Today we can find a huge variety of Nutrients in the form of pill or in a similar format: vitamins, minerals and other compounds that our body generally obtains from food, in a more “practical” format. Some of these pills in fact incorporate a wide variety of these nutrients.
This leads us to raise an issue: why not everyone. Is it possible to concentrate all micro- and macronutrients, and all the energy contribution that our body needs in a simple format? And if it is, are we close to achieving it?
If someone hoped that the answer to this last question was something different from a resounding “no”, he was wrong. To understand why it is so difficult we have to understand a key detail: not all nutrients are the same and some simply do not fit in a single pill.
The first thing we should know to understand the great difficulty we would face if we wanted to create A pill to feed It is how we classify nutrients. We usually distribute them into two groups.
The first is that of macronutrients that covers three categories: fat or lipids, carbohydrates, and proteins or amino acids. The second, that of micronutrients, which covers the vitamins and minerals that our body requires for its function. The difference between the categories can be intuited by name (and advances the great reason why it is difficult to concentrate the food in a pill), is the amount.
We can see food as a mechanism of our body to obtain two things. The first, chemical elements and compounds that you need in your daily function such as amino acids, minerals or vitamins. The second is energy, which obtains mainly through two key macronutrients: carbohydrates and fats (although our body can “recycle” its own proteins as an emergency energy source).
Energy is the main problem, and even the most energy concentrated foods, FatsThey require relatively large volumes to be able to provide us with the energy we need (between 1,600 and 3,000 calories a day in adults, depending on our body and our habits).
The idea of lipid supplements is not new, but concentrating the necessary amount of fat to replace a meal in a single pill (in which we would also have to include other compounds) does not seem viable, so in the best case we would depend on the consumption of several pills to be consumed throughout the day.
“Human beings are never going to eat pills such as food … pills can never be made in a way that contain enough caloric volume,” he explained in an article published in 1936 in the Jefferson City Post-Tribune (As the British chain collected more recently BBC) The professor of the University of Comumbia Milton A. Bridges. “Experfically plausible to provide all the necessary vitamins and minerals in a meal in the form of a pill. But you cannot achieve calories if it is not eating food.”
We still have no food in pill but we do have products that try to offer us all the micro and macronutrients that our body needs in a more bulky formatthe milkshake. The shakes of this type are not new: a decade ago they began to popular formulas such as Soylent or Joylent.
Is it possible to subsist and stay healthy with these formulas? We do not know, but there are two reasons that lead us to doubt. The first is that human nutrition is very complex. We know a lot about it but it is possible that our bodies require traces of some micronutrient that we have not considered.
This is not necessarily the case, but it is a possibility. To know this we would have to put this type of test formulas in rigorous experiments and long term. Something is complicated today.
The second issue has to do with the diversity of our bodies: people of different age, sex or body mass would need specific formulas for adapt to your body’s requirements. Even controlling these variables we would also find a huge diversity caused by health disorders and conditions, habits and daily activities, and other factors very difficult to introduce if we wanted to customize the pills or shakes to consume.
Reducing our diet to a series of pills would undoubtedly have their advantages. But it would be difficult to make us lose, as a species, our taste for gastronomy. This way of feeding ourselves is today science fiction and for many surely of the subgenre focused on dystopia: after all, these formulas, practices on a day -to -day basis, eliminate the agency and the feeling of having free will.
This does not mean that these options could not have their niche, for example facilitating food in Interplanetary trips or in other contexts in which access to food could be more complicated.
In WorldOfSoftware | We have asked two nutritionists to blind a weekly menu created with GPT-4. It has been very well stopped
Image | Danilo.Alvesd
