Almost every jar of pickles claims a serving of pickles has zero calories. Now clearly, this is incorrect and the result of exploiting some ridiculous FDA loophole, since anyone knows that cucumbers provide calories.

So let’s say you’re in a situation where you lose all access to food, but you’ve got effectively unlimited access to pickles – like, you’re trapped inside a recently abandoned pickle warehouse.

Could you conceivably eat enough pickles to survive for a month? Two months? Or would your body just shut down from all the sodium and acid?

  • Punkie@lemmy.world
    2134·
    10 months ago

    Well, it really reminds me of that famous GreenText about pickles

    • frickineh@lemmy.world
      451·
      10 months ago

      Oh good, it’s not just me. I came here to say that the odds of shitting pure pickle juice are way too high to make it worth the risk.

    • snooggums@kbin.social
      43·
      10 months ago

      If anyone hasn’t had a butt cam (colonoscopy) before, this basically describes the process for flushing out before the procedure, except the stuff they give you doesn’t taste as good as pickles.

          • GBU_28@lemm.eeEnglish
            12·
            10 months ago

            If you’ve had a stomach flu of that variety, it totally is.

            I’ve had a flu so bad I barfed every ~ 30 minutes for over 12 hours.

            By the end my throat was on fire

            • ArxCyberwolf@lemmy.ca
              6·
              10 months ago

              Stomach acid is also why people with some eating disorders like bulimia have badly eroded teeth. The acid from throwing up constantly eats away at your teeth.

              • GBU_28@lemm.eeEnglish
                3·
                10 months ago

                Yep. I’m always careful to rinse my mouth thoroughly after barfing, even if still nauseous

            • thawed_caveman@lemmy.world
              2·
              10 months ago

              But in this situation you can drink water and wash it down, preventing acid damage to your eusophagus. The author of this greentext can’t get water into their intestines.

              • GBU_28@lemm.eeEnglish
                2·
                10 months ago

                Did I say I was trying to solve for greentext’s situation?

                My comment is clearly related to vomiting

  • sanguine_artichoke
    763·
    10 months ago

    With a serving size of 20-30g and only 1 g carbs, unfortunately they’re not exploiting labeling. Cucumbers do not have significant carbohydrates, fat or protein and thus neither do pickled cucumbers. Maybe enough carbs to survive but not enough fat or protein, and so you’d end up with protein deficiency and whatever that condition is where people eating just rabbits starve from lack of fat. Probably also a horrific case of heartburn from such an acidic diet.

    They do have a decent amount of some vitamins and minerals, and electrolytes such as potassium. It wouldn’t make up for the lack of protein and fat though.

    • Mario_Dies.wav@lemmy.dbzer0.comOP
      23·
      10 months ago

      Would it be at least marginally better to eat the pickles, or would you be better off just fasting? Could they give you a few more days to live, at least, in hopes of rescue?

        • WarmSoda@lemm.ee
          531·
          10 months ago

          OP, we can get you out. Just make sure the door isn’t a jar!

            • Goldmage263@sh.itjust.works
              5·
              10 months ago

              If you are stuck right now. Go ahead and eat some pickles. Some calories and nutrition is better than completely 0. Also keep in mind that Cal stands for Kilocalories, so a pickle serving may have anywhere from 100 to 5000 calories (0-5 Cal) based on the prior numbers

              • Mario_Dies.wav@lemmy.dbzer0.comOP
                4·
                10 months ago

                Cal stands for Kilocalories

                I forget this a lot! It seems so unintuitive. I wonder why they didn’t just go with “kcal” or some other abbreviation.

      • Jiggle_Physics@lemmy.world
        271·
        10 months ago

        if you are discussing short-term survive-ability, while waiting for rescue, then eating pickles is better than nothing. They will provide water, vitamins, electrolytes, etc. If you are discussing living off of pickles as a lifestyle, or prolonged diet option, then it isn’t enough.

      • sanguine_artichoke
        4·
        10 months ago

        They have some carbs and protein at least, and vitamins and electrolytes. The water would probably help but I’d wonder if it would be too salty.

    • Davel23@kbin.social
      201·
      10 months ago

      whatever that condition is where people eating just rabbits starve from lack of fat

      Not sure if you’re making a joke, but it’s literally called “rabbit starvation”.

      • CountVon@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
        211·
        10 months ago

        Apparently the technical term is protein poisoning. Digesting protein creates urea, and the body needs at least some fat in order to convert to ammonia that can be excreted. It’s also called “mal be caribou” in French (caribou sickness, I think), which I find fascinating.

    • vexikron@lemmy.zip
      7·
      10 months ago

      Yeah… wouldnt you basically be able to live for a while, but not actually having much actual energy to move… and probably basically be having liquid stinging shits the whole time?

    • Nastybutler@lemmy.world
      10·
      10 months ago

      I suspect he’s locked a hostage in one and wants to know how long he can leave him there before he adds a murder charge to his kidnapping charge.

  • blazera@kbin.social
    474·
    10 months ago

    Cucumbers themselves, like basically every green vegetable, dont provide sustainable amounts of calories. But assuming pickles cant have a different calorie count from the cucumbers they started with is a bit nonsense, it’s like saying wood ash will burn as well as unburnt wood. It’s undergone chemical processes that alter its makeup. If you’re talking about conventional vinegared pickles, that’s acids breaking down the few carbohydrates and proteins, and if you’re talking about lacto-fermented pickles, that’s bacteria eating the calories first and converting into carbon dioxide. You can also compare the vitamins for fresh cucumbers vs labeled on the pickle jar. They’re not finding loopholes to not label the health benefits of what they’re selling, the pickling process also destroys vitamins.

    • CyanFen@lemmy.oneEnglish
      11·
      10 months ago

      But they are using a technicality that allows them to label them as 0 calories. While pickles don’t have many calories, they don’t have 0. According to fda guidelines a serving between 0-5 calories can be claimed as 0 calories and even the nutrition facts is allowed to say 0.

      • blazera@kbin.social
        91·
        10 months ago

        It’s not a technicality, it’s just rounding. Go check out the nutrition labels on various foods you got. The majority of them will be rounded to the nearest tenth. A few low calorie ones might be rounded to the nearest fifth. Less than that is for all practical purposes 0 calories. You will not get a significant amount of calories no matter how many pickles you eat. Forget the sodium and acidity, your body cant hold enough pickle mass to add up to a snack’s worth of calories.

      • tamal3@lemmy.world
        5·
        10 months ago

        Like gym bros putting spray butter on everything because it has “zero calories,” hahahha.

  • Ms. ArmoredThirteen@lemmy.ml
    30·
    10 months ago

    So there are a lot of “basically nothing” foods you can survive on for a time until nutrient deficiencies kill you. However in the case of pickles I think you’d be better of literally not eating for a month. Like how drinking saltwater dehydrates you, eating pickles would blow anything of nutritional value out of you and then some

  • Crack0n7uesday@lemmy.world
    181·
    10 months ago

    Imagine the shit you would have to take after a few days of even trying. I would definitely not trust a fart after day three.

  • HubertManne@kbin.social
    182·
    10 months ago

    calorie negative food requires more energy to digest than they give you. The more you preprocess them like cooking, the more that changes. It the basis for the cabbage soup diet that while this wikipedia page pans my wife swears by https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cabbage_soup_diet . Although she does not eat just the soup but uses it as a supplement cruch that does have a lot of non caloric nutrients to stay full. I have no idea why the wiki page say medical professionals say the weight lost is water. I find that hard to believe given the amount of water consumed as part of eating soup. Im just skeptical of what medical professionals or what proportion said that particular thing.

    • Quetzalcutlass@lemmy.worldEnglish
      12·
      10 months ago

      The cabbage soup diet has many names, usually linking the diet to a mainstream institution, including the “Sacred Heart Diet”, “Military Cabbage Soup”, “TJ Miracle Soup Diet”, and “Russian Peasant Diet”. All of the institutions named have denied a link with the diet.

      Russian peasants: "Don’t blame us for this shit!”

      • HubertManne@kbin.social
        1·
        10 months ago

        maybe but my wife is one of those women who won’t use the bathroom away from home, does not want anyone to hear or in anyway know she farted and does not like the bathroom door open when she is in there on the toilet.

    • spittingimage@lemmy.world
      9·
      10 months ago

      People who are trying to eat healthy are probably also cutting back salt (intentionally or by eating less processed food), so their body retains less fluid in its tissues.

    • volvoxvsmarla @lemm.ee
      1·
      10 months ago

      For the water part, in the wikipedia article it is said in context with the claim that people lose 4.5 kg within a week. That weight is unrealistically just fat. A kg of body fat has about 7700 kcal iirc (I remember it is not exactly 9000 kcal/kg but less and google spat out 7700), so that would necessitate an energy expenditure of 3850 kcal/day (if you wanted to lose 4.5 kg/7 days). This would be a lot, at least for a regular sized person with moderate activity levels (mostly we estimate 2000-2500 kcal/day as an energy need). You also have something like 2000 kcal saved in your body as glycogen, which will also be broken down of you fast. Glycogen is stored in a kind of “water shell”, so when you burn through glycogen, you also “lose water” (1 g of glucogen : 3 g of water I think). Considering you’ll put your body in a kind of “fasting mode”, the diet will also cause a metabolic response where your metabolism will slow down and cling on what you have. Muscles will also be broken down for gluconeogenesis from amino acids.

  • Jackcooper@lemmy.world
    15·
    10 months ago

    Missing some vitamins and minerals as well as some obligate amino acids so without getting to the calories, no

  • dual_sport_dork 🐧🗡️@lemmy.world
    11·
    10 months ago

    I’d give it 3 or 4 days, if literally all you have is pickles. All that salt and vinegar will dehydrate you pretty damn good, despite all the liquid you’re ostensibly consuming.

    Even if you had fresh water present as well, I think you’d wind up with one hell of a stomachache by day 2 or 3.

    • skydivekingair@lemmy.world
      6·
      10 months ago

      Yeah they said only pickles, and even with the liquid in the pickles it’s so briny that unless they are also drinking additional water their kidneys would keep using more water the same way drinking salt water would cause. I took the question as only pickles and that, as you said, would only last until dehydration sets in. Now if they have unlimited fresh water I’d say until malnutrition so maybe a few weeks, a few horrible weeks. Just playing along and speculating, I am not a MD.

      • dual_sport_dork 🐧🗡️@lemmy.world
        3·
        10 months ago

        Yeah, I think I’d rather spend my time seeing if I could use the pickle juice to corrode some component of the place that’s keeping me locked in. Fuck all that noise.

        I’d take, like, one or two jars of pickles with me when I left, though.

        • jballs@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
          2·
          10 months ago

          Now that I think about it, it really works in both orders. Just went for 3 days without shitting? Eat a bunch of pickles and it’ll flush your right out! Need to go 3 days without shitting? Eat a bunch of pickles the day before you start to completely void your system.