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?

  • Punkie@lemmy.world
    1983·
    8 months ago

    Well, it really reminds me of that famous GreenText about pickles

    • snooggums@kbin.social
      39·
      8 months ago

      If anyone hasn’t had a butt cam (colonoscopy) before, this basically describes the process for flushing out before the procedure, except the stuff they give you doesn’t taste as good as pickles.

    • frickineh@lemmy.world
      401·
      8 months ago

      Oh good, it’s not just me. I came here to say that the odds of shitting pure pickle juice are way too high to make it worth the risk.

    • ANON@lemmy.ml
      13·
      8 months ago

      Is it really possible to shit stomach acid and what would hapeen if it is outside of your stomach will it burn through your skin ?

        • ANON@lemmy.ml
          101·
          8 months ago

          Yes i have but that isnt pure undiluted stomach acid

          • GBU_28@lemm.eeEnglish
            11·
            8 months ago

            If you’ve had a stomach flu of that variety, it totally is.

            I’ve had a flu so bad I barfed every ~ 30 minutes for over 12 hours.

            By the end my throat was on fire

            • ArxCyberwolf@lemmy.ca
              5·
              8 months ago

              Stomach acid is also why people with some eating disorders like bulimia have badly eroded teeth. The acid from throwing up constantly eats away at your teeth.

              • GBU_28@lemm.eeEnglish
                2·
                8 months ago

                Yep. I’m always careful to rinse my mouth thoroughly after barfing, even if still nauseous

            • thawed_caveman@lemmy.world
              2·
              8 months ago

              But in this situation you can drink water and wash it down, preventing acid damage to your eusophagus. The author of this greentext can’t get water into their intestines.

              • GBU_28@lemm.eeEnglish
                2·
                8 months ago

                Did I say I was trying to solve for greentext’s situation?

                My comment is clearly related to vomiting

  • sanguine_artichoke@midwest.social
    703·
    8 months ago

    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.

    • Mario_Dies.wav@lemmy.dbzer0.comOP
      21·
      8 months ago

      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?

        • WarmSoda@lemm.ee
          511·
          8 months ago

          OP, we can get you out. Just make sure the door isn’t a jar!

            • Goldmage263@sh.itjust.works
              5·
              8 months ago

              If you are stuck right now. Go ahead and eat some pickles. Some calories and nutrition is better than completely 0. Also keep in mind that Cal stands for Kilocalories, so a pickle serving may have anywhere from 100 to 5000 calories (0-5 Cal) based on the prior numbers

              • Mario_Dies.wav@lemmy.dbzer0.comOP
                4·
                8 months ago

                Cal stands for Kilocalories

                I forget this a lot! It seems so unintuitive. I wonder why they didn’t just go with “kcal” or some other abbreviation.

      • Jiggle_Physics@lemmy.world
        251·
        8 months ago

        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.

      • sanguine_artichoke@midwest.social
        4·
        8 months ago

        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.

    • vexikron@lemmy.zip
      7·
      8 months ago

      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?

    • Nastybutler@lemmy.world
      10·
      8 months ago

      I suspect he’s locked a hostage in one and wants to know how long he can leave him there before he adds a murder charge to his kidnapping charge.

  • blazera@kbin.social
    434·
    8 months ago

    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.

    • CyanFen@lemmy.oneEnglish
      11·
      8 months ago

      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.

      • blazera@kbin.social
        71·
        8 months ago

        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.

      • tamal3@lemmy.world
        5·
        8 months ago

        Like gym bros putting spray butter on everything because it has “zero calories,” hahahha.

  • Ms. ArmoredThirteen@lemmy.ml
    27·
    8 months ago

    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

  • Crack0n7uesday@lemmy.world
    161·
    8 months ago

    Imagine the shit you would have to take after a few days of even trying. I would definitely not trust a fart after day three.

        • jballs@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
          2·
          8 months ago

          Now that I think about it, it really works in both orders. Just went for 3 days without shitting? Eat a bunch of pickles and it’ll flush your right out! Need to go 3 days without shitting? Eat a bunch of pickles the day before you start to completely void your system.

  • dual_sport_dork 🐧🗡️@lemmy.world
    10·
    8 months ago

    I’d give it 3 or 4 days, if literally all you have is pickles. All that salt and vinegar will dehydrate you pretty damn good, despite all the liquid you’re ostensibly consuming.

    Even if you had fresh water present as well, I think you’d wind up with one hell of a stomachache by day 2 or 3.

    • skydivekingair@lemmy.world
      5·
      8 months ago

      Yeah they said only pickles, and even with the liquid in the pickles it’s so briny that unless they are also drinking additional water their kidneys would keep using more water the same way drinking salt water would cause. I took the question as only pickles and that, as you said, would only last until dehydration sets in. Now if they have unlimited fresh water I’d say until malnutrition so maybe a few weeks, a few horrible weeks. Just playing along and speculating, I am not a MD.

      • dual_sport_dork 🐧🗡️@lemmy.world
        3·
        8 months ago

        Yeah, I think I’d rather spend my time seeing if I could use the pickle juice to corrode some component of the place that’s keeping me locked in. Fuck all that noise.

        I’d take, like, one or two jars of pickles with me when I left, though.

  • OurTragicUniverse@kbin.social
    81·
    8 months ago

    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.

    • snooggums@kbin.social
      6·
      8 months ago

      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.

  • Adulated_Aspersion@lemmy.world
    93·
    8 months ago

    It would take more energy to digest the pickle than the pickle would provide.

    One example that I like to use is this: would a cockroach eat it? Roaches eat everything from food crumbs to wallpaper paste. Anything with calories. Do you know something that roaches WON’T eat? Cucumbers.

    So long as the pickles don’t have sugar in the brine, I would say you would likely starve to death.

      • Adulated_Aspersion@lemmy.world
        1·
        8 months ago

        Nature has a way of providing an observable metric.

        Let me correct my statement. Given no alternatives, cockroaches will eat anything without a caloric deficit. Hence my statement about wallpaper paste. A true infestation of cockraoches will eat anything that will sustain the intrusion. If there is no available “food” around, cockroaches will crawl over cucumbers to eat the paste holding the wallpaper to the wall.

        So long as there is no additional sugar in the brine (hence calories), the roaches will not eat the pickles.

        Edit: obligatory not an entomologist.