Cause we force them to
Ding ding ding, we have a winner!
We do not “need” a variety of food. We eat it because we can afford it and it makes us healthier and happier.
Daily reminder that pet food is a more recent industry and before it existed pets mostly ate table scraps.
…why the fuck did i waste time reading all that
Animal food is usually balanced to contain all the nutriens the animal needs, or most.
Ofc if it’s proper
Well. We always have Soylent green …
My current cats have Opinions (capital O) about what is or isn’t food. I tried giving them variety, at least in flavour. They don’t want it. The want one specific brand of fish-flavored wet food (in jelly, not gravy). They’ll eat some kinds of fish-flavored kibble if wet food isn’t available. Anything else, they have to be pretty desperate.
At least they both like the same stuff! But the lack of variety is 100% on them, not me.
(My previous cats would eat most things. These two are just weird.)
I’m a living proof that you can eat the same thing every day for decades and be just fine.
If the food you’re eating doesn’t contain all the nutrients you need you’re unhealthy as fuck and it will come back to haunt you.
What do you eat daily?
Not the other guy but i have been eating the same thing every day for lunch for a yearish now. Chicken, carrots , potato. I found a great seasoning mix that works great and its a decent lunch. I have really bad stomach issues and this keeps that mostly in check. Mostly.
I’ve been eating the same thing for almost a year at this point as well.
We don’t
There are lots of dogs and cats who crave variety in their diets, too. Like humans, it’s a behavioral thing rather than a nutritional necessity. My shepherd will simply stop eating regularly unless I vary her diet. I usually have three or so options I rotate through to keep her interested in eating. Lots of people add toppers and mix-ins when they have dogs like mine, but I find that only increases food rejection, as smart pups learn to hold out until we sweeten the deal enough.
I worked for a pet food manufacturer, and it amazed me what customers would do to try to entice their picky pets to eat. One guy was giving his dog lasagna, and he was shocked that his dog didn’t want to eat kibble anymore. Imagine that.
My guess: Cats might get everything they need nutritionally from one meat source. Humans need a more diverse diet.
My thoughts were: At the mercy of their owner for one. Then a simpler obligate carnivore’s taste buds and brain reward system vs an easily bored omnivore with thumbs and unga fire.
Cats can be pretty different with food preference compared to each other. My two aren’t super picky. One is allergic to something in kibble so they both only eat wet food. I noticed above all that they vastly prefer paté pucks to a mince in gravy, no matter what flavour any of it is. Seems to leave them feeling fuller too afterwards. Priority: scent, mouth feel, and then taste is considered last is my observation.
spoiler
That said, a lot of humans in NA who don’t cook at home are eating the same crap repackaged in multiple ways from the same Sysco supply monopoly served at almost every restaurant :p
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Survival =/= nutrition
Somewhere I read that bread has most of the essential nutrients for humans, except for vitamin C. That would mean that prisoners who were sentenced to bread and water could last many years if they had fruit occasionally.
I guess the kind of bread, and the reduced caloric needs of prisoners, play a huge role here.
Asked my GF who’s an aspiring crazy cat lady:
It’s because (proper) cat food is engineered to contain all the nutrients they need. While it looks like a bland mush of only one thing, it’s more like the cat equivalent of having several full nutricious meals run through a blender. The required variety is built in.
I’m convinced you could create such a food for humans too, it’s just not many people want that.
Isn’t that basically what Huel is?
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Its called soylent. Been around for at least a couple decades.
Speak for yourself, bachelor chow would solve many problems for me
Awww shieeet I JUST got done finding a pee’n’gee. What am I gonna do with this thing now?
If you live in the US, there’s soylent. They also ship to Canada, but they’ve been out of stock for half the dang year now…
I’m convinced you could create such a food for humans too,
You could, and it would be very simple to do so.
1: Take all the food you’d eat for, say, a week. Absolutely everything.
2: Blend it. Maybe add some extra vitamins to make up for the ones that will be lost due to processing.
3: Dehydrate it. (To make it more compact and less likely to spoil.)
4: Compress it into pellets.
Done. You have now created ‘human food’.
That’s what I find so absurd about the “humans need variety in their diet” mantra. If we need some vast unknown combination of things, how is it that letting people loose on supermarkets and choosing their own recipes somehow achieves that, compared to at least some first pass attempt based on macro nutrients?
Because many of our modern staples are fortified with essential vitamins and nutrients.
Ok, what we’ll do is, we’ll take some sort of kibble, A, fortify it, call it “Vegetable Delight”. Then another sort of kibble, B, fortify that, call it “Ox Fondue”. Then another, just like the previous ones, call it, say, “Mystery Surprise”. All fortified. Then you just alternate them. Mondays, A. Tuesdays, B. Then Wednesdays you think C but nope! A again. Then B, then A, THEN B, and then, finally C, so you have something special to look forward to on Sundays.
We also get cravings for specific foods when our bodies are lacking in a nutrient that food contains. I don’t think we have them for every nutrient our bodies need, hence why people can get nutrient deficiencies by accident even when the nutrient they need is available, but there’s some instinctual failsafes for certain ones that must have been scarce or intermittent enough for cravings to confer an evolutionary advantage.
Yeah that’s a good point.
Blending it is pre-digesting it which means it doesn’t travel our bodies quite the same way.
We have long digestive systems for a reason.
I’m not saying it isn’t possible but you’d probably shit funny for a long time
Pemmican! We should be eating pemmican.
There are powdered meals that are supposed to offer balanced nutrition. I’ve heard of people living off Soylent, Huel, etc. I don’t think it’s good long-term, and the lack of chewing could cause problems. But it is feasible in principle.
I did a long period of time where Solyent was my main nutrition source and I ate different food if I went out to eat socially with people (which to be fair was several times a week). As far as I can tell, the only problem was getting used to the high amounts of fiber
I ate only soylent for a long time, and the lack of chewing did cause me some issues: first was bad oral hygiene. I brush and floss twice a day (after breakfast and before bed), yet I still got a cavity. Chewing normal food also cleans off plaques on your teeth, so when you’re not chewing anything those plaques just sit there fucking your shit up. Second (*and this is just my conjecture) chewing causes activity in a certain part of the brain to spike, so if you’re not chewing anything that part atrophies and causes depression. I forget where I read the chewing part though. So, along with the cavity, I also felt generally sad about everything. I would still definitely have it for lunch everyday because the nutrients are there, but yeah, unfortunately you have to chew stuff. I thought about just chewing gum, but those are all chock-full of microplastics so…
lack of chewing
this is also a solved issue with a mature industry
That’s true, but we’re not cats.
It’s can be difficult to change a cat’s food. You have to gradually introduce the new food mixed in with the old food, or the cat may just refuse to eat it.
Oh ho ho ho. They will eat. Eventually. Then they get more. Then they complain it’s not enough.
They have.
We don’t. Burritos exist.
Damn you. Another new white t-shirt with coffee and snot stains. Take my upvote.
