Becoming 'fat adapted' reduces this cost significantly as you can get approximately 120 fat calories in a tablespoon of high quality coconut or olive oil for about 10 cents in bulk based on my last trip to costco, and as long as you supplement that with an inexpensive protein source you can get by on a very cheap diet. I splurge on high quality veggies simply because we don't know enough about phytonutrients' effect on health to rule them out. This in combination with skipping meals (intermittent fasting) causes the food bill to drop significantly and has some potential health benefits.
Stigler Diet
11–20 of 71 posts
Re: Stigler Diet
#12 “No one recommends these diets for anyone, let alone everyone.”
But surely there must be some hacker out there who has decided to try it.
Re: Stigler Diet
#13I'm sure we could attempt this today with a larger dataset of foods and nutrients. I know that there's nutritiondata.self.com and the usda's nutrition database, anyone know of an average price dataset for food?
Re: Stigler Diet
#14Here is a meal from these ingredients by a Google chef: https://gsuite-developers.googleblog.com/2014/09/sudoku-line...
> Google Chef Anthony Marco took it as a challenge, and we’re calling the result Foie Linéaire à la Stigler
Re: Stigler Diet
#15Bookmarking this for later use. I've always wanted to find a recipe somewhere between Soylent and Lembas Bread that can be used for long hiking or canoe trips. Unfortunately the beans and cabbage hardly sound appetizing for a bread. The obvious ideas are wheat, nuts, and dried fruits. Any good resources for this?
There's a difference between food good for survival and food that is good for you.
You can buy modern high calorie food bars that will last ten years and contain 3000 cals in a tiny package, but they're mostly carbs. Again, great for survival but not something to live off of while on a fun trip in the backcountry.
I usually pack precooked meats (frozen if needed), dried meats, firm biscuits or crackers, and some nuts and fruit. Granola and oats are good too of course.
If you have conveyance (a canoe or kayak, an atv, etc) then you can afford to bring much less dense (and usually better tasting) food.
Re: Stigler Diet
#16Bookmarking this for later use. I've always wanted to find a recipe somewhere between Soylent and Lembas Bread that can be used for long hiking or canoe trips. Unfortunately the beans and cabbage hardly sound appetizing for a bread. The obvious ideas are wheat, nuts, and dried fruits. Any good resources for this?
Logan Bread https://sectionhiker.com/logan-bread-recipe/ (various recipes out there, but I've tried this one)
or Mealsquares: https://www.mealsquares.com/
The Logan bread was tastier, though the Mealsquares are really pretty good just a bit dry.
Re: Stigler Diet
#17Here's a story of a guy who used the same method to come up with the optimal diet for himself: https://www.gwern.net/docs/statistics/decision/1990-dantzig....
The first try he ended up with a diet that required 500 gallons of vinegar a day. There was a mistake in the data that give vinegar 0 weight.
The second try ended up with 200 bouillon cubes per day. He didn't put a limit on salt content.
Then it gave him 2 pounds of bran per day. And when he put a limit on that, it changed to two pounds of black molasses. His wife put a stop to it after that.
Optimization is very dangerous when applied in large quantities. The vast majority of good solutions of any high dimensional problem will end up in weird edge cases.
Re: Stigler Diet
#18FWIW, when adjusted for inflation, $39.93 (the total annual cost of Stigler's 1939 diet) is approximately equivalent to $712 in 2018 US dollars(1). Still a paltry sum, though, for a year's worth of food for most people in the US, I think. 1. http://www.usinflationcalculator.com/
Or delivered on a pallet for about $1000/person-year: https://www.costco.com/THRIVE-1-Year-Food-Storage-31%2C500-S...
Note that that's $1000/person-year for 1300 calories per day, vs. 3000 calories on the Stigler Diet!
Re: Stigler Diet
#19> a moderately active man weighing 154 pounds
> 3,000 Calories
It's really striking how much heavier and how much less active Americans have become.
Re: Stigler Diet
#20it would be interesting to try to constrain / regularize this problem such that the solution is palatable. User could answer some questions about ingredient preferences to build approximate set of weights for the LP objective. Also easy to add some constraints that prevent huge amounts of one food. Tools to allow the user to "critique" the solution which generate new constraints or modify the objective.
Also would be interesting to run the same LP over historical ingredient price datasets and see how the optimal diet changes as ingredient prices fluctuate.