcium, zinc, magnesium, and iodine. Some more Google searching shows that various other dietary minerals can be purchased as supplements. Apparently even arsenic supplements exist. You probably don't want to overdose on those. As one might imagine from the existence of multivitamins, such a pill would be small enough to consume. Summing up the weights of all the suggested daily values for the various vitamins and minerals (using the tables here and here) comes out to about 11 grams, so it's safe to say that you could make a pill-sized pill that could satisfy your vitamin and mineral needs.
Macronutrients such as carbohydrates and protein are difficult though. The USDA suggests consuming 130 grams of carbohydrates per day, about 30 grams of fiber, again about 30 grams of fat, and an average of perhaps 45 to 50 grams of protein. When we add all these together, we can see that a macronutrient "pill" would not exactly be a pill. More like a blob of stuff weighing about half a pound.
I could just Google food pills and see what comes up, but who wants to do that? That would be boring.
Let's deal with vitamins and minerals first. There are already pills that provide these. A random example includes Vitamin A, some B Vitamins, Vitamin C, Vitamin D, Vitamin E, Omega 3s, iron, calcium, zinc, magnesium, and iodine. Some more Google searching shows that various other dietary minerals can be purchased as supplements. Apparently even arsenic supplements exist. You probably don't want to overdose on those. As one might imagine from the existence of multivitamins, such a pill would be small enough to consume. Summing up the weights of all the suggested daily values for the various vitamins and minerals (using the tables here and here) comes out to about 11 grams, so it's safe to say that you could make a pill-sized pill that could satisfy your vitamin and mineral needs.
Macronutrients such as carbohydrates and protein are difficult though. The USDA suggests consuming 130 grams of carbohydrates per day, about 30 grams of fiber, again about 30 grams of fat, and an average of perhaps 45 to 50 grams of protein. When we add all these together, we can see that a macronutrient "pill" would not exactly be a pill. More like a blob of stuff weighing about half a pound.
But let's just go with the half-pound blob. There's a simple problem with this: the average American consumes 1996 pounds per year (according to an NPR blog), which comes out to just under 5.5 pounds per day--more than 10 times the weight of our glob of nutrients. That will cause some problems with satiety, or the state of feeling full. If one has early satiety (the state of feeling full after eating a small meal), then this could still work. Early satiety is caused by a lot of nasty diseases, so inducing it isn't something you should try at home. If you do decide to contract a deadly disease, then all I can say is wow, you must be really determined to live on food pills. At least it would work better than breatharianism though.
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