Nutritional value of replicated food

[Crewman47]

I'm on a roll today as this is my third post in the space of a couple of hours.

Anyway know how ordinary food and snacks can contain anything from a few calories and what not to several hundred calories and what not, eg a Yorkie chocolate bar can conatin around 300 odd calories, and if eaten in great capacity can cause one to become obese, then do you suppose that similar replicated foods and snacks contain the same nutritional value or could you eat as much replicated chocolate and cake as you wanted without getting fat?

Any thoughts?

 

[bryce]

Crewman47 said:
I'm on a roll today as this is my third post in the space of a couple of hours.

Anyway know how ordinary food and snacks can contain anything from a few calories and what not to several hundred calories and what not, eg a Yorkie chocolate bar can conatin around 300 odd calories, and if eaten in great capacity can cause one to become obese, then do you suppose that similar replicated foods and snacks contain the same nutritional value or could you eat as much replicated chocolate and cake as you wanted without getting fat?

Any thoughts?

I'd don't see what the point of bothering to replicate food with NO nutritional values at all would be,everyone would starve.

But I imagine you could...tweak...replicated foods to be lower in fat and sugar, or contain artificial substitutes if you so desired.

Also, there is Tom Paris' "holographic wine" (which I can only reconcile as a sly *joke*...)

 

[Vanyel]

Crewman47 said:
I'm on a roll today as this is my third post in the space of a couple of hours.

Anyway know how ordinary food and snacks can contain anything from a few calories and what not to several hundred calories and what not, eg a Yorkie chocolate bar can conatin around 300 odd calories, and if eaten in great capacity can cause one to become obese, then do you suppose that similar replicated foods and snacks contain the same nutritional value or could you eat as much replicated chocolate and cake as you wanted without getting fat?

Any thoughts?

The replicators do give you food that is nutritionally balanced and is good for you, which is why Troi once said she wanted real chocolate not what the replicater gives you.

Also eating too much of anything, no matter how good it is for you, wil get you fat if you don't exercise.

 

[bryce]

Vanyel said:

Crewman47 said:
I'm on a roll today as this is my third post in the space of a couple of hours.

Anyway know how ordinary food and snacks can contain anything from a few calories and what not to several hundred calories and what not, eg a Yorkie chocolate bar can conatin around 300 odd calories, and if eaten in great capacity can cause one to become obese, then do you suppose that similar replicated foods and snacks contain the same nutritional value or could you eat as much replicated chocolate and cake as you wanted without getting fat?

Any thoughts?

The replicators do give you food that is nutritionally balanced and is good for you, which is why Troi once said she wanted real chocolate not what the replicater gives you.

Also eating too much of anything, no matter how good it is for you, wil get you fat if you don't exercise.

Yeah, as much as this makes me sound more conservative than I am, I can imagine some nanny state do-gooders who demand that all replication food be good for you.

I would rather think that in a utopian society, people are just smart enough to eat right, or seek medical aid when they can't.

 

[Trekker4747]

I always invisioned the replicator system being able to track whatever it is your order and eat from it. Thus it itself balances what it gives you to make sure you're getting a healthy, but not too much, ammount of the carbs, fats and vitamins you need.

And it packages those into whatever form and flavor you ask for. Thus, you could always order cake and ice-cream from the replicator and it'll happily oblige and just make it "cake and ice-cream flavored balanced diet" and when it has delivered your daily needs it serves you "cake and ice-cream flavored nutritionaly nothing" so it's pretty much "cake and ice cream-flavored air."

To "get fat", eat too much, or intake too many fats, vitamins, minerals, etc. A person either has to order food from a source that isn't tracking their needs (for example the replicators in 10-Forward wouldn't likely know who is ordering what) or to get ahold of "real food."

The deal with Troi is a multi-layered one.

Troi knows the replicator is doing this for her and she further knows there isn't chocolate behind those walls and that she's being served "chocolate ice-cream flavored nutritional supplement #47" and the replicator in her room cannot oblige in her request because it is there to balance her diet and because it simply cannot come-up with 'real' ice-cream or chocolate. Everything is manufactured at either the atomic or mollecular level from stock stores of various chemicals and energy.

 

[Ronald Held]

i also would think that the replicators give you a personally balanced diet, no matter what the form of the foods you are eating. I can envision that if you are consuming too many calories, the future food will be replicated with few calories to compensate.

 

[Bill Morris]

I suppose the replicator system would limit the total caloric content per day dispensed to any individual, based on the person's height, such as by substituting some molecules of sugar with left-handed sugar molecules (which the human body doesn't have an enzyme to digest and would therefore pass through as like dietary fiber) or other such substitute, besides keeping essential nutrients at an appropriate level per day.

 

[Forbin]

Man, that's depressing.

 

[Bill Morris]

Forbin said:
Man, that's depressing.

I guess I have a health-food bias. Sorry.

 

[David cgc]

Remember, though, that Troi was talking to a Starfleet replicator, that was programmed to see to the health of Starfleet officers. If you were Joe Nobody going down to the replimat on Deep Space Nine, it probably would just give you the as close to the real version of whatever you ordered as you wanted. Though I suppose you could program a regular-guy replicator to make sure you got all your vitamins...

 

[Cary L. Brown]

The idea of that level of "tweaking" of what we consume is just rife with the possibility of abuse.

Imagine this... someone inserts a few lines of code into a ship's program banks. So that it just very subtly adjusts the dietary programming for everyone.

Effectively putting a tab of LSD into everyone's diet first thing in the morning... just for instance.

Impossible? Not in Star Trek... we've seen much more radical computer failures (developing sentient holographic characters, sprouting new lifeforms, becoming possessed by demonic alien entities, flirting with the captain, etc, etc). The idea of subtly altering food replication programming isn't far-fetched at all.

Then again... this isn't an argument for why it shouldn't happen. After all... we all drink our fluoridated water and eat our hormone-laced Tyson chicken every day, don't we? And it's not like we're being harmed... is it?

 

[David cgc]

Well, yes, but that would be a concern even if it weren't a matter of course to tailor-make replicated meals to maximize their nutritional value. Even if every replicator lacked those features and was simply made to perfectly recreate its original template without deviation, it could still be maliciously reprogrammed to slip drugs, poison and what have you into the food it produces. Or, for the more prank-minded individual, simply scrambling the names of all the entries, so it always gives the wrong food.

 

[Bill Morris]

Okay, well, since I do LCARS programming, I guess I have another bias: about the reliablity of safety in the software.

But it has been stated on Trek. The EMH said that the replicators wouldn't make poisons. Ricker said that you couldn't cause an emergency situation by slapping an LCARS touch panel to break a fall or by sitting on one.

Basically, a computer system that can parse verbal commands when the grammar is a little off and refrain from opening doors in response to corridor traffic is hopefully smart enough to foil that kind of tampering, and Starfleet almost certainly would have demanded that level of safety in the replicator system from the start, and not wait for that kind of abuse to happen then issue service packs.

I can just imagine a programmer saying, "Anyone who wants to poison people with our replicated food will have to slip something in the old-fashioned way--after it's been served."

 

[Ronald Held]

With the computers running everything including the AG/IDF and life support, why is misprogrammed food any more risky?

 

[Forbin]

Good to know the control panels can tell the difference between a fingertip and an ass!

 

[Timo]

Didn't we actually get a case of replicator-facilitated food poisoning already, in DS9 "Babel"?

Timo Saloniemi

 

[Bill Morris]

Well, we do know that the computer system does things like activating emergency force fields automatically for hull breaches and some emergency fire suppression, depending on what equipment of that type is installed, and issues reports, but also gives issues verbal warnings for dangers that require intervention by the crew.

 

[Bill Morris]

Anyway, aside from microwave ovens and bread machines, one of the closest things we have to a food replicator is the common kitchen blender. And to get maximum nutrition with that, my breakfast is always raw sesame seeds, nonfat powdered milk, and fruit or vegetable juice, since breaking the sesame seeds open in a blender like that unlocks their extreme nutritional value. It's also quick, makes vitamin supplements easy to swallow, and I like the taste.

 

[Forbin]

How does a blender replicate (as in create from thin air) anything?

 

[seekertwo]

Cary L. Brown said:
The idea of that level of "tweaking" of what we consume is just rife with the possibility of abuse.

Imagine this... someone inserts a few lines of code into a ship's program banks. So that it just very subtly adjusts the dietary programming for everyone.

Effectively putting a tab of LSD into everyone's diet first thing in the morning... just for instance.

Impossible? Not in Star Trek... we've seen much more radical computer failures (developing sentient holographic characters, sprouting new lifeforms, becoming possessed by demonic alien entities, flirting with the captain, etc, etc). The idea of subtly altering food replication programming isn't far-fetched at all.

That would be a great episode......

PICARD: Mr. Worf, target the swirly purple Klingon vessel and fire.

WORF: Unable to comply. My fingers are melting....

GEORDI: Oooh....warp core makes pretty colors....