Animal food is usually balanced to cocntain all the nutriens the animal needs, or most.
Ofc if it’s proper
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.
Cause we force them to
Ding ding ding, we have a winner!
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
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.
We don’t
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I’m a living proof that you can eat the same thing every day for decades and be just fine.
What do you eat daily?
I’ve been eating the same thing for almost a year at this point as well.
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.
We don’t. Burritos exist.
Damn you. Another new white t-shirt with coffee and snot stains. Take my upvote.
need a variety of food to survive?
It’s not true.
Boredom feels terrible while it lasts, but it doesn’t kill you. In the end, humans usually start to get creative after boredom.
Oh, and yes, some food industry has found out things and told you things… yes, they were creative :-)
What about the British? They were starving, and they didn’t get creative. They just kept eating brown goo for centuries.
I like British food. I live in Germany now and if I see another Maultasche I’m going to scream.
We like carbs which are often brown and make for a good hangover food. Not sure about goo though?
I suppose that’s why we added mild pain to our diet. Mix things up a bit.
To add on to other peoples answers regarding the complete nutritional makeup of pet food; many animals can make a variety of the amino acids they need to survive with just a few inputs (like deer and cows eating only (mostly) plants), but some, especially predatory animals, cannot. They get those nutrients from the prey they eat, which in turn got them from the plants.
It essentially comes down to which enzymes any given organism can create, which ones their DNA codes for. Humans can’t make a bunch of these amino acids themselves. Many (maybe all of them, not that far into my class yet) of the reactions taking in place in any living organism are entirely reliant on enzymes to catalyze them; that is, without them these reactions would take millions of years to complete.
BTW there are appr. 37x1017 (3,700,000,000,000,000,000) reactions happening in your body every second. All of them (or at least a great majority of them) require enzymes to complete.
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.
Its called soylent. Been around for at least a couple decades.
Isn’t that basically what Huel is?
yeah. I tried the “nothing but huel for a week” thing and got INTENSE cravings for other foods pretty quickly. I guess the other comments about getting bored are true. You can survive on it - even healthily - but it’s not fun. Maybe you get used to it after a few weeks.
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…
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.
How can I survive off of that, if they’re out of stock for half the year? ;-;
Im just pointing out we can make a human food just like we make cat food and dog food and indeed have. Soylent sorta started it but there are a variety of other things now doing the same thing with twists (all vegan or organic, etc) and even before then we had meal replacement shakes and bars and actually there is this emergency food called plumpy nut that is actually made to nurse someone back from severe starvation. All sorts of bunker survival ration bar things to which are fairly common as boat things.
Buy double in the half year when it is available
Usually can’t afford that much upfront, wish I could tho.
I did make the comment in jest, though I appreciate the candor lol
That aside, I don’t have an idea if it’s even a viable approach considering the potential expiration dates and storage condition requirements, assuming one would even be willing to pay the exorbitant price to buy it as their main source of nourishment
Everyone is saying “we don’t,” but do need a diet that’s more varied than cats? (for example) If so, why?
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.
