Nutrition on The Space Station

Nutrition on Board the International Space Station With Bob Thirsk and Frank De Winne (Background music playing) Today we are going to talk a little bit about food on the ISS, on the International Space Station. As you can see, we have here our table, our dinner table, where we eat normally every evening on board the ISS. But of course we are not in a restaurant here, so dinner does not get served for us. We have to prepare it ourselves. It is a little bit like when you go camping, then as well you need to prepare everything yourselves. You need to make sure you have everything with you. And then once you are at (the) camping site, it is quite easy, but also you need to be well prepared to eat. So dinner is also important to us for a social occasion because every evening around this table we gather with the entire crew. We eat and we share stories. But now a little bit more about the nutritional aspects of our dinner food. Living in space is a pleasure for any astronaut. However, there are consequences to the human body when living in a weightless environment. Every single organ system is affected in one way or another. So food and nutrition play an important role in helping us to maintain proper human physiology in a weightless environment. In particular, we are concerned about the effect of weightlessness on muscles and our bones. And as Frank mentioned a minute ago, we live in an isolated and confined environment so the psychological aspect of eating is important. Muscles atrophy in space, so some of the food items that we will describe today are high in protein content. That�s important and a little bit different than how we would normally eat on Earth. Also, in space, bones tend to demineralize. They lose calcium. So we also need special supplements in our diet. Contain the proper nutrients to keep bone mass and strength. So a lot of the items that we will be discussing today may be a little bit atypical, might seem a little bit imbalanced compared to an Earth diet, but they are perfectly tuned by the nutritionists and food scientists for astronauts who live for long periods of time in a weightless environment. Yes, indeed, because we get to enjoy all this food around our dinner. There are many people on the Earth that prepared this for us that make sure that the food we eat is healthy and is the best possible way that we can live here on orbit. So let�s discuss a little bit about the food we have here on the table. Well, we have different types of food. First of all we have some Russian food. They usually come in cans like this. So this is a can that you can find in any store basically. This one is meat and vegetables. For example, with this can we can eat up in a Russian way. We have also other types of food which is simply dehydrated food. These are kinds of packages (from) which all the water is withdrawn. And then we simply just add hot water. A little bit like when you have instant soups or instant meals that you can prepare on the ground. Other types of food are thermal-stabilized food. This is food which has been cooked and prepared and sealed in an airtight envelope. Treated with high temperature and perhaps radiation so that no bacteria can divide or reproduce inside the food. This type of food has a shelf life of many, many, many months. The example I just showed you was homemade potatoes. Another example, one of my favorites, is pears. In a few minutes I will probably try to sample some of these. All these foods are specially processed at a lab in Houston at the Johnson Space Center or Star City in Russia, not too far from Moscow. Part of our preflight training involves going to these labs, sampling all of the more than 75 menu items and several beverages, and ranking our personal choices on which ones we like the best. The nutritionists have decided that it is important to give us a broad spectrum of all the nutrients that we need. But we also have a personal preference. And when we select our food prior to flight, we can select special items that (we) have special fondness for. Yes, then of course there are also the drinks. We also need to drink on board here on the ISS. Drinking of course we cannot do out of a cup because in weightlessness everything would just flow out. So that is why we have these types of drinking bags. Also inside this is a chocolate drink, for example. It is some instant chocolate drink (mix) and then we fill it up with water. And then we attach a small straw that has a clamp on the straw that keeps it well confined inside. Then we can just drink it out of the straw like an ordinary bag. (Background music playing)