The Army wants to pay people to eat nothing but MREs for 3 weeks
Participants must be between 18-62 years of age and without digestive health issues.
A full MRE meal contains around 1,250 calories, as they're designed to sustain soldiers during field missions.
The Army hopes the data gathered from this study will allow them to improve MREs.
The packaged MREs are precision engineered to deliver calories and nutrition, but they miss out on some of the inedible but necessary compounds natural foods contain. These compounds are vital to what Dr. J. Philip Karl calls "gut health."
"There's a lot of interesting and new research looking at gut bacteria, and how those gut bacteria interact with the human body," Karl told Army Times.
"We think we can manipulate the bacteria in a way that helps the bacteria fight foreign pathogens - things that could cause food-borne illness, for example," Karl said.
"Oftentimes, war fighters are overseas and they eat something off the local economy that can cause [gastrointestinal] distress. Potentially, what we could do by increasing the amount of beneficial gut bacteria is to help prevent some of that."
Participants in the study will even get an MRE cookbook that features dishes like "Bunker Hill Burritos" and "Fort Bliss-ful Pudding Cake", Army Times reports.
As it is a true scientific study, there will be a control group among the 60 participants that will maintain their regular diet.
For more information on the program click here.