\u201cIf you have to choose one food, if you\u2019re one of the people that\u2019s getting sent to Mars, choose potatoes,\u201d says Taylor. \u201cI\u2019m not trying to be evangelical about potatoes, but it was a really good experience for me.\u201d\n

First and foremost, it\u2019s not a good idea to only eat one kind of food. To survive, we need 20 amino acids\u2014of which nine are essential, meaning we can\u2019t make them ourselves and must get them from food\u2014as well as a plethora of\u00a0minerals\u00a0and\u00a0vitamins. (And, obviously, we need water in addition to food to keep our cells hydrated so they don\u2019t wither and stop functioning.) Throughout history we\u2019ve often combined foods, like rice and beans, yogurt and nuts, and even macaroni and cheese to a certain extent, in an attempt, or by accident, to intake the proper balance of nutrients that you usually can\u2019t attain from eating a single food item. But in times of famine, fasting, or strange double-dog-dares, there are a couple of foods a human could survive on\u2026at least for awhile.\n

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The potato diet\n

The potato is one good example. Andrew Taylor isn\u2019t the only person in history who has relied almost exclusively on potatoes for sustenance. In the beginning of the 1800s, about a third of the Irish population got most of their calories from spuds. The average American ate\u00a0about 113 pounds\u00a0of these starchy tubers in 2015. \u201cFor the money and your blood pressure, you can\u2019t beat a traditional baked spud,\u201d says\u00a0Joan Salge Blake, a clinical nutrition professor at Boston University.\n

Technically, the traditional white potato contains all the\u00a0essential amino acids\u00a0you need to build proteins, repair cells, and fight diseases. And eating just five of them a day would get you there. However, if you sustained on white potatoes alone, you would eventually run into vitamin and mineral deficiencies. That\u2019s where sweet potatoes come in. Including these orangey ones in the mix\u2014technically, they belong to a different taxonomic family than white potatoes\u2014increases the likelihood that the potato consumer will get their recommended daily dose of Vitamin A, the organic compound in carrots that your mom told you could make you see in the dark, and Vitamin E. No one on a diet of sweet potatoes and white potatoes would get scurvy, a famously horrible disease that happens due to a lack of Vitamin C and causes the victim\u2019s teeth to fall out.\n

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Even with this combo, you\u2019ll still need to eat a lot of spuds before you intake the right levels of everything. Consuming five potatoes would give you all the\u00a0essential amino acids you need to build proteins, repair cells, and fight diseases. But unless you ate 34 sweet potatoes a day, or 84 white potatoes, you would eventually run into a calcium deficiency. You would also need 25 white potatoes a day to get the recommended amount of protein. Soybeans have more protein and calcium\u2014but they don\u2019t have any Vitamin E or beta-carotene.\n

Of course, there are a lot of health disadvantages to potatoes, especially when you eat them en masse. White potatoes are high in a kind of carbohydrate that causes your blood sugar to spike and then dip, which puts a strain on the insulin system. People who ate a lot of these tubers were more likely to get diabetes and become obese,\u00a0according\u00a0to\u00a0multiple\u00a0studies.\n

Andrew Taylor actually lost weight\u2014probably from eating less overall and giving up\u00a0sugar\u2014which wasn\u2019t his ultimate goal. He quit eating most food to train himself to get comfort and joy from other areas of his life. But now even though his spud experiment is over, he still gets pretty excited about potatoes. \u201cIt was just an experiment and turned out to be exactly like I wanted,\u201d he says.\n\n\n\n

Foods you can survive on\n

No nutritionist would get on board with an all-potato diet. Nor would they recommend an all coconut, kale, seaweed, or yogurt one either. There\u2019s a reason that the\u00a0U.S. dietary guidelines recommends eating a variety of vegetables, grains, proteins, fruits, and oils. Eat any of these just by themselves and you would soon run into the same nutritional deficiencies that you would with a potato. Variety is important, and in this case, it\u2019s vital. So don\u2019t just eat a baked potato, load it with other healthy stuff, too.\n\n\n\n\n

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For all of 2016, Andrew Taylor ate only potatoes. There were a few caveats to his potato diet: He ate both white potatoes and sweet ones, and sometimes mixed in soymilk, tomato sauce, salt and herbs. He also took B12 supplements. But, overall, he ate potatoes for breakfast, lunch, and dinner. He took four blood …\n","protected":false},"author":30,"featured_media":82387,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[670],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-82386","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/echowoven.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/82386","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/echowoven.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/echowoven.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/echowoven.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/30"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/echowoven.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=82386"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/echowoven.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/82386\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":82389,"href":"https:\/\/echowoven.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/82386\/revisions\/82389"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/echowoven.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/82387"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/echowoven.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=82386"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/echowoven.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=82386"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/echowoven.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=82386"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}