Ming’s Wisdom

What would happen if we ate 100% recommended daily intake of every vitamin each day in real food? Would our bodies become super-human? Is it even possible to stuff enough food into our stomachs each day to reach that mythical “daily recommended value” for everything? Let’s find out.

After reading How I stopped Eating Food, a very thought-provoking experiment where Rob Rhinehart stops eating real food and simply mixes a concoction of chemicals to reach the daily recommended intakes of all essential nutrients, I began to ponder if we can go about achieving that awesome goal using a safer and more natural method. I’d like to go about it in a much more socially accepted and easier to prepare fashion, and in my mind, harder to mess up and screw yourself over. Basically I’d like to create a diet plan of real, fresh foods that would get me to at least 100% of daily recommended intake of vitamins and minerals, and see how difficult or expensive it might be.

The criteria and guidelines I set for myself are as following:

1. All foods must be real, natural, and whole.
2. Using nutritiondata.com as a reference, all listed vitamin and mineral daily recommended values would be met at 100% or greater. Ideally we’d get to 200% (so we have some buffer) since there may be some variation between individuals where digestive problems or high-heat cooking processes can destroy some of those nutrients, but anything over 100% would satisfy the criteria.
3. The list of foods to satisfy the daily recommended nutrient requirements must fit in an average human stomach in one day. E.g. if all that food cannot possibly be reasonably consumed in a day, then it’s useless. Ideally we’d be able to do it with as small of food intake as possible, to leave room in the stomach for the person to eat whatever else they want during that day. Once the requirements are satisfied, any remaining food intake can be anything, good food or junk food, I don’t care.
4. Foods can be raw or cooked, but should be in as natural a state as possible.
5. I have no concern whether a food is a carb, protein, or fat. Nor whether it’s a vegetable, fruit, fish, white meat, or red meat. As long as it meets the vitamin requirements.
6. As a personal goal, I’m trying to keep the plan as low cost as easily available as possible. Not only am I lazy and busy, but I also can’t afford lobster every day.
7. If possible, use super foods. In this case I’m referring to foods that provide ridiculous amounts of one or more nutrients in a small amount of food. Just makes things easier if we can find a few of those.

So here’s my first draft of a diet plan:

You’ll probably notice that I’ve created a plan with foods that I enjoy eating, or have gotten used to eating (for the most part). Each column is a quantity of food that I believe I can eat in a day or enjoy eating in a day, with the percentage daily values of each nutrient that it satisfies, along with their total calories and total per day (currently in Chinese Yuan since I’m currently in China, divide by 6 to get US Dollars).

A few notes:

• You can alter this plan any way you like, with foods that you like or are easily accessible to you.
• You’ll notice that spinach provides a ridiculous amount of vitamin A, vitamin K, and betaine. Not too weak in other areas as well. I’m assuming that with vegetable cell walls protecting cells we might not get the full brunt of the nutrients, but even a fraction of that is great.
• I enjoy eating lots of eggs every day. If you don’t enjoy eggs or don’t think you can stomach that many, simply swap it out with something else as long as the nutrient values work out. Note though that it contains a ton of nutrients, including being the only ridiculously good source of choline, and only natural source of vitamin D I found other than sunlight. (I ruled out artificially enriched milk, since milk doesn’t actually naturally contain vitamin D)
• The only way I was able to rack up enough vitamin E was with some intake of nuts. I don’t usually eat them, but I stuck some sunflower seeds in. I also use peanut oil to cook, to get us barely over 100% in vitamin E.
• Thiamin was also difficult to rack up. The few sources of thiamin that provided anything significant that are available here are pork and durian. These two seem to be able to be substituted as needed, as they seem to have similar nutrient profiles.
• Niacin was also a little difficult, as there wasn’t really any super food that provided a ton of it. You pretty much have to eat lots of chicken. I didn’t add any more chicken to the chart because I wasn’t sure how much I would be able to eat in a day.
• Calcium was extremely difficult to rack up as well, unless you eat a ton of vegetables. I’m not the biggest fan of the taste of vegetables, so I pondered at this problem for a long time, until I realized that in the chicken wing listed on the chart, there was a bone, and if I chewed and ate it, it would be the superfood needed to get massive amounts of calcium and phosphorous into the body. Just 10 grams of bone will give you over triple the daily intake requirement. I’ve put a lower amount that the chicken wing bone actually provides, as sometimes the bone is hard or sharp and I might only eat the chewable parts of it.
• Oysters are also a superfood in B12 and zinc. Beef also is similar, but where I live oysters are much cheaper and more accessible than beef.
• I was actually very short on sodium in this plan. So I added a bit of sea salt into the cooked items (I plan on doing pork and spinach cooked together) to add a bit of sodium requirement.
• Vitamin D is very difficult to get from food, so a bit of sunshine is necessary. Otherwise the only thing that provided it was eggs, and you’d need to eat over 30 eggs per day to get vitamin D purely from food alone.
• Note that despite not caring whether foods are vegetable/fruit/meat, we actually ended up with a fairly even spread of meats/fruits/veges/nuts, because it was fairly difficult to rack up all the nutrients otherwise.
• Judging by the calories, it doesn’t seem like a lot of food. However, because we’re not eating any fast food stuffed with dense calories, this is actually a very high volume of food. There’s literally a pound of watermelon, a pound combined of egg/pork/oyster/chicken, a pound of cucumber, a pound combined of oranges/vegetables, and a pound and a half of bananas. (Cucumbers and bananas are very filling)
• The cost turns out to be a little expensive, if I can find a sale here and there, then roughly $10 USD per day.

So this was actually a little more difficult than I had expected. I thought that I’d be able to jam all the daily requirements into 500 calories of super foods and any remaining stomach space I could just eat whatever. There’s actually many vitamins that are way over 100%, but the hard parts were vitamin E, Niacin, Pantothenic Acid, Iron, and Magnesium. I took a brute force method to lay this out, as I just kept doubling amounts of certain foods until I got to at least 100% on these difficult nutrients, so it definitely wasn’t the most optimized approach. I think that if I played around with it a little more, shifted some ratios of foods, and looked a little harder to find super foods rich in one or more nutrients, I could probably get both the total amount of food and cost down further. I could eat this amount of food in a day, but it definitely would be a very filling day. I will keep you updated with any progressions.

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This entry was posted on Monday, April 8th, 2013 at 22:42 and is filed under Health. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.