Cataclysm-dda: Change to fat nutritional value is pure insane

[Muffindrake]

26873

At this point you might as well throw away the meat and freeze the fat.

Raw fat may or may not have such high nutritional value by itself, but that doesn't matter. This change doesn't help the already unfortunate circumstance in which butchering provides a boundless source of food with little effort necessary in the game.

It was sort of okay prior to this change - preserve/dehydrate/freeze the meat you can before it rots and perhaps process some of the other parts like fat to gain a modicum of value out of them.

Or dispose of all of that - just go kill a deer and eat its fat, it'll sate the character for the next day or two (fat spoils in a week).

As it stands now, meat is a pointless commodity.

[nexusmrsep]

It's not the change itself that is obnoxious, but the lack of the holistic approach. While old nutrition value was trying to achieve arbitrary balance, which was bad, it is impossible for the nutrition system based only on calories to be also balanced without at least rudimentary representation of food's basic ingredients and their effect on human body when lacking or overabundant.

This example is a direct reason why protein/fat/carbohydrates system should be implemented ASAP, with balanced diet in mind. With it implemented, eating high-calorie fat would be offset by it originating from abundant mass of (guess what) fat. So fat-only diet would perhaps keep you alive, but lack of proteins and carbohydrates (below set thresholds) and oversupply of fat (above set thresholds) would imply some set of negative effects on a character.

Furthermore, implementing it within existing bounds of vitamin mod would be relatively easy, even if rudimentary in the beginning.

[Treah]

Why not just make fat give you a negative health modifier like junk food does now? Also Inuits subside on blubber which is just whale fat so a fat only diet is not unheard of IRL.

Also was there any justification in the PR for the change? I cant seam to find anywhere where it was referenced to IRL values to justify the change in calories. I am unsure how much fat a portion is, if I had that we could do a simple lookup online to see how much it has. But I very much doubt its this high tho considering most hamburger is 20% fat and a pound of hamburger is only about 1040 calories.

[Treah]

I just looked it up a pound of fat is about 3500 calories. This value is way off and should be fixed.

[Treah]

Found a better source and also found the portion size in the game.
Portion size in the game is 1/2 a pound. So using that as a base I found the calorie count for 1lb of beef fat and cut it in half. I used 90% lean beef for the meat value.

Meat: 798 calories
Fat: 1528.5 calories

Sources
Meat: https://www.fatsecret.com/calories-nutrition/usda/beef-fat?portionid=47377&portionamount=1.000
Fat: https://www.fatsecret.com/calories-nutrition/usda/beef-fat?portionid=47377&portionamount=1.000

[Treah]

Created PR #26916 to correct this.

[mlangsdorf]

I mildly object to the issue title. 1943 calories for 230-250 g of raw fat may not be entirely correct, but it's fairly close to the actual value. It's certainly not an insane number.

[kevingranade]

Upon review, the number is correct, this is an invalid issue.