Do you sometimes wonder whether you are getting all the nutrients your body needs? You require different kinds of minerals, vitamins and amino acids. You also need fats (triglycerides), carbohydrates, and fibres. The simple idea I present here can remove all your nutrition-related worries.
TOXICITY
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| Dosis sola venenum facit |
But first, something about toxicity. Many people have a wrong idea about toxicity. They think that the world is divided into good, healthy substances, and bad, toxic substances. This is a wrong assumption. EVERY SUBSTANCE IS TOXIC. Or can be toxic, to be more precise. Every substance has a toxicity threshold of amount consumed per unit of time. Below that the substance is harmless, but above that it's damaging. Generally the higher you go, the more damaging it is. But the toxicity dynamics differ between substances. Some substances might be damaging in very low doses, but lethal only in extremely high doses. For others this 'zone' between the damaging and lethal doses might be very small. Things you regularly consume in large quantities (like water or starch) have a very high toxicity threshold.
So to call a substance a toxin or poison is misleading. To call a substance 'carcinogenic' is equally misleading. A lot of substances nowadays are called carcinogenic by ignorant popular science writers. You might have thought for yourself that you can't eat anything without eating cancer-inducing stuff. And you're right. But each of the so-called carcinogenics, has a carcinogenic threshold. Below that you're fine, above that you have a higher chance of getting cancer. Avoiding cancer is not possible anyway, because the things most commonly causing cancer are reactive oxygen species (superoxide, hydrogen peroxide), UV-radiation, and sugars (glycation), which are part of every day life.
ARTIFICIALITY
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| Soylent drink |
Rob Rhinehart was on to something when he designed the drink Soylent. It contains everything you need, and is not expensive. You don't have to worry about cooking again. But the problem with Soylent is that it tastes like "homemade nontoxic Play-Doh". OK, I don't know whether that's true. I haven't tried it myself. But I sure would not like to eat the same thing 24/7/365. To most people food is not a necessity, food is fun. People like to eat all kinds of different tasty things, myself included. So logically, we need a variety of food that contains everything we need, but that also tastes good.
These food products have to contain all the things we need in the right relative amounts, in order to not get a deficiency, but also not be poisoned. On top of this we will need a large range of non-nutritious substances that alter the taste, texture, look, and smell. For example, if you want a very sweet food, you should not add a lot of sugar. This will disrupt the balance of all the nutrients. You will either get too much sugar, or too little of the rest. That's where artificial sweeteners come in handy. They provide a sweet flavour, but do not count towards the carbohydrate content. For example, aspartame is 200 times sweeter than sucrose (sugar), so you have to add 200 times less to the food. Aspartame is broken down in a few different substances, among which two amino acids. So you have to adjust the amino acid content a bit of the food you want to produce, though because of the small amount of aspartame needed, this difference will also be minimal.
Additives like aspartame have received a lot of unjustified negative attention. Because they are termed artificial, people get alarmed, and demand investigation of toxicity. When people find evidence of toxicity, even if it is 30.000 times higher than the amount you'd normally intake, ignorant people still label it as fundamentally toxic. And they are labelled artificial, as if these substances aren't made with the regular set of 118 chemical elements, but with elements from a different, evil universe. And as if all natural products can be consumed without negative consequences. Try eating a salad of belladonna, fox gloves, and monkshood leaves.
In fact, to produce these super-foods, I would consider not using natural products at all. Plant and animal matter contains many different substances, most of which have been never tested for food safety. It is well possible that people nowadays are slightly poisoned by some regularly consumed plant without their knowledge. To avoid such accidental poisonings, I would only use substances in the food that has been tested for safety.
LABELS
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| Chocolate cake |
I hope to see upgraded versions of all kinds of food: pizzas, cakes, pies, pastas, you name it. These have to be modified so that you can eat whichever you like, without having to worry about deficiencies or toxicities. For example, a chocolate cake might have reduced sugar and fat content, and their flavours reproduced by non-nutritious additives. And we know that some things in chocolate are bad for you, if you eat it every day. These things can be removed, and a potential change in flavour can again be compensated by using artificial flavourers. And we can add things like vitamin C so that you don't suffer from scurvy on your cake-diet.
People also eat non-processed foods like fruits, seeds, and leaves. To enhance these we can genetically modify the plants, so that they stop producing the things we do not want (things that are toxic in low concentrations, and things that induce allergies), and add things they lack. Of course, making these things optimal for consumption is more difficult, because plants are living organisms. Adding or removing parts might result in lower disease resistance, or lower growth rate. We have to find a balance between plant health and human health here.
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| Pizza |
Two problems remain, though they can be solved by proper labelling. First, when these super-foods are made, you can still eat too little or too much. The solution is to add labels that tell you how much to eat of it. For example, we might create an indicator similar to that for calories. Perhaps we set the daily intake level at 100, and each superfood gets a value showing how much it contributes to that number.
Second, all people are not the same. I expect most of the differences between people due to differences in size or activity, which are easily solved by eating more or less. If you feel a little weak when eating 100 food points, perhaps you should up that to 110 points per day. Other differences need to be solved differently. Some muscle-building activities might require extra protein. And climate has an effect too. Colder climates require a higher energy intake, and warmer climates a higher salt consumption. To solve this, we can make several versions of our products, and use a simple labelling system to distinguish them. Extra energy content may be indicated by lightning bolt symbol. Extra salt indicated by a sun symbol, and extra protein by a brick symbol.
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