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Actually eat healthily for £1 per day

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Re: Actually eat healthily for £1 per day

#91

Post by nsxwolf »

CodeMage wrote: post #71
MarkMc wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

From a book called Rework [1]: "When you want something bad enough, you make the time - regardless of your other obligations. The truth is most people just don't want it bad enough. Then they protect their ego with the excuse of time." I think virtually everyone in the UK has the means to eat healthy if they really want to. [1] http://www.amazon.com/Rework-Jason-Fried/dp/0307463745

That kind of comment can only be excused by lack of experience. Try "making time" when, for example, you've got a job where you can't bring your food with you (and would have nowhere to heat it up even if you were permitted to bring it), a long commute and a family to spend time with. And I'm talking about a middle-class example. Now add being poor on top of that.

The eating at work part doesn't need to be a factor. Just eat dinner. You don't really need 3 meals a day.

Re: Actually eat healthily for £1 per day

#92

Post by adeaver »

ctdonath wrote: post #85
mtrimpe wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

king_jester was talking about the poor. I doubt telling poor people to want it more badly is going to have a huge positive effect.

Many poor are content with their condition, unwilling to take even basic steps to improve. Harsh as this sounds, and downvote-bait it seems, I've worked at helping the poor and found (to my dismay) most of them are in that condition because they refuse to choose to do better. Yes, they don't want it badly enough.

And there are many that aren't. Don't make the mistake of assuming that just because a few are content that everyone in that position is.

Re: Actually eat healthily for £1 per day

#93

Post by Shorel »

ska wrote: post #82
Shorel wrote: post #52

> Around 50% of food energy from carbohydrate That's NOT healthy at all.

> That's NOT healthy at all This statement assumes facts not in evidence. There is a lot of argument about what the best distributions are, without any real resolution at this point. The author reasonable chose to target a standard without claiming it was the only way to go.

No, the author simply repeated old stuff. If all those 'reasonable' diets worked, the current obesity epidemic would not be in its worst point, as it is.

Some evidence about sugar:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dBnniua6-oM http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PRAwgdvhWHw http://martin.ankerl.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/01/trouble_...

Re: Actually eat healthily for £1 per day

#94

Post by andyjohnson0 »

MarkMc wrote: post #56
king_jester wrote: post #29

Eating cheaply is really difficult to do for the folks with the least amount of money to spend on food, as working is counter to the things that make eating cheaper: cooking your own meals, shopping or growing cheaper foodstuffs, having appliances to store items for longer periods or cook dried items, being able to plan meals out in advance, etc. That is the reason why convenience foods are popular. A lot of advice s…

From a book called Rework [1]: "When you want something bad enough, you make the time - regardless of your other obligations. The truth is most people just don't want it bad enough. Then they protect their ego with the excuse of time." I think virtually everyone in the UK has the means to eat healthy if they really want to. [1] http://www.amazon.com/Rework-Jason-Fried/dp/0307463745

"I think virtually everyone in the UK has the means to eat healthy if they really want to."

For too many people this is simply not true.

People living in poverty face a number of challenges to eating healthily. For example:

- Cost. Fresh healthy food is becoming more costly due to exchange rate commodity price fluctuations. See [1][2].

- Access. If there are no shops nearby that sell fresh food (and this is becoming increasing common in some areas of the UK, see [3] or google "food desert") then time and/or transport need to be expended to get the food home. A person working 12+ hours a day on a couple of low paying jobs (say, factory work and then office cleaning)may not have the time to walk miles to a supermarket and do child care.

- Fuel. Gas and electricity are expensive in the UK. Cooking veg, pulses, grains, etc. requires fuel. Batch cooking to use-up cheap bulk-bought food also requires a freezer to store it, which in turn uses electricity that might not be affordable. Some people lack the resources to be able to afford a cooker and/or freezer.

A useful but rather depressing read on the situation in the UK is "Food Poverty and Health" from the Royal Colleges of Physicians Faculty of Public Health [4].

[1] http://www.guardian.co.uk/global-development/datablog/intera...

[2] http://www.which.co.uk/documents/pdf/the-impact-of-rising-fo...

[3] http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/home-news/food-deserts-...

[4] http://www.fph.org.uk/uploads/bs_food_poverty.pdf

Re: Actually eat healthily for £1 per day

#95

Post by mberning »

goldmab wrote: post #88
np422 wrote: post #77

Before we start talking about "eat healthily", please visit http://nusi.org/ , apply critical thinking - ask for references to published research papers. Be aware of the difference between observational and clinical studies and of course, always remember correlation does not imply causation. We, as in mankind, don't know very much about what really is healthy food.

It took me a little reading to figure out the agenda, but some key phrases like "obesity is a growth disorder" tipped me off. This is a Gary Taubes project. He is a writer of books in favor of low-carbohydrate diets, and he often badly misinterprets the scientific literature. He has a selection bias about which studies he thinks are worth talking about, so as to make it appear that low-carbohydrate diets are the answ…

If you think there are literally no legitimate nutritional scientists that agree with Taubes then you are woefully misinformed.

Re: Actually eat healthily for £1 per day

#96

Post by itsybitsycoder »

ctdonath wrote: post #76
king_jester wrote: post #29

Eating cheaply is really difficult to do for the folks with the least amount of money to spend on food, as working is counter to the things that make eating cheaper: cooking your own meals, shopping or growing cheaper foodstuffs, having appliances to store items for longer periods or cook dried items, being able to plan meals out in advance, etc. That is the reason why convenience foods are popular. A lot of advice s…

A lot of advice stories about eating cheaply often fail to achieve that goal because it is hard to do and requires a lot of effort. This is a recurring sentiment which speaks volumes about our culture. Complaints of "hard" and "a lot of effort" belies how incredibly rich this society is, that the notion of just making pasta or growing vegetables is somehow prohibitively difficult - not because it's inherently so hard…

I think as software developers, many of us are very disconnected with the lives of the very poor in our society. There are people out there working multiple full time jobs, or working full-time while raising young kids by themselves. It boggles my mind that you would consider these people lazy because they're dead on their feet when they arrive home... probably even software developers can think of days when they're too tired to cook, is it really so hard to imagine having to work so hard that those days are every day?

Re: Actually eat healthily for £1 per day

#97

Post by itsybitsycoder »

king_jester wrote: post #29

Eating cheaply is really difficult to do for the folks with the least amount of money to spend on food, as working is counter to the things that make eating cheaper: cooking your own meals, shopping or growing cheaper foodstuffs, having appliances to store items for longer periods or cook dried items, being able to plan meals out in advance, etc. That is the reason why convenience foods are popular. A lot of advice s…

Also, and this is true for many things, the poor are less capable of spending more money now to save money over the long term. E.g., if a pair of boots that will last 3 years is $150 and a pair of boots that will last 6 months is $30, the $150 pair of boots is a better deal because you'd have to buy $180 dollars worth of cheap boots to last 3 years. But if you only have $50 available to spend and you need new boots now, you have to choose the cheap boots.

So, forget buying everything in bulk, or buying a membership to a warehouse club.

Re: Actually eat healthily for £1 per day

#98

Post by ska »

Shorel wrote: post #93
ska wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> That's NOT healthy at all This statement assumes facts not in evidence. There is a lot of argument about what the best distributions are, without any real resolution at this point. The author reasonable chose to target a standard without claiming it was the only way to go.

No, the author simply repeated old stuff. If all those 'reasonable' diets worked, the current obesity epidemic would not be in its worst point, as it is. Some evidence about sugar: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dBnniua6-oM http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PRAwgdvhWHw http://martin.ankerl.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/01/trouble_...

This is what "no real resolution yet" means: every few years we get a pet theory or two.

The reason this so easily devolves into a `religious` argument scenario is because the basic science is still too weak.

The author did the right thing to stay well shut of all that in this article.

Re: Actually eat healthily for £1 per day

#99

Post by ryeguy »

DanBC wrote: post #34
venomsnake wrote: post #8

Now if only there was consensus what is healthy eating (it changes once a decade, cyclical fashion). Fat is currently returning with a vengeance, while sugar is the killer molecule. 10 years ago a spoonful of butter was considered slightly worse than cyanide. The amounts of protein per day is also debated as are total calories, and carb/fat ratios. And the number of meals per day and the optimal amounts of fasts.

You mention some things that are under debate. Those things are not part of "healthy" eating, they are important for "optimal" eating. Fat is not returning with a vengeance. Common sense advice has not changed particularly much over the past twenty years. There are some things - dietary cholesterol isn't seen as evil (but the foods it's in are). But other stuff - replacing fat for sugar (replacing a real salad dressi…

Fat is "coming back" in the sense that it is no longer mistakenly being viewed as evil. It seems carbs have taken that place, but at least that is kinda true: http://examine.com/faq/are-there-health-benefits-of-a-low-ca....

Granted, people overdo the 'carbs are evil' thing.

Re: Actually eat healthily for £1 per day

#100

Post by stonemetal »

frou_dh wrote: post #21

Am I the only one unduly annoyed by the ubiquitous slogan "fruits and vegetables"? Fruit is full of fructose AKA sugar. They are worth eating some of, but it's bizarre that they've come to occupy this front and centre position in diet advice.

Fruit also carry vitamins and such. One apple covers about 10% of your daily calcium, potassium, vitamin A needs.

Also Most fruit isn't all that high calorie. An apple is only between 55-110 calories depending on size.

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