What If You Ate Only Chicken for a Year?

What If You Ate Only Chicken for a Year? Your best friend bets you ten thousand dollars that you can't eat only chicken for one full year. Chicken, water and salt. Nothing else. The first weeks feel amazing. Then your gums start to bleed. This story is fiction, but the science is real. Please don't try this: a single-food diet can seriously harm you. If you want to change how you eat, talk to a doctor or dietitian first. Chapters: 0:00 Day sixty-one 0:16 What if you ate only chicken? 0:20 The bet 1:15 The best week of your life 1:55 You're eating dinosaurs 2:26 The first warning 3:14 The sailors' disease 3:59 The loophole 4:19 What chicken doesn't have 5:06 When food stops tasting 5:31 The empty chair 6:06 Day three hundred 6:28 Sam 7:13 Day 365 7:50 The ending Sources: - USDA FoodData Central: cooked chicken breast (about 165 calories and 31 g protein per 100 g), roasted thigh with skin, cooked chicken liver (vitamin C, vitamin A), calcium and fiber values - Per-person chicken use in the US, about 100 lb a year: USDA Economic Research Service - US National Academies, Dietary Reference Intakes: protein, fiber, calcium, vitamin C, vitamin A upper limit - Protein and the energy used to digest it (about 20-30%): Westerterp 2004, Nutrition & Metabolism - CDC, Chicken and Food Poisoning: about 1 in 25 packages contaminated with Salmonella; cook to 165 F (74 C) - Organ et al. 2008, Science: T. rex proteins and birds - FAO statistics: about 30 billion chickens alive at any time - Protein toxicity ("rabbit starvation"): Bilsborough & Mann 2006, Int J Sport Nutr Exerc Metab - Scurvy: NIH Office of Dietary Supplements, Vitamin C fact sheet; Lind, A Treatise of the Scurvy, 1753; the two million sailors figure is a common historians' estimate - David et al. 2014, Nature: diet changes gut bacteria within days - Desai et al. 2016, Cell: fiber-starved gut bacteria eat the mucus layer (in mice) - Rolls et al. 1981, Physiology & Behavior: sensory-specific satiety - Gout and meat: Choi et al. 2004, New England Journal of Medicine