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Pure supplements alone, no. Many problems would occur. You need to chew, or your teeth and jaw weaken. Your gut microbiome would die off without fuel, which would virtually cripple your immune system. Your organs would begin to falter, starting with digestive organs, because the job of quite a bit of our organs is to filter out the stuff that’s useless or harmful to us and pass it back out as waste. And who knows what else. But avoiding cooking, sure, some people do that. They’re called “raw vegans” and they eat things that are generally unprocessed and uncooked.
However, that is a rather dangerous diet. There’s a reason we are omnivores (to address the vegan angle, which is 30% of the risk) and there’s a reason we have cooked our food, vegetables or otherwise, for nearly all of human history. This accounts for 70% of the risk.
In our modern reality, we can not obtain all the proper nutrition from exclusively plant foods. We either need to sprinkle in some non-plant foods, or to supplement diligently.
And cooking helps reduce the burdens of digestion, and increase the bioavailability of what we eat. Increasing our nutrient uptake and Calorie intake, thus enabling us to maintain our large brains and warm-blooded bodies.
Cooking also helps neutralize pathogens that would otherwise pose a much larger problem. Animal products carry the largest risk if uncooked or under-cooked, but many plant foods also carry increased risk of transmission of pathogens when consumed uncooked. How many times have you heard of people getting salmonella or e coli from stir-fried or baked veggie medley? Or from thoroughly cooked meats? Compared to how many times you’ve heard it being transmitted via undercooked meat, or salad greens that are most often served uncooked.
Nope. Vitamins and minerals are required for proper functioning of the body systems, but it is not a source of energy. Similar to a car, oil is needed for the hydraulics, air for the tires, and a charge for the battery, but without petrol you’re not moving.
ATP is the fuel source for cellular metabolism.
Pyruvic acid supplies ATP energy to cells from glucose through a process called glycolysis. So, it all comes down to glucose from either carbs or converting fats/proteins via Gluconeogenesis.
When free glucose is depleted(\~1-3 days) the body begins to breakdown fat for it’s energy needs. In the absence of fat, it will breakdown muscle. Lastly, if there is no muscle, it will scavenge energy from the organs (to preserve brain function at all costs), and this would eventually lead to system failure.
You could subsist on caloric dense supplement shakes…but these are inferior to the energy matrixes present in wholefoods.