I randomly came across my dream product. It’s supposed to be a 100% meal replacement. Unfortunately, as is often the case, it’s likely not as good as it sounds.
The product is basically a smoothie, purportedly based on what astronauts eat in space and designed to totally replace conventional eating. Now, I hate cooking and I even hate having to take the time to sit down and eat – there are so many other things I could be doing! – so this sounds great to me. The question is, how do we know if these meal replacements are really covering my nutritional needs?
WHAT ARE OUR NUTRITIONAL NEEDS?
If you’d like to know if a smoothie regmine is covering your nutrition requirements, you first have to know what those requirements are. This, contrary to what one might first think, is not as easy to determine as it sounds. We know that everyone needs certain basic nutrients, but this says very little about what one should actually eat. People vary greatly in how their bodies react to food. To name one example, Precision Nutrition, in an effort to give us some sense of these differences, sets varying guidelines for the three different human body types: ectomorph, mesomorph, endomorph. For PN, the size and shape of your body determines the ratio of carbohydrates, fats, and proteins that you should be taking in. What might be appropriate for one person could be vastly different for another.
You can see this problem playing out on the website if you have a look at the discussion forums. One individual asks about the carbohydrate count in 100% Food’s low carb option. She says that the carb count is far above what she believes she should be taking in. The response from the company replys that her quoted number seems far too low, but also notes that there is no regulated standard for what low carb means. And this is the real truth. You can’t set a catch-all for carbs which means ultimately, there is no one size fits all and this is a problem when drinking standardized smoothies.
HOW DO WE KNOW THAT WE ARE DELIVERING THOSE NEEDS
To cut to the chase, even if we have a satisfactory understanding of our nutritional requirements, that does not mean that we know exactly how to meet them. We understand a lot about nutrients, but not necessarily everything about food. It used to be believed, for example, that vitamins were the source of much of our normal health and this spawned a whole industry to deliver them in high quantities. Now, more modern research has uncovered even smaller nutrients, called phytochemicals, and we have only just begun to understand their role. It may be that vitamins are only part of the picture, incomplete without phytochemicals, or that vitamins cannot do their work without phytochemicals present. It may even be that vitmains themselves aren’t as important as we thought. In any event, we don’t really know. Fortunately, we don’t really need to worry too much about these details if we simply eat a whole food. Whatever nutrients it has to offer will be there, and our bodies will do with it what they will.
CONCLUSION
At the end of the day nutrition is fabulously complex and at the same time amazingly simple. If you are going to try to construct artificial food, you are going to be swamped with the complexity. You’ll need to know all of the nutrients, all of their functions, how they work together, what amounts are needed, what combinations work the best, what combinations inhibit each other – the list goes on. If, on the other hand, you simply eat a wide variety of what the natural world provides, you can mostly rest assured that you will eventually end up with what you need.
RESOURCES
http://www.precisionnutrition.com/all-about-body-type-eating
PHOTO: NASA Goddard Space Flight Center: Spacewalking Astronaut John Grunsfeld, License