Here's What Would Happen If You Ate One Type Of Food For The Rest Of Your Life (2024)

Everyone has a favorite food, but there's a good reason the USDA recommends we squeeze in a healthy mix of fruits, vegetables, grains, proteins, and dairy every day.

After a British teenager was hospitalized last week for eating nothing but McDonald's chicken nuggets for 15 years, Natalie Wolchover of Life's Little Mysteries thought it would be a good idea to investigate what would happen if a person decided to exile all but one food from his or her diet.

Jo Ann Hattner, a nutrition consultant at Stanford University School of Medicine tells Wolchover that choosing to eat only one fruit, vegetable, or grain would result in organ failure, while a meat-only diet would force your body to start eating its own muscles (including your heart). With the exception of fruit, eating only one type of any food would give you scurvy, a disease caused by a lack of Vitamin C.

So basically, choosing to eat only one food will generally result in one or more life-threatening illnesses.

According to Hattner, the only food that has all nutrients for human survival is mother's milk.

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