And Then You're Dead by Cody Cassidy

Author:Cody Cassidy
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Publishing Group
Published: 2017-02-10T09:26:33+00:00

A Gas Station (Or: What Would Happen If You Lived on a Diet of Only Junk Food?)

Surviving a single gas station hot dog is a feat, so how long could you live on a diet of them?

Junk food, for all its faults, preserves quite well. Potato chips last a long time, and it’s unclear if a Twinkie will ever rot, so you would not starve, though if you ate junk food and soda for years you would probably develop diabetes. However, there’s a more short-term problem: Junk food has practically no vitamins or minerals, so while it makes for a good snack, it’s a poor meal.

If there were any fresh fruit in your gas station, it would expire within a few days. And without fruit you would get almost no vitamin C, which is one of the worst to skip if you’re going without vitamins.

In the early 1500s bigger boats and better maps made long sea voyages possible. Unfortunately, food preservation lagged behind—which meant no fresh food, no vitamin C, and the inevitable result: scurvy.

Magellan lost 80 percent of his sailors to scurvy on a voyage across the Pacific, and even by 1740, thirteen hundred sailors died of it in ten months aboard a ship captained by the explorer George Anson.*

A month after you started your diet of pure junk food in the gas station, you would show the first signs of scurvy (gum bleeding, fatigue, skin spots). After another month you would be unable to repair your capillaries and you would bleed to death.

Conclusion: If you’re ever stuck in a gas station, you had better hope it stocks multivitamins.

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