>White bread in particular has no real nutritional value

I've never understood this claim that a lot of people seem to make. There's plenty of starch and protein in it, two vital macronutrients. Same with the bizarre claim some people make about breakfast cereals, that you're better off eating the box it comes in. No, you're not, humans cannot digest cellulose.

In the context of the article, I'm pretty sure this relates to nutritional value for ducks, not humans. Birds and people can eat a lot of the same food but our metabolisms are optimized very differently. I read one article that compared raising horses on a diet of corn to raising children on a diet of chocolate. After all, horses' metabolisms are optimized for extracting nutrition from grass. I would imagine ducks are on the opposite end of the spectrum.

Sure, I don't dispute the health risks of excessive starch and sugar consumption for either ducks, horses or children, but the nutritional value of starch and sugar is very real indeed. Animal cells rely on glucose as their primary source of energy, you can't get more real than that.

I get what they intend to say, but when they use categorical language like that at least one word has to yield its actual meaning, whether it's 'nutrition', 'real' or 'value'. It's a bit like the Clintonian interpretation of 'is'.

You're making an assumption that because glucose is part of the process, it is essential to ingest it through sucrose, fructose, starches, etc. For humans at least, this isn't really the case as it's possible for the body to produce glucose from fat and protein when no polysaccharides are being ingested, and function normally and indefinitely doing so. Without water, vitamins, sodium, iron, etc., the body will experience problems it cannot compensate for.

Starch(in general) is considered a nutrient, but not because it can be used to produce glucose.

>You're making an assumption that because glucose is part of the process, it is essential to ingest it through sucrose, fructose, starches, etc.

No, that's not what I'm assuming or implying.

I'm saying because starch is a highly efficient source of glucose, it has nutritional value.

Nobody who are saying citrus fruits have nutritional value because they are high in vitamin C are implying it's essential to ingest vitamin C through citrus fruits. You can't blame a lemon for not being the exclusive source of vitamin C, neither can you blame white bread for not being the only way to increase your blood sugar.

>Starch(in general) is considered a nutrient, but not because it can be used to produce glucose.

What else is it good for but to be converted into glucose?

"nutritional value" is shorthand for "practical nutritional value in this context"

Chocolate is actually a surprisingly good food, being one if the few providing carbohydrates, protein, and fats all by itself.

It’s obviously not advisable for a regular diet. But in a strNded-on-an-island scenario, you could easily survive on chocolate alone for years.

> you could easily survive on chocolate alone for years

Seems like quite an extreme claim. I'm not disagreeing, I simply don't know, but is this surviving with no ill effects (rickets for example) or surviving in the sense of just being alive?

Do you have any references?

I suspect it would be "just being alive" because I imagine eating chocolate alone would come with a whole host of other problems over a long period of time (including scurvy). I'm not sure vitamin D deficiency would be an issue if you were stranded on an island with limited shelter.

However, there is something to be said for chocolate's nutritional value in special circumstances. Most modern military rations include chocolate or chocolate-flavored items in some form as a significant part of their caloric value (predominantly fats and carbohydrates, even for the flavored items, as your OP mentioned). Aside from its propensity to melt, its size and weight make it somewhat convenient to carry on patrol and for lightweight rations, calorie-dense items are important.

I'm sure there's probably some literature on its use in rations that may be a good starting point, but as far as I remember from watching far too much Steve1989 on YT [1], most of the historic survival rations--think plane crashes--tended to rely on candy, malted milk tablets, or compressed oatmeal/cornflake bars rather than chocolate.

I've linked his channel below because I think you might find it fascinating.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC2I6Et1JkidnnbWgJFiMeHA/vid...

One of my friends found a whole carton of chocolate eggs while dumpster diving at college, and spent his break living off of the eggs.

Bathroom time must be interesting.

It's more about having enough fiber, chewing and overall time spent eating (which is good both for their intestinal tract and their wellbeing) than about extracting nutrition from grass.

If you consider that the cereals are made of wheat and corn that with traces of pesticides, sugar, synthetic ingredients, and so on, all of which cause health problems, the cardboard box starts to seem more appealing.

Yeah... the cardboard not made for consumption is definitely safer.

> ...made of wheat and corn that with traces of pesticides, sugar, synthetic ingredients...

Have you looked at what is in most of the things that are on grocery store shelves?

> ...the cardboard box starts to seem more appealing.

You go ahead and eat a cardboard box every morning for breakfast for a week and tell me how much better it was than a bowl of cereal. I'll wait.

Aaaand have you considered all the shit that might be in that cardboard?

considering i ate almost entirely cereal growing up and was much healthier than most of the people i grew up with, that claim is not worth its weight in font.

One data point? Are you sure most of the people you know were eating healthier than you?

yes, having 0 nutrition would mean that i could not have possibly survived. and if you want to be in the group that thinks eating indigestible cardboard is a possibility because 'there wasnt enough data', have at it.

you do realize, you dont need a ton of data in everything to draw conclusions.

One is more than none.

One is a data point. You can draw any line you feel through it but that doesn't mean it's a trend. You need more data.

It wasn't an argument about a trend. The question of whether you can drive a car by filling its gas tank with cola instead of gasoline is answered after you fill a car with cola instead of gasoline, then drive it. There's no need to establish a trend.

My favorite park has signs all along the water, warning people not to feed the animals, but they use an image of an alligator for the signs.

The article does mention how their beaks are changing to better retrieve and eat the larger sunflower seeds commonly found in feeders.

I think you missed the part about how feeders contribute to the spread of disease like conjuctivitis.

In larger sense, if fed birds are more successful, it affects the distribution of species (favouring fed part of the ecosystem). Not that it's necessarily a bad thing, and city environment does that anyway.

and as usual with any news headline involving evolution, it's worded the wrong way round. It should say something like "Fed urban birds have tended to survive more" i.e. looking back, not looking forward as though birds are capable of intentionally changing the genes of future generations