Can you survive on pickles alone, for a while?
Can you survive on pickles alone, for a while?
Almost every jar of pickles claims a serving of pickles has zero calories. Now clearly, this is incorrect and the result of exploiting some ridiculous FDA loophole, since anyone knows that cucumbers provide calories.
So let's say you're in a situation where you lose all access to food, but you've got effectively unlimited access to pickles -- like, you're trapped inside a recently abandoned pickle warehouse.
Could you conceivably eat enough pickles to survive for a month? Two months? Or would your body just shut down from all the sodium and acid?
With a serving size of 20-30g and only 1 g carbs, unfortunately they’re not exploiting labeling. Cucumbers do not have significant carbohydrates, fat or protein and thus neither do pickled cucumbers. Maybe enough carbs to survive but not enough fat or protein, and so you’d end up with protein deficiency and whatever that condition is where people eating just rabbits starve from lack of fat. Probably also a horrific case of heartburn from such an acidic diet.
They do have a decent amount of some vitamins and minerals, and electrolytes such as potassium. It wouldn’t make up for the lack of protein and fat though.
Cucumbers themselves, like basically every green vegetable, dont provide sustainable amounts of calories. But assuming pickles cant have a different calorie count from the cucumbers they started with is a bit nonsense, it's like saying wood ash will burn as well as unburnt wood. It's undergone chemical processes that alter its makeup. If you're talking about conventional vinegared pickles, that's acids breaking down the few carbohydrates and proteins, and if you're talking about lacto-fermented pickles, that's bacteria eating the calories first and converting into carbon dioxide. You can also compare the vitamins for fresh cucumbers vs labeled on the pickle jar. They're not finding loopholes to not label the health benefits of what they're selling, the pickling process also destroys vitamins.
I don't know enough to answer but I like this question
So there are a lot of "basically nothing" foods you can survive on for a time until nutrient deficiencies kill you. However in the case of pickles I think you'd be better of literally not eating for a month. Like how drinking saltwater dehydrates you, eating pickles would blow anything of nutritional value out of you and then some
I don't know, but let us know how it goes.
Imagine the shit you would have to take after a few days of even trying. I would definitely not trust a fart after day three.
calorie negative food requires more energy to digest than they give you. The more you preprocess them like cooking, the more that changes. It the basis for the cabbage soup diet that while this wikipedia page pans my wife swears by https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cabbage_soup_diet . Although she does not eat just the soup but uses it as a supplement cruch that does have a lot of non caloric nutrients to stay full. I have no idea why the wiki page say medical professionals say the weight lost is water. I find that hard to believe given the amount of water consumed as part of eating soup. Im just skeptical of what medical professionals or what proportion said that particular thing.
I feel like Lemmy probably lacks the expertiese on pickles. Beans on the other hand...
Missing some vitamins and minerals as well as some obligate amino acids so without getting to the calories, no
I'm pretty sure this would kill you in a short amount of time. Chubbyemu had a video on Youtube where a single, large jar of pickles was enough to nearly kill someone (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gF69voHU_ys).
If you're also drinking water and only eating a few pickles a day for the salt and mineral content, you can water fast safely for a good while if you have enough body fat.
Folk with morbid obesity have safely water fasted up to a year.
The pickles would only be sustaining you so far as salt and minerals though, your body fat would be doing the rest to keep you alive.
It would take more energy to digest the pickle than the pickle would provide.
One example that I like to use is this: would a cockroach eat it? Roaches eat everything from food crumbs to wallpaper paste. Anything with calories. Do you know something that roaches WON'T eat? Cucumbers.
So long as the pickles don't have sugar in the brine, I would say you would likely starve to death.
No
It would vary quite a bit depending on the person and the circumstances.
First, I'm assuming you're talking about brine pickled cucumbers based on the context, but brining isn't the only way to make pickles and cucumbers aren't the only thing you can make pickles from.
I think 2 of the biggest considerations here would be whether I have access to clean, fresh water and whether I'm in good health, with no major health issues.
If I don't have access to fresh water, then I wouldn't eat the pickles to begin with. And I would probably only have a matter of days to live.
If I had major health issues that would be potentially fatal without medical treatment, then that would probably be the limiting factor in how long I survive and would be dependent on the condition.
If I do have access to fresh water, I would give the pickles a lengthy soak (or even boil them if I could) before I ate them. That would mitigate at least some of the concerns about too much sodium. I could further mitigate some of the concerns by ensuring that I'm drinking lots of water (at least I would assume that would help somewhat).
I've read that the average person can go without any food for at least a month or two (with 3 weeks being the minimum), so if I did my sodium mitigation, then I would expect to at least survive at the upper limit of that. From a purely caloric standpoint, the average pickling cucumber (not that there really is such a thing as average/standard) is something like 20 - 50 calories each, and I feel like that alone would extend the window of survivability.
No fat, no protein. You’d starve to death in a matter of weeks. Assuming you have fresh water to drink.
Easy. If I was trapped in a recently abandoned pickle factory, then I would survive on the food in the staff canteen, starting with what had just been prepared, such as pizza and sandwiches; after a day or so I would move on to see what was in the refrigerators, and finally work my way up to the frozen food. Oh, by the way, when they abandoned the factory, they forgot to turn off the power, so all the perishables are still nicely preserved.
Also, lots of things can be pickled, not just cucumbers. The word “pickles” makes me immediately think of pickled onions. There is usually quite a bit of sugar in the picking vinegar.
Would eating Pickle Rick be extra calories?
