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People Who Eat the Same Meal Every Day

theatlantic.com

321–330 of 350 posts

Re: People Who Eat the Same Meal Every Day

#321
post #179

Earlier quoted context omitted.

FWIW humans need more than potato & soy sauce in their diet to be healthy long term, so at least for that part wanting more doesn't seem like snobbery. (You can subsist on potatoes, and you can even do it for a while- but for example young children develop deformities if they lack certain vitamins, which potatoes do not have)

If you haven't ever lived at subsistence level you may not understand what you are facing in reality. Food is food, better to have a deformity than to be dead. There are tons of greens in everyone's backyard in America right now that you can eat. Half the weeds in your yard are editable and would fill in all the missing nutrients. Education is the problem here, maybe not so much resources. (unless famine?) But also,…

I think we are talking past each other. I was just trying to say that wanting a variety of food, is not a sign of a greedy opulent society.

I've not had to rummage food from dumpsters, but I've been broke & eaten a nutritionally inadequate diet as a result, and I saw what it did to me.

Re: People Who Eat the Same Meal Every Day

#322

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I believe the statisticians would call this heteroscedasticity. But meta-variety certainly easier to remember ;)

That's weird. Never heard the word heteroscedasticity before and now I see it in two different HN threads within the hour. (the other being https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19337466 ).

See further the Baader-Meinhof Effect. [1]

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baader%E2%80%93Meinhof_effec...

Re: People Who Eat the Same Meal Every Day

#323

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The term you’re looking for is ‘bred’. Genetic modification is a term of art, one which doesn’t apply (yet) to fruits on the market. This will not be true forever, papaya and banana are likely to be the first ones.

Ah, got it. What are the GMO versions designed to do then?

work on GMO papayas and bananas is to render them less susceptible to diseases.

Bananas in particular are a triploid, so any given strain is effectively one big clone propagated by vegetative cutting, hence the lack of seeds. This leaves them unusually susceptible to funguses, which can adapt to them, while they can't remix their genome to adapt back.

Re: People Who Eat the Same Meal Every Day

#324

When my daughter was born during the recession, my wife and I went through a stretch where money was pretty tight. One obvious expense to cut was eating out for lunch every weekday. So I switched to bringing in lunch. For several months, I brought the same thing: granola, yogurt, and chopped melon. I love food and love variety, so I was really surprised to discover that I simply didn't get tired of it or resentful. E…

"I found the peacefulness and simplicity of not having to stress out about where to go for lunch" very often in life, we mistaken boredom for peacefulness. a simple and stress-free life can be just as, if not more, rewarding then the hectic one we leave behind.

Mistaking boredom for peacefulness is like mistaking a placebo for a cure; if the net effect is what you’re going for, it doesn’t matter.

Re: People Who Eat the Same Meal Every Day

#325

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's weird. Never heard the word heteroscedasticity before and now I see it in two different HN threads within the hour. (the other being https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19337466 ).

See further the Baader-Meinhof Effect. [1] [1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baader%E2%80%93Meinhof_effec...

I thought that too, initially, but consider: https://hn.algolia.com/?query=heteroscedasticity&sort=byDate...

3 mentions in the same day out of a total of 8 mentions ever on HN (not including the 2 meta-comments). User dcomp noticed it also.

(oops, just bumped those numbers up one)

Re: People Who Eat the Same Meal Every Day

#326
post #321

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you haven't ever lived at subsistence level you may not understand what you are facing in reality. Food is food, better to have a deformity than to be dead. There are tons of greens in everyone's backyard in America right now that you can eat. Half the weeds in your yard are editable and would fill in all the missing nutrients. Education is the problem here, maybe not so much resources. (unless famine?) But also,…

I think we are talking past each other. I was just trying to say that wanting a variety of food, is not a sign of a greedy opulent society. I've not had to rummage food from dumpsters, but I've been broke & eaten a nutritionally inadequate diet as a result, and I saw what it did to me.

>I think we are talking past each other. I was just trying to say that wanting a variety of food, is not a sign of a greedy opulent society.

I don't disagree at all, I think everyone wants some variety, or at the very least the ability to choose.

It seemed your comment was worded unclearly, which may be why the down votes...

Re: People Who Eat the Same Meal Every Day

#327

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you haven't ever lived at subsistence level you may not understand what you are facing in reality. Food is food, better to have a deformity than to be dead. There are tons of greens in everyone's backyard in America right now that you can eat. Half the weeds in your yard are editable and would fill in all the missing nutrients. Education is the problem here, maybe not so much resources. (unless famine?) But also,…

You can't subsist on greens, they're 8 calories a cup (47 grams). You would need to eat thirty pounds a day of lettuce out of your back yard. That's polluted urban soil so it would probably poison you whilst you starved.

I was merely pointing out that probably a few bites of greens (not covered in chemicals, where do you live?) has enough vitamins to stave off scurvy and a host of other nutritional deficiencies... not feed you outright.

Re: People Who Eat the Same Meal Every Day

#328
post #248

Earlier quoted context omitted.

not OP but I've eaten two eggs on toast every morning for a lot of my life

For some time now I've been tempted to start eating eggs on a toast for breakfast daily so I'm curious: has this impacted your bad cholesterol?

I never had it measured and since I've been doing it since I was about 14 I'm not sure I could judge cause and effect.

Re: People Who Eat the Same Meal Every Day

#329
post #279

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Vitamin D deficiency has a lot to do with your climate. It's not realistic to get all of your vitamin D from food no matter what. I'm guessing you live in Seattle or some other place where you forget what the sun looks like sometimes?

Is there any easy way to know if you suffer vitamin D defeciency? I'm in Vancouver, and especially at this time of year you end up inside for pretty much all the daylight hours Monday-Friday.

It's diagnosed through a blood test. As far as I know, you can't really diagnose it accurately in any other way. But in developed countries the rule of thumb on that is:

Do you work outside in the sun? Do you eat a lot of fish? Do you take a vitamin D supplement? If you answered "no" to all of these questions then you probably have a vitamin D deficiency. Vitamin D deficiency is very common.

>The National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey 2005 to 2006 data were analyzed for vitamin D levels in adult participants (N = 4495). Vitamin D deficiency was defined as a serum 25-hydroxyvitamin D concentrations ≤20 ng/mL (50 nmol/L). The overall prevalence rate of vitamin D deficiency was 41.6%, with the highest rate seen in blacks (82.1%), followed by Hispanics (69.2%).

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/21310306

Re: People Who Eat the Same Meal Every Day

#330

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> your numbers are somewhat off I used the McDonald's calorie calculator on their website. I picked the hamburger 250 calories (it's their main item and I guess most people get it), medium fries 337 calories (so not even picking the smallest items), and Diet Coke 1 calorie (maybe that one is bending over backwards to be low calorie) = just 588 calories. A very light lunch!

As someone who spent literal years working at a McDonald's as a teenager, the basic hamburger is perhaps only eclipsed by the Filet of Fish sandwich as one of the least ordered regular lunch menu items. The Big Mac probably outsells all other regular lunch sandwiches 3:1, at least. Of course it's been almost 20 years since I worked there, but I don't imagine it has changed all that much.

In many locations, the basic hamburger isn’t even on the menu. When I keep to the published menu and order a cheeseburger with no cheese, it only shows up on the receipt as a hamburger about 25% of the time.
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