What are the top 3 food products you need to eat every day ?

There is no such thing as a food you need to eat every day, and in fact humans have evolved to seek variety and not eat any one thing daily.  Humans have evolved to survive sustained periods of deprivation of any nutrient, including all nutrition, for weeks at the least.  So you don't need to eat anything every day.  Water you need almost daily, food no.


So what do we run out of first?  Calories.  When we run out of calories, our bodies will start to divert muscle protein and other parts of our bodies into blood sugar, to keep our brains working.  That's our human, evolutionary advantage, to use our brains to save our lives.  We could live quite a while longer in starvation mode with nothing more than empty calories provided by, say,  pure sugar.  


I think the next item to run out would be protein, even if we were getting plenty of calories.  (I'm not an expert on the progression of starvation, so I'm speculating.)  We rebuild our proteins - muscles, enzymes - routinely and this would become a problem if no fresh protein was available.  Our bodies cannot manufacture all the needed amino acids.   It would take months for our muscles to be consumed but it would have to happen.


After that, I'm not sure it's known what happens.  We would start running out of vitamins and essential fatty acids - the things we cannot make ourselves - but those deficiencies might be trivial compared to the protein deprivation.  I'd love to hear more about this.  But I suspect this is not what you were asking about in the first place.

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