Almost every jar of pickles claims a serving of pickles has zero calories. Now clearly, this is incorrect and the result of exploiting some ridiculous FDA loophole, since anyone knows that cucumbers provide calories.
So let’s say you’re in a situation where you lose all access to food, but you’ve got effectively unlimited access to pickles – like, you’re trapped inside a recently abandoned pickle warehouse.
Could you conceivably eat enough pickles to survive for a month? Two months? Or would your body just shut down from all the sodium and acid?
Cucumbers themselves, like basically every green vegetable, dont provide sustainable amounts of calories. But assuming pickles cant have a different calorie count from the cucumbers they started with is a bit nonsense, it’s like saying wood ash will burn as well as unburnt wood. It’s undergone chemical processes that alter its makeup. If you’re talking about conventional vinegared pickles, that’s acids breaking down the few carbohydrates and proteins, and if you’re talking about lacto-fermented pickles, that’s bacteria eating the calories first and converting into carbon dioxide. You can also compare the vitamins for fresh cucumbers vs labeled on the pickle jar. They’re not finding loopholes to not label the health benefits of what they’re selling, the pickling process also destroys vitamins.