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?
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.
Do she be fartin?
Asking the real questions here
For the water part, in the wikipedia article it is said in context with the claim that people lose 4.5 kg within a week. That weight is unrealistically just fat. A kg of body fat has about 7700 kcal iirc (I remember it is not exactly 9000 kcal/kg but less and google spat out 7700), so that would necessitate an energy expenditure of 3850 kcal/day (if you wanted to lose 4.5 kg/7 days). This would be a lot, at least for a regular sized person with moderate activity levels (mostly we estimate 2000-2500 kcal/day as an energy need). You also have something like 2000 kcal saved in your body as glycogen, which will also be broken down of you fast. Glycogen is stored in a kind of “water shell”, so when you burn through glycogen, you also “lose water” (1 g of glucogen : 3 g of water I think). Considering you’ll put your body in a kind of “fasting mode”, the diet will also cause a metabolic response where your metabolism will slow down and cling on what you have. Muscles will also be broken down for gluconeogenesis from amino acids.
Would eating Pickle Rick be extra calories?
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 have you tagged on Connect as “ask about the stick”, and so now I must ask, about the stick?
I don’t know enough to answer but I like this question
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.
Would it be at least marginally better to eat the pickles, or would you be better off just fasting? Could they give you a few more days to live, at least, in hopes of rescue?
if you are discussing short-term survive-ability, while waiting for rescue, then eating pickles is better than nothing. They will provide water, vitamins, electrolytes, etc. If you are discussing living off of pickles as a lifestyle, or prolonged diet option, then it isn’t enough.
They have some carbs and protein at least, and vitamins and electrolytes. The water would probably help but I’d wonder if it would be too salty.
I think it would be, similar to drinking sea water
Yeah… wouldnt you basically be able to live for a while, but not actually having much actual energy to move… and probably basically be having liquid stinging shits the whole time?
whatever that condition is where people eating just rabbits starve from lack of fat
Not sure if you’re making a joke, but it’s literally called “rabbit starvation”.
Well, simpler than I thought!
Apparently the technical term is protein poisoning. Digesting protein creates urea, and the body needs at least some fat in order to convert to ammonia that can be excreted. It’s also called “mal be caribou” in French (caribou sickness, I think), which I find fascinating.
I just bought some pickles today, AMA.
Have you eaten any? If so, did you survive?
I have eaten some before, not today. I survived and it was 3 pickles too.
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.
Folk with morbid obesity have safely water fasted up to a year.
With medical supervision, supplements for vitamins & nutrients, and other considerations for their particular condition. Certainly not something a person should do on their own.
I don’t think he’s actually planning to try this… is he?
Hey are you by any chance trapped in a recently abandoned pickle factory?
maybe eat some vitamin pills too. it’s what i do, when i venture on week long junk food or preserves feasts. i also, sometimes take some minerals like magnesium, but just one pill after like 3 days or so if i think i didn’t get enough. it prevents cramps to have the minerals balanced
Hey man maybe just eat regular food
You don’t need to! That’s the point.
vinegar pickles or pickled foods? lactofermented foods are technically pickles and I’ve seen quite a bit of pickled meat. pickling is a food preservation method, you dont need high levels of sodium, though it certainly helps.
I’m thinking about dill pickles specifically, which are made with cucumbers. At least here in the US, that’s what people mean when they just say “pickles” with no further context.
I do like other pickled foods, though. My mom makes amazing pickled beets, and my grandma used to make watermelon pickles!
The only pickled foods I’ve tried in my life that I strongly dislike are pickled fish and pickled eggs.
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).
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.
But they are using a technicality that allows them to label them as 0 calories. While pickles don’t have many calories, they don’t have 0. According to fda guidelines a serving between 0-5 calories can be claimed as 0 calories and even the nutrition facts is allowed to say 0.
It’s not a technicality, it’s just rounding. Go check out the nutrition labels on various foods you got. The majority of them will be rounded to the nearest tenth. A few low calorie ones might be rounded to the nearest fifth. Less than that is for all practical purposes 0 calories. You will not get a significant amount of calories no matter how many pickles you eat. Forget the sodium and acidity, your body cant hold enough pickle mass to add up to a snack’s worth of calories.
Well, it really reminds me of that famous GreenText about pickles
