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How to eat healthily on £1 a day

bbc.co.uk

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Re: How to eat healthily on £1 a day

#121

Post by pbhjpbhj »

jiggy2011 wrote: post #78
yummyfajitas wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your claims are a little surprising, at least from an American perspective. Our various welfare programs are so generous that our poor can (and often do) eat like gluttons. I was under the impression that UK welfare benefits are far more generous than those in the US - is that incorrect? (Full disclosure - I've spent a grand total of 5 days of my life in the UK, most of it in zones 1-2 of London. I know virtually not…

That depends, for the most part being on welfare doesn't allow for an extravagant lifestyle at all. Especially if you are a single person living alone. Job seekers allowance (the standard benefit for the unemployed) will net you around £50 per week. Out of that has to come all of your expenses including energy , food , travel etc. You may be able to get rent covered by separate housing benefits. Of course the right w…

>Job seekers allowance (the standard benefit for the unemployed) will net you around £50 per week. //

Our family live on far less than that each per week after housing and we're working ... clearly we're not doing it right but it seems that is more than sufficient. Indeed my experience is that those I know on benefits can afford to live quite badly, wastefully.

Re: How to eat healthily on £1 a day

#122

Post by csense »

batemanesque wrote: post #100
yummyfajitas wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

At least among children (the only group for which I could find this data, see the citations I added to the post you responded to), this is not correct. The number of poor children who don't get enough to eat is virtually the same as the number of rich children who don't - about 5%. In the last few years, the number of people using foodbanks in the UK has increased dramatically, for instance. This does not mean people…

very much doubt that only 5% of poor children don't get enough to eat. citation?

Government definitions of "poor" don't necessarily equate to what you and I would call "poor," due to politics (basically, getting more people identified "poor" helps you get votes if you're the party perceived as better able to help the poor, and in the US one party has dominated the poverty issue and used this strategy for a number of decades).

For example, someone I knew in high school (a number of years ago now) qualified for the school lunch program, so nominally his family was poor. But they lived in a house, with a yard; had cable TV, computers, and Internet. I would say they're working-class, or maybe even lower middle-class.

If the lowest-income 20% of the population is labeled as poor for the purposes of this statistic ("nominal poor"), but the number of people who are so poor their children are starving in the streets ("desperately poor") is 0.20% of the population, then it's not so surprising that statistics over the nominal poor much more closely resemble the general population than the picture of the desperately poor.

Re: How to eat healthily on £1 a day

#123

Post by yummyfajitas »

thenomad wrote: post #115
yummyfajitas wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Obesity is a direct product of gluttony (i.e. eating more than you need). If the poor were really financially constrained, they would eat a smaller quantity of high caloric density foods. (There is one exception to this - tall muscular people. This is a known problem with BMI.)

Sorry, can I just get a clarification here? Are you saying that it's impossible to be malnourished and obese? If so, that's provably untrue.

I'm aware that one can be obese and have scurvy or something along those lines.

From what I've read, the primary diet-related medical problems that the poor suffer are diabetes, heart disease, and similar things. Scurvy and B12 deficiency are very far down on their list of problems.

Feel free to do a google search and prove me wrong.

Re: How to eat healthily on £1 a day

#124

Post by Samuel_Michon »

DasIch wrote: post #107
claudius wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

On one hand, I cannot recall a single village of more than, say, 1000 inhabitants (in Germany) which did not have a decent supermarket (Aldi, Lidl etc.) – at most, it might be at the other end of the village a few kilometers away, but, well. On the other hand, you ignore that bicycles are perfectly fit for use as transportation, especially in rural areas with little traffic, reducing the need for a car even further.…

Living in Germany I can assure you that there are towns and villages spread out so far that getting to the nearest supermarket takes hours by foot. Bicycles are not an option, if you know what Mittelgebirge[1] means in practice, you know why and if you use public transportation in rural areas, every trip to the supermarket turns into an event that needs to be scheduled.

I didn't know what a ‘Mittelgebirge’ was, so I looked it up. Translated, it means ‘mid range mountainous area’, and there are plenty of those in Germany. In those areas, you definitely need a car to get to the nearest supermarket.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mittelgebirge

Re: How to eat healthily on £1 a day

#125

Post by mpclark »

wklauss wrote: post #70

I see a lot of anger in the comments, some of them questioning the practicality of it or the actual approach you'd use if money was an issue in your household. The BBC didn't do this in order to educate people on how to eat cheap. This is just a flashy piece intended to provoke the "oh look how easy is to make something cheap look nice and healthy" reaction. In that sense its similar to the "deconstructed McDonalds m…

The problem is that it is now being retweeted by wingnuts as proof positive that the benefits system is too generous.

Re: How to eat healthily on £1 a day

#126

Post by RBerenguel »

Samuel_Michon wrote: post #74
RBerenguel wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Clearly the commenter means in cities or towns, or generally inside the public transportation system. I'm from Spain (and I have been to several other countries in Europe from the list you give.) I live in a small town (22000 inhabitants) and I don't have a car. Anything I need for day-to-day life I can find in town, for anything else I use public transport to get to Barcelona, which is just 30 minutes by train. In m…

“Clearly the commenter means in cities or towns, or generally inside the public transportation system.” I doubt that’s what he meant, because that wouldn’t be much of a statement to make. When you live in a town or city, of course you can walk to a grocery store – that’s not unique to Europe. I lived in rural northern New Mexico, the 6th least densely populated state of the 50 United States. Even there, I could walk…

There was a 3rd clause there: "or generally inside the public transportation system."

Re: How to eat healthily on £1 a day

#127

Post by pbhjpbhj »

rgbrenner wrote: post #36
GigabyteCoin wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In the bbc article the woman's diet for day one consisted of: Breakfast: - one piece of toast and margarine (6p - cost of tea) - one cup of tea (6p - cost of toast - cost of margarine) - one "unethical" egg (8.7p) Lunch: - one ham sandwhich, presumably just bread and ham (29p) Snack: - one "value" scone with jam (6p) - one apple (free?) Dinner: (37p combined, I imagine there are some more "free" ingredients in here)…

So I wasn't the only one that noticed the free apple... Around here a single apple is $0.50-$1 depending on the size. I too can eat for less than a dollar by simply not counting the expensive parts.

Perhaps she scrumped it?

Re: How to eat healthily on £1 a day

#128

Post by thenomad »

yummyfajitas wrote: post #98
thenomad wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Our various welfare programs are so generous that our poor can (and often do) eat like gluttons." This statement surprises me, as it contradicts a lot of what I've heard of poverty in the US. Do you have a citation or several I could look at?

I added a couple to the post above. The link with "women" in the title also includes data on men under the data tab. The gist - poor women are more likely to be gluttons than non-poor women, no big difference among men.

You've added a couple of links on obesity. Nothing on "gluttony" or the generosity or lack therof of the US welfare program.

Five minutes' Googling will make it abundantly clear that "they're fat because they have a moral failing" is a seriously unhelpful point of view.

(For anyone interested - the phrase "obesity-poverty paradox" is a good place to start.)

Re: How to eat healthily on £1 a day

#129

Post by pbhjpbhj »

wklauss wrote: post #70

I see a lot of anger in the comments, some of them questioning the practicality of it or the actual approach you'd use if money was an issue in your household. The BBC didn't do this in order to educate people on how to eat cheap. This is just a flashy piece intended to provoke the "oh look how easy is to make something cheap look nice and healthy" reaction. In that sense its similar to the "deconstructed McDonalds m…

>No one who has to l[i]ve on £1 a day will look here for practical advice and discussing the practicality of it is, therefore, pointless. //

If it was actual advice on that then yes I would have found that useful.

The BBC should be doing better than this sort of Broadsheet newspaper piece - they're probably employing poor people, perhaps they should have spoken to some of them about it.

Re: How to eat healthily on £1 a day

#130

Post by yummyfajitas »

takluyver wrote: post #108
yummyfajitas wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

At least among children (the only group for which I could find this data, see the citations I added to the post you responded to), this is not correct. The number of poor children who don't get enough to eat is virtually the same as the number of rich children who don't - about 5%. In the last few years, the number of people using foodbanks in the UK has increased dramatically, for instance. This does not mean people…

Most parents probably prioritise feeding their children above almost anything else. Then there are provisions like free school meals. So I wouldn't really expect the statistics to show many children not getting enough to eat. You seem to be focussing on the correlation between poverty and obesity. That's well known, but there are a couple of key differences from the discussion at hand: First, the poorest category is…

I'm looking at one of your citations now, and it lumps all households below about $20k into the 'poor' bracket.

That's actually very likely the right thing to do. Thanks to various wealth transfer programs, anyone with earned income consumption of approximately $20k.

ftp://ftp.bls.gov/pub/special.requests/ce/standard/2009/income.txt

We don't need to see people literally starving to death to accept that people have a problem getting enough food.

Are people even becoming slightly less fat? That will happen long before anyone starves.

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