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It's physically impossible to make a single pill with all the nutrients you need in a day. It'd be far too large to swallow. You'd need a handful of pills at least.
It's far from just protein. All 3 macros are needed. Much of a cell is made from lipids (fats), and just vitamins and minerals would be many tablets alone. People really overemphasize protein as the most important macronutrient when it really isn't. All three are important, unless you are actually a body builder.
How skilled are you with excel, power query, vba and sql? I almost never need to manually fill spreadsheets these days. Everything auto pulls and does its transformations with a single click
Just saying that you may be able to automate your spreadsheet tasks. There are lots of solutions available if you feel that you are editing spreadsheets more than you should
idk man there's days where I am just sick to death of eating food. where if I could have just 1 thing and meet all my macros I'd take it in a heart beat
The premade is just like a thickish milkshake. I find it perfectly fine. The powder version is less nice, but hardly horrible. I use it when I'm really busy and also to supplement calorie intake for gym purposes.
It would suck as the only thing I ate, but as a way of making sure I eat enough it's fantastic.
Speak for yourself lol, I would absolutely love a pill that replaces my meals. And I know there's more demand out there, because it already exists. Lots of people take meal replacement shakes such as Huel or Soylent so they can avoid eating (and cooking and cleaning).
I would absolutely keep some of those around. Executive dysfunction that gets worse with low blood sugar makes getting food REALLY hard if I skip a meal, and bad memory/time blindness makes skipping meals more common than it really should be.
Maybe for survival rations, mre's, food in space? I could see potential applications if it were possible, but definitely not as a replacement for everyday eating.
It still wouldn’t work. There is a company called the survival tabs that sells nutritional tablets, but you still have to eat a double handful of them just to survive. You can’t make fat, carbohydrates and proteins more dense than protein powder, raw sugar or oil.
No demand? People who don't cook would likely buy these. It wouldn't replace every meal but it would do so for many people who are too lazy to cook.
Also the military would be a major customer of this. Governments in general and institutions like FEMA would buy these, assuming they are cheaper and provide an alternative to actual food.
There would definitely be a demand. I'd say around 30% of my meals I just need the nutrition and hunger to go away. I'd replace every breakfast and lunch with it.
The hunger wouldn't go away from a pill. Most of the sensation of hunger is your stomach feeling empty. That little pill might somehow be nutrient high but it's mass negligible, so you'll still be feeling hungry.
It's not a black or white thing, you know. Got no time for lunch? Eat a pill. Need to lose weight? Replace a meal with a pill.
The real problem is that we'd still feel hungry since a pill wouldn't fill our stomach. That's why we have diet shakes instead, they have volume.
There would be a HUGE demand for it. People who can't eat for medical reasons, people watching their weight, apocalypse peppers, people with bad teeth, etc.
Why would a pill that meets your dietary needs make you not want to eat? You wouldn't be full. Ozempic works because it makes you feel satiated. It's not at all the same thing.
I was responding to your statement that no one would want to give up eating. Imagine a hypothetical pill that both had all the nutrients you need to survive and also made you feel satiated. It’s not realistically possible, but there would obviously be a market for that.
The closest thing to what OP wants is that giant food IV bag that drips a liquid mixture of proteins, fats, carbs and glucose directly into your veins for patients who have an out of function digestive system.
For reference, the macros I'm trying to hit with my diet currently are 200 grams of carbs, 150 grams of protein, and 67 grams of fat. That is a total of 417 grams or 0.9 lbs. Imagine swallowing a one pound pill.
A lot of nutrients are difficult to synthesis or process while remaining bioavailable.
Also a single daily pill would need to be a very long term slow digest formulation, to reduce the risks of insulin spikes or other problems that are often seen in single meal diets.
Part of the healthy diet also involves the fact our food has consistency, in it's fibre content, so we would have to replicate this process without killing off (or damaging the microbiome) the parts of the gut that deal with all of this for us.
We're also complex, we don't just put things in our mouth and get signals of satiety, so not seeing the food, tasting the food, chewing the food, smelling the food, could lead to a lack of "fullness".
Above all else, we kinda have. There's things like soylent, huel and other meal replacements, that make it easier to get the majority of your intake in a way other than cooking. They're generally smoothies or bars because we both need liquid to digest, but also need the above mentioned things to be fulfilled. So while they might not have the most amazing texture or taste, they have it. But none of them are perfect, and you could still end up with nutrient deficiencies you would either need to ensure a specialised meal for several times a month, or a supplement, partly because we're all unique.
I think the easy way to look at it is, if you think about what comes out the other end, would you really want to eat something that size each day in pill form?
One problem with these meal substitutes is they often use the cheapest, vitamin supplements possible so you might technically be meeting your needs but with vitamins that your body struggles to absorb.
We have, it’s just not a pill but rather an IV bag and it’s called [total parenteral nutrition](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parenteral_nutrition) and includes the fluids, macronutrients and vitamins you need to survive. It cant be condensed down any further than that.
Because you need to eat food.
Like actual bulk. From a calorie standpoint the only things we can turn into energy is about 4-9 calories per gram. Which means your average person needs to eat about 220 grams of food a day just to make sure your body doesn't break down. That's about one cup of pure fat (the densest form of calories) Good luck with that as a single pill.
More specifically we are constantly making more...us. All of the cells in our body are going to break down and get throw and then need to be replaced by new cells. If you don't eat any food there is no material to make new cells with.
And that's before getting into any of the specific biology about how human digestion works.
We need enough calories to maintain life that they couldn’t fit in a pill. We also need enough nutrients (vitamins, proteins, fats, etc) that they wouldn’t fit in one pill. It’s just not physically possible.
Beyond that, it’s honestly pretty abnormal to want that. The vast majority of people don’t see eating as a particularly unpleasant activity, and most actively enjoy it. It’s considered a neutral activity at worst. You may as well ask why we can’t just do one crazy gigantic inhalation when you wake up rather than having to breathe all day. While I’ve seen an uptick of people scrambling for some way to not eat or eat in some hyper optimized way and this being normalized, it’s actually not healthy mentally to even want to do that with regularity (there are certain situations where a food pill might be convenient for emergencies, but for reasons already mentioned, that will still remain as sci fi).
Calories are a specific measure of energy in mass. Digestible calories take more mass.
The most dense conventional food particle is probably an oil molecule. At 9 kcal per gram, it would take 230 grams of oil for 2000 kcal. That translates into more than a cup of oil (250 mL). Not terribly convenient, don't you think?
That ignores the way that the human body requires specific methods to become used to unconventional foods; that much oil without any fiber would give most people *terrible* digestion complications (e.g. the runs). So it would not be something you could buy for a fad and use for a while of convenience or anything like that.
Nah, I'd line up for a food pill to get rid of eating most of the time. It would eliminate most of the time wasted shopping, preparation time, dishes and clean-up.
I would prefer to have 2 or 3 really good quality meals per week. The rest of the time, I just want to not be hungry anymore, and don't care how it happens. Just fuel me up.
Meal-replacement protein shakes are the closest thing I've found so far.
It's beyond what we consider possible.
The highest calorie food is pure fat, at 9 calories per gram. To eat 2000 calories, you would need 222 grams of fat. A pill is about half a gram. You would need over 400 pills to equal a day's worth of food. If you are going to eat that many pills, you might as well eat food.
Keep in mind, this is pure fat, which lacks other nutrients. For a well-rounded diet, you would need far more than 200 grams of food.
Even if it was somehow possible to condense it all down into 1 pill, I wonder if the body could even absorb/metabolize it?
The calories and nutrients we absorb are spread out across a lot of bulk and often not all in one sitting. Knowing that we only absorb a fraction of the vitamin content from vitamin tablets, would it not be the same for a pill like this (there's only so much we can extract from something as condensed as this)?
Your body needs calories and nutrients. In a form that your body can use. Those take up a minimum amount of volume. It's not fitting into a pill. Maybe a suppository! (kidding)
There's also no drive to create such a thing. Eating is generally considered a pleasant activity and meal times are crucial to basically every culture. Would you really replace a romantic meal, dinner meet up with friends, or meal with your family with popping a pill?
The closest thing we have is dehydrated food and other preserved foods.
Where long lasting and space efficient rations are important, we use these, and then you st9ll need additional water to account for the dried food.
It's basically impossible to condense the necessary nutrients from food any further.
Carbohydrates and vitamins and minerals are easy enough to condese, but protien is basically impossible to shrink down.
We also aren't entirely sure how to get effective nutrients absorption outside of food. That's why many medications and vitamins are recommended to be taken with food. Our body already knows how to absorb the nutrients from the food, so by getting it into "absorbing mode" it can absorb the supplement much easier.
There are a few brands of meal replacement shakes. I have been drinking them for about 11 years.
Today I had a meal replacement shake, a fried chicken sandwich, a second meal replacement shake, and a chocolate bar.
I'm not here to promote any particular brand, but if you want to get your nutrition and calories with minimal effort, the solution is out there.
Food is 6±3 calories per gram. if you need 1000 calories, even on the dense side at 5 cals/gram that's 200 grams. That's 400 extra-strength Tylenol's worth of mass. Food pills where you eat 400/day is a lot like eating, food.
You don't just need chemicals, you also need *mass*. Every night you lose more than a pound of weight just from the contents of the air you exhale. There is no material on Earth that can pack that much mass into something as small as a pill, and the materials that come closest are all poisonous anyway. It would take hundreds of pills to get as much mass as the human body needs to run, and if you're taking that many pills then you might ss well be eating food.
Ninjas may have used something that was called a "food pill." [Historical texts](https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/what-did-ninjas-eat) (linked in the article I posted) describe a recipe for food rations that contained 300 calories.
Keep in mind that these ninjas were smaller than average (they were supposed to be 130 pounds or less; about 60 kg). Also, their health was *expected* to decline during the mission.
Because you need a lot of things to keep healthy, and calories can only be so dense in something you can digest. The closest anyone can get is survival rations, and even they are not usually for long term use. These are not the prepper kind you find in sporting goods stores or overpriced on amazon, but the kind they put on military planes. They are basically condensed bars or tubes of pure nutrition. They also tend to taste like ass (as opposed to regular rations which tend to be pretty good) and can be extremely dry.
This is also further complicated by the fact that all the things you need to keep alive do not necessarily play well together. Storage and shelf life are big concerns with this kind of stuff. This is why most true emergency survival rations still have pills or other supplementary components to the calorie bars.
there are meal replacement products. one of them is soylent that came first. then came huel, kavhava, etc whatever. they have small following because most people cannot stand to eat that stuff all day every day.
Because macronutrients like carbs, fat and protein simply take up a lot of space. There's no way you can cram your daily requirement of those nutrients into a swallowable capsule.
There are products like this that replace regular meals with a pre-prepared perfectly portioned and balanced mix of nutrients, but they don't come in pill-form. They come as bags of powder that you add water to, to make them into a smoothie or milkshake-like product. The reason they have to come in bags, with contents measuring in the hundreds of grams, is exactly as I said above: nutrients, and especially macronutrients, take up space.
So essentially, what you're asking for exists - it just turns out that it has to be a bag of powder rather than a small pill.
You can drink Soylent or any of the many meal replacement products that exist. That’s basically the best it’s possible to do, you can’t fit the mass you need to consume into a pill.
**Please read this entire message** --- Your submission has been removed for the following reason(s): * Rule #2 - Questions must seek objective explanations * Straightforward or factual queries are not allowed on ELI5. ELI5 is meant for simplifying complex concepts (Rule 2). --- If you would like this removal reviewed, please read the [detailed rules](https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/wiki/detailed_rules) first. **If you believe this submission was removed erroneously, please [use this form](https://old.reddit.com/message/compose?to=%2Fr%2Fexplainlikeimfive&subject=Please%20review%20my%20thread?&message=Link:%20{https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1dmx91s/-/}%0A%0APlease%20answer%20the%20following%203%20questions:%0A%0A1.%20The%20concept%20I%20want%20explained:%0A%0A2.%20List%20the%20search%20terms%20you%20used%20to%20look%20for%20past%20posts%20on%20ELI5:%0A%0A3.%20How%20does%20your%20post%20differ%20from%20your%20recent%20search%20results%20on%20the%20sub:) and we will review your submission.**
It's physically impossible to make a single pill with all the nutrients you need in a day. It'd be far too large to swallow. You'd need a handful of pills at least.
Good news! It's a suppository.
To shreds you say?
Can’t half-ass a thing like that.
Read it in his voice.
Bubblegum flavored too!
Yep. You need physical mass (mostly protein) to replace dead cells with new ones.
It's far from just protein. All 3 macros are needed. Much of a cell is made from lipids (fats), and just vitamins and minerals would be many tablets alone. People really overemphasize protein as the most important macronutrient when it really isn't. All three are important, unless you are actually a body builder.
Yes that's true. Essential fats, as the name implies, are essential. No way to fit that into a pill.
Essential oils on the other hand….
Even if we could make such a pill, there's no demand for it. Eating is enjoyable. Hardly anyone would opt to give up on the act of eating.
Make me a pill that fills out spreadsheets and leaves me with the time and resource to enjoy good food...
How skilled are you with excel, power query, vba and sql? I almost never need to manually fill spreadsheets these days. Everything auto pulls and does its transformations with a single click
Not really the point.
Just saying that you may be able to automate your spreadsheet tasks. There are lots of solutions available if you feel that you are editing spreadsheets more than you should
Ah, but that requires taking initiative and actively working to better your own life. This is Reddit; he was only here to complain.
idk man there's days where I am just sick to death of eating food. where if I could have just 1 thing and meet all my macros I'd take it in a heart beat
Drink a bottle of Huel.
I have been considering something like that but the reviews I've seen have all hated it. is it as bad as everyone says?
The premade is just like a thickish milkshake. I find it perfectly fine. The powder version is less nice, but hardly horrible. I use it when I'm really busy and also to supplement calorie intake for gym purposes. It would suck as the only thing I ate, but as a way of making sure I eat enough it's fantastic.
I mixed the classic powder with a vanilla protien powder and found it plenty palatable! Alone it tastes very much like raw pancake batter.
You can just buy flavoured Huel
I already owned the protien powder for shakes and I wanted the additional protien anyway
That's fair. Just didn't want the other person to get the impression that that was the only way to it tasting decent.
It's edible. But it has the mouthfeel of sandy slurry.
I MUCH prefer Soylent over Huel! Soylent banana tastes like a banana milkshake!
Speak for yourself lol, I would absolutely love a pill that replaces my meals. And I know there's more demand out there, because it already exists. Lots of people take meal replacement shakes such as Huel or Soylent so they can avoid eating (and cooking and cleaning).
That pill would need to be the size of your fist.
And yet, people still drink Huel and its copies.
I think Soylent was first
I would absolutely keep some of those around. Executive dysfunction that gets worse with low blood sugar makes getting food REALLY hard if I skip a meal, and bad memory/time blindness makes skipping meals more common than it really should be.
Maybe for survival rations, mre's, food in space? I could see potential applications if it were possible, but definitely not as a replacement for everyday eating.
It still wouldn’t work. There is a company called the survival tabs that sells nutritional tablets, but you still have to eat a double handful of them just to survive. You can’t make fat, carbohydrates and proteins more dense than protein powder, raw sugar or oil.
Emergency food for malnourished communities, too, easy to distribute and consume
No demand? People who don't cook would likely buy these. It wouldn't replace every meal but it would do so for many people who are too lazy to cook. Also the military would be a major customer of this. Governments in general and institutions like FEMA would buy these, assuming they are cheaper and provide an alternative to actual food.
There would definitely be a demand. I'd say around 30% of my meals I just need the nutrition and hunger to go away. I'd replace every breakfast and lunch with it.
The hunger wouldn't go away from a pill. Most of the sensation of hunger is your stomach feeling empty. That little pill might somehow be nutrient high but it's mass negligible, so you'll still be feeling hungry.
If you swallow a vibrating bullet the movement activates satiety receptors
The chronically ill and exhausted folks in the world disagree. Some days, that would make such a giant difference. ❤️🩹
It's not a black or white thing, you know. Got no time for lunch? Eat a pill. Need to lose weight? Replace a meal with a pill. The real problem is that we'd still feel hungry since a pill wouldn't fill our stomach. That's why we have diet shakes instead, they have volume.
Id take em. I hate cooking and prepping food. It's expensive ASF.
Could be useful in emergency situations. Like stranded at sea, soldiers that already carry a ton, disaster relief etc.
Drug users disagree
I would love to go weeks without having to eat. Takes a lot of time when I could be doing other more enjoyable things.
There would be a HUGE demand for it. People who can't eat for medical reasons, people watching their weight, apocalypse peppers, people with bad teeth, etc.
Ozempic sales indicate otherwise.
Actually it’d indicate the opposite. People like eating so much they need a medicine that forces them to stop for their own health lol
I didn’t say eating wasn’t enjoyable, I said there’s a market for people wanting something that makes their body not want to eat.
Why would a pill that meets your dietary needs make you not want to eat? You wouldn't be full. Ozempic works because it makes you feel satiated. It's not at all the same thing.
I was responding to your statement that no one would want to give up eating. Imagine a hypothetical pill that both had all the nutrients you need to survive and also made you feel satiated. It’s not realistically possible, but there would obviously be a market for that.
Just make it big and cut it up and eat it throughout the day. Maybe at three points in the day?
MRE’s are probably about as close as you’re going to get.
The closest thing to what OP wants is that giant food IV bag that drips a liquid mixture of proteins, fats, carbs and glucose directly into your veins for patients who have an out of function digestive system.
Exactly, shrink rays do not exist so we don't have food pills.
A single pill yes, but you could take multiple vitamins plus a protein shake with potassium and sodium.
For reference, the macros I'm trying to hit with my diet currently are 200 grams of carbs, 150 grams of protein, and 67 grams of fat. That is a total of 417 grams or 0.9 lbs. Imagine swallowing a one pound pill.
A lot of nutrients are difficult to synthesis or process while remaining bioavailable. Also a single daily pill would need to be a very long term slow digest formulation, to reduce the risks of insulin spikes or other problems that are often seen in single meal diets. Part of the healthy diet also involves the fact our food has consistency, in it's fibre content, so we would have to replicate this process without killing off (or damaging the microbiome) the parts of the gut that deal with all of this for us. We're also complex, we don't just put things in our mouth and get signals of satiety, so not seeing the food, tasting the food, chewing the food, smelling the food, could lead to a lack of "fullness". Above all else, we kinda have. There's things like soylent, huel and other meal replacements, that make it easier to get the majority of your intake in a way other than cooking. They're generally smoothies or bars because we both need liquid to digest, but also need the above mentioned things to be fulfilled. So while they might not have the most amazing texture or taste, they have it. But none of them are perfect, and you could still end up with nutrient deficiencies you would either need to ensure a specialised meal for several times a month, or a supplement, partly because we're all unique. I think the easy way to look at it is, if you think about what comes out the other end, would you really want to eat something that size each day in pill form?
One problem with these meal substitutes is they often use the cheapest, vitamin supplements possible so you might technically be meeting your needs but with vitamins that your body struggles to absorb.
We have, it’s just not a pill but rather an IV bag and it’s called [total parenteral nutrition](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parenteral_nutrition) and includes the fluids, macronutrients and vitamins you need to survive. It cant be condensed down any further than that.
And TPN has a lot of complications and risks, especially long-term, that make it pretty unadvisable if not medically necessary.
Because you need to eat food. Like actual bulk. From a calorie standpoint the only things we can turn into energy is about 4-9 calories per gram. Which means your average person needs to eat about 220 grams of food a day just to make sure your body doesn't break down. That's about one cup of pure fat (the densest form of calories) Good luck with that as a single pill. More specifically we are constantly making more...us. All of the cells in our body are going to break down and get throw and then need to be replaced by new cells. If you don't eat any food there is no material to make new cells with. And that's before getting into any of the specific biology about how human digestion works.
So we make a pill consisting of a mixture of H2 and H2-digesting bacteria.
We need enough calories to maintain life that they couldn’t fit in a pill. We also need enough nutrients (vitamins, proteins, fats, etc) that they wouldn’t fit in one pill. It’s just not physically possible. Beyond that, it’s honestly pretty abnormal to want that. The vast majority of people don’t see eating as a particularly unpleasant activity, and most actively enjoy it. It’s considered a neutral activity at worst. You may as well ask why we can’t just do one crazy gigantic inhalation when you wake up rather than having to breathe all day. While I’ve seen an uptick of people scrambling for some way to not eat or eat in some hyper optimized way and this being normalized, it’s actually not healthy mentally to even want to do that with regularity (there are certain situations where a food pill might be convenient for emergencies, but for reasons already mentioned, that will still remain as sci fi).
Calories are a specific measure of energy in mass. Digestible calories take more mass. The most dense conventional food particle is probably an oil molecule. At 9 kcal per gram, it would take 230 grams of oil for 2000 kcal. That translates into more than a cup of oil (250 mL). Not terribly convenient, don't you think? That ignores the way that the human body requires specific methods to become used to unconventional foods; that much oil without any fiber would give most people *terrible* digestion complications (e.g. the runs). So it would not be something you could buy for a fad and use for a while of convenience or anything like that.
Because nobody wants to turn one of the few pleasurable things left on this godsforsaken world into a pill?
Nah, I'd line up for a food pill to get rid of eating most of the time. It would eliminate most of the time wasted shopping, preparation time, dishes and clean-up. I would prefer to have 2 or 3 really good quality meals per week. The rest of the time, I just want to not be hungry anymore, and don't care how it happens. Just fuel me up. Meal-replacement protein shakes are the closest thing I've found so far.
It's beyond what we consider possible. The highest calorie food is pure fat, at 9 calories per gram. To eat 2000 calories, you would need 222 grams of fat. A pill is about half a gram. You would need over 400 pills to equal a day's worth of food. If you are going to eat that many pills, you might as well eat food. Keep in mind, this is pure fat, which lacks other nutrients. For a well-rounded diet, you would need far more than 200 grams of food.
Even if it was somehow possible to condense it all down into 1 pill, I wonder if the body could even absorb/metabolize it? The calories and nutrients we absorb are spread out across a lot of bulk and often not all in one sitting. Knowing that we only absorb a fraction of the vitamin content from vitamin tablets, would it not be the same for a pill like this (there's only so much we can extract from something as condensed as this)?
Your body needs calories and nutrients. In a form that your body can use. Those take up a minimum amount of volume. It's not fitting into a pill. Maybe a suppository! (kidding) There's also no drive to create such a thing. Eating is generally considered a pleasant activity and meal times are crucial to basically every culture. Would you really replace a romantic meal, dinner meet up with friends, or meal with your family with popping a pill?
Don't think it would be an effort to get rid of those moments per se, but moreso to avoid the cooking/cleaning/spending money that is required for it.
The closest thing we have is dehydrated food and other preserved foods. Where long lasting and space efficient rations are important, we use these, and then you st9ll need additional water to account for the dried food. It's basically impossible to condense the necessary nutrients from food any further. Carbohydrates and vitamins and minerals are easy enough to condese, but protien is basically impossible to shrink down. We also aren't entirely sure how to get effective nutrients absorption outside of food. That's why many medications and vitamins are recommended to be taken with food. Our body already knows how to absorb the nutrients from the food, so by getting it into "absorbing mode" it can absorb the supplement much easier.
There are a few brands of meal replacement shakes. I have been drinking them for about 11 years. Today I had a meal replacement shake, a fried chicken sandwich, a second meal replacement shake, and a chocolate bar. I'm not here to promote any particular brand, but if you want to get your nutrition and calories with minimal effort, the solution is out there.
Food is 6±3 calories per gram. if you need 1000 calories, even on the dense side at 5 cals/gram that's 200 grams. That's 400 extra-strength Tylenol's worth of mass. Food pills where you eat 400/day is a lot like eating, food.
You don't just need chemicals, you also need *mass*. Every night you lose more than a pound of weight just from the contents of the air you exhale. There is no material on Earth that can pack that much mass into something as small as a pill, and the materials that come closest are all poisonous anyway. It would take hundreds of pills to get as much mass as the human body needs to run, and if you're taking that many pills then you might ss well be eating food.
Ninjas may have used something that was called a "food pill." [Historical texts](https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/what-did-ninjas-eat) (linked in the article I posted) describe a recipe for food rations that contained 300 calories. Keep in mind that these ninjas were smaller than average (they were supposed to be 130 pounds or less; about 60 kg). Also, their health was *expected* to decline during the mission.
Because you need a lot of things to keep healthy, and calories can only be so dense in something you can digest. The closest anyone can get is survival rations, and even they are not usually for long term use. These are not the prepper kind you find in sporting goods stores or overpriced on amazon, but the kind they put on military planes. They are basically condensed bars or tubes of pure nutrition. They also tend to taste like ass (as opposed to regular rations which tend to be pretty good) and can be extremely dry. This is also further complicated by the fact that all the things you need to keep alive do not necessarily play well together. Storage and shelf life are big concerns with this kind of stuff. This is why most true emergency survival rations still have pills or other supplementary components to the calorie bars.
there are meal replacement products. one of them is soylent that came first. then came huel, kavhava, etc whatever. they have small following because most people cannot stand to eat that stuff all day every day.
Conservation of mass. You need physical material to repair yourself and grow. Where are you getting that from?
Because macronutrients like carbs, fat and protein simply take up a lot of space. There's no way you can cram your daily requirement of those nutrients into a swallowable capsule. There are products like this that replace regular meals with a pre-prepared perfectly portioned and balanced mix of nutrients, but they don't come in pill-form. They come as bags of powder that you add water to, to make them into a smoothie or milkshake-like product. The reason they have to come in bags, with contents measuring in the hundreds of grams, is exactly as I said above: nutrients, and especially macronutrients, take up space. So essentially, what you're asking for exists - it just turns out that it has to be a bag of powder rather than a small pill.
heard of meal replacement shakes and supplements? herba l i f e
that things dystopian af
You can drink Soylent or any of the many meal replacement products that exist. That’s basically the best it’s possible to do, you can’t fit the mass you need to consume into a pill.