Secrets from the Eating Lab by Traci Mann

Author:Traci Mann
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi, pdf
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2015-02-16T16:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 10

HOW TO COMFORT AN ASTRONAUT

For most people, losing weight is a struggle, but there is one known group of perfectly healthy people who are able to lose weight without trying: astronauts. When they spend an extended amount of time in space (at the International Space Station), most astronauts tend to accidentally lose weight. This phenomenon has very little to do with the effects of zero-gravity conditions—being weightless and floating around in a rocket. Astronauts lose weight in space because they don’t eat enough,1 partly because space food isn’t the most enticing food on any planet. Many foods are dehydrated before they are sent into space so that they weigh less and stay fresh longer. Those foods have to be rehydrated in space, and while astronauts generally find them palatable, they’re nothing to write home about.2

There are plenty of space foods that are identical to what we eat down here, but they may still be less enjoyable in space because being weightless causes nasal passages to swell,3 which makes it more difficult to smell things. This is useful for dealing with space toilets, but it’s not ideal when it comes to eating, because food doesn’t taste as good when you can’t smell it.4 Even if it did taste as good, you may still get sick of it if you eat it often, which is likely to happen when you are somewhere as isolating as outer space.

Another reason astronauts don’t eat enough when they’re on a mission is that they’re under a lot of stress.5 They don’t like to admit it and they would never complain about it, but they generally have a lot of work to do and not always enough time to do it and meet the high expectations of the people on the ground. Plus there’s that nontrivial matter of their lives being in danger, which likely adds to their overall stress levels. As we’ve discussed, studies have shown that dieters tend to overeat when they are stressed,6 but astronauts—or at least the nearly two hundred astronauts NASA has studied in recent years—undereat, perhaps because they don’t want to take time away from what they are doing.

You might be thinking that this sounds like an added perk of being an astronaut, but it is actually somewhat problematic. While losing five or six pounds over the course of three months spent on the International Space Station is not a big deal, over a longer mission, that rate of weight loss could become unhealthy. And NASA is thinking about a much longer mission: Mars. It takes nine months to get to Mars, and after traveling that far you don’t just stay for a long weekend. A Mars mission is expected to last for three years,7 and NASA is researching all sorts of problems that must be solved before it can even be considered. How do you get enough food and oxygen to Mars? What does three years of weightlessness do to your body? Where do you dump waste? What sorts

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