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?
Well, it really reminds me of that famous GreenText about pickles
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.
Hah! It’s so true.
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.
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 ?
You’ve never thrown up before?
Yes i have but that isnt pure undiluted stomach acid
I think it is after the 2nd or 3rd round
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
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.
Yep. I’m always careful to rinse my mouth thoroughly after barfing, even if still nauseous
And the acidity makes normal tap water taste sweet as if it has sugar in it, it’s pretty neat
Just don’t immediately brush! It weakens your enamel, so swish and spit, and wait like half an hour to brush
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.
Did I say I was trying to solve for greentext’s situation?
My comment is clearly related to vomiting
It’s a much shorter distance from stomach to mouth.
Could we evolve to spit stomach acid on command and burn our enemies
Question answered OP, this will be your daily life until the sweet relief of death
I was just about to mention this. Go ahead, OP. Eat those pickles.
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?
Are you stuck in a pickle factory? Blink twice if you’re under duress.
OP, we can get you out. Just make sure the door isn’t a jar!
I mean, I don’t want to make a big dill about this…
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
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.
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?
Hey are you by any chance trapped in a recently abandoned pickle warehouse?
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.
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.
I mean… Couldn’t rounding be considered a technicality?
Like gym bros putting spray butter on everything because it has “zero calories,” hahahha.
I don’t know enough to answer but I like this question
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?
No idea what Connect is but maybe you’re talking about this comment? https://lemmy.ml/comment/5223327
Yeah that’s a pretty good hiking stick right there
Wow that is a nice stick.
Connect is a mobile app for Lemmy. That is quite a nice stick.
Was this a good stick?
Wasn’t rating sticks banned on some instances for not being sophisticatedly pretentious enough?
I don’t know, but let us know how it goes.
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.
I feel like Lemmy probably lacks the expertiese on pickles. Beans on the other hand…
Is this the follow up to the no poop question made months ago?
I feel like eating nothing but pickles is the polar opposite of the no poop question.
First the one, then the other.
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.
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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.
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.
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.
I just bought some pickles today, AMA.
Have you eaten any? If so, did you survive?
Well it’s been 20 minutes so
I call their speakers
I have eaten some before, not today. I survived and it was 3 pickles too.
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).
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til the ld50 of pickles is disappointingly low
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?
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.
That is a poor metric. Pickles are salty and acidic as fuck. Covkroaches dont literally eat everything with calories.
He mentioned that roaches wouldn’t eat cucumbers, not pickles.
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.