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Comment by Dowwie | Hacker News Reader

Igor Limansky, from Alone Season 9, didn't do well living off of just seaweed. He grew very weak and developed heart palpitations from malnutrition.

Including seaweed in one's diet may have worked for people but living exclusively on seaweed seems to have problems.

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Yes...living off of just seaweeds seems...like a pretty bad idea and incomplete nutrition. In Alone participants are constrained to a specific plot of land -- I'll assume if Igor could go to other locations he could have augmented his diet and improved his living situation (not kept to that boggy area) like a good hunter-gatherer.

My understanding is that there are very few foods that are fine to live off of exclusively, especially vegetarian ones. Potatoes are the most famous example where it is possible, but even there it only works if you eat both white potatoes and sweet potatoes, which come from quite different plants from different taxonomic families.

Acorns come pretty close. Protein, carbohydrates, and fats, as well as calcium, phosphorus, potassium & niacin. Just leech those tannins!!

From what I've understood from one particular (very early) experiment of living on just potatoes for a year is that it worked because (for some reason) the participants had, or developed, a particular gut microbiome which could transform some of the potato starch to additional nutrients which their bodies could then use.

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