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Actually eat healthily for £1 per day

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Re: Actually eat healthily for £1 per day

#161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't agree it's unquantifiable in this instance -- the diet is intended to meet the standards outlined by the UK Food Standards organization [1]. Whether or not you agree with the standards is a valid point, but a separate issue. [1] http://www.food.gov.uk/multimedia/pdfs/nutguideuk.pdf

"Healthy" is a subjective descriptor, it cannot be quantified. There's a reason it differs from person to person, nation to nation, health organization to health organization.

It can be quantified, and it was. You are just arguing for the sake of arguing. You not liking the definition of healthy that she specified does not mean it can not be specified.

Re: Actually eat healthily for £1 per day

#162
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.

I've seen lots of people complaining about not having money to pay the rent (or mortgage)/food/textbooks for kids but going on holidays (or skiing, or binge drinking) every possible moment. It's not general, there are lots of people making as best as they can with the resources they have. But there are also a lot of people who don't even try and just say they can't.

Re: Actually eat healthily for £1 per day

#163

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Thanks. I think a lot of them agree that low-carb approaches work for weight loss and some other outcomes, since that's what the science shows. But his "insulin hypothesis" is pure pseudoscience and I'm not aware of any papers about it.

Unvalidated/untested hypothesis are not "pseudoscience".

Re: Actually eat healthily for £1 per day

#164

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…

[deleted]

Re: Actually eat healthily for £1 per day

#165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you know what happens when you break your leg but keep walking on it without going to a doctor? It keeps causing damage, until that damage is irreparable and there's a bone hanging out of your useless leg. That's pretty easy to visualize, yeah? It's harder to imagine the same thing going on but mentally. It's hard to see the true damage that repeated exposure to stressful situations causes to your mind and psyche.…

I just got here in passing, and I have to admit I'm kind on the side of ctdonath here. Currently, I'm working 3 jobs (one is 6 hours a day, the other two are two projects I'm working on that are 2-4 hours a day, total.) In addition to this, I'm finishing my PhD (or trying, time is scarce lately) but I still find the 10-15 minutes it takes to open the gas stove and prepare some sauteed vegetables, the 10 minutes it ta…

Well it's kind of a false equivalency to try to say that 30 minutes cooking dinner is the same as 30 minutes preparing convenience food. Cooking meat, cooking beans, cooking rice, sauteing veggies, preparing a salad, whatever, is not the same as putting a frozen lasagna in the oven for 30 minutes while you veg out on the couch and unwind.

Sure, it's 30 minutes, but what really counts is what you're doing in that 30 minutes. If you're watching your food, you're working. If you're watching TV while your food cooks to the tune of the prepared directions, that's completely different. That doesn't even take into account the time spent at the store picking out individual ingredients vs just grabbing a frozen meal and running out the door.

I'm not defending poor eating habits, at least I'm not trying to. The point of my post was to point out how self-righteous ctdonath is being in the majority of his posts in this topic. "You're not tired unless you're passing out standing up" is just bullshit. Mental stress is a real thing, and it cannot be discounted. I don't know you, but I can guess that if you're doing a PhD, you have what it takes to handle significant amounts of mental stress. You have to, or you wouldn't have even gotten through undergrad with the will to pursue two more difficult degrees. Your single parent dual factory worker who grew up in a blue collar family and sees no prospect for future success might not have that same level of motivation, which is why I called out ctdonath for being a motivational speaker.

What works for you will not work for everyone. It's difficult to see mental injury and duress. Stress is not as visible as a broken leg, nor as easy to treat. People should eat proper, yes, but telling them "it's not hard, you're just lazy" is by far not the proper way to get them motivated.

Re: Actually eat healthily for £1 per day

#166
post #154
post #132

Before even going into the side-effects of such a diet let's just have a look at the numbers used: Olive oil (extra virgin)(price per kg quoted) 3.30 (price per kg actual) 6.39 (weekly quoted) 1.96 (weekly actual) 3.80 Yellow split peas (dried)(price per kg quoted) 1.16 (price per kg actual) 0.98 (weekly quoted) 1.62 (weekly actual) 1.37 Bananas (price per kg quoted) 0.68 (price per kg actual) 0.68 (loose / leftover…

Did you read the full article or just the data? 1. The author assumed NO sales. 2. Aside from bananas everything else will easily last a full week. If you wanted to say you are only shopping once a week then that means you either are willing to eat very ripe bananas by the end of the week (some people do this), or if you are like me then you would have to just eat bananas the first part of the week and not eat them t…

I have neither included transport cost nor sales nor waste.

If you live in the UK you might immediately know what including these in that completely unrealistic article would mean.

(1) You have to go to one of the superstores to get these prices - Tesco Express, Sainsbury's Local e.a. almost never store the cheapest goods and normally mark up all other goods by a substantial amount (30%+). Next cheapest goods on the list are often 100%+ more than the prices used in the article (that's the superstore price of course) - most extreme (from my own experience) with rice - the cheapest rice you most likely find in a Tesco Express is £4+ vs. 40p quoted, that's 1000%.

(2) Getting to a superstore can be rather costly - assuming about £3.2 for bus tickets (that's £6.4 per week uups just doubled your weekly budget by only adding the transport cost) - you might alternatively walk about 10-16 miles each time (both ways, can be more if you live on the countryside) - guess that's the healthy part of that diet - walking 32 miles each week (you should than of course also adjust you calories / fat / vitamin intake which gets us to about e.g. £12 actual vs £7 and 12 hours spent walking).

(3) To use sales most effectively you have to have a budget to vary your diet, buy larger quantities when available etc - neither of this is possible in the constraints of this assumption - hence I also did not use sales prices.

Re: Actually eat healthily for £1 per day

#167
post #158
post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For most people, I imagine a decent-sized subset of appealing meals can be very satiating at the same time. p.s. wtvanhest: Not sure what you have against blue cheese. Hopefully not "dietary fat makes you fat because it's calorie dense" because that would again be anomalous 80s thinking that ignores satiety effects and runs with a 1-dimensional model for something as complex as nutrition and aggregate consumption beh…

Calorie dense food "hiding" in salad needs small amount of caution. So long as you're aware of what you're eating it's fine. If you can't understand why you're still 17 stone you might want to look at whether you're having a blue cheese dressing on a salad but counting that snack as 0 calories, which is something a surprising number of people do. They have their 3 meals, which come to something like 2,000 kCal per da…

Yeah, and that's exactly why "calorie excess" is nowhere near the conversation ender it's so often used as. At best it's a conversation starter to use on those dummies to which it is not self-evident. The thorny part of overconsumption is WHY one is compelled to do so, not simply that one does.

Re: Actually eat healthily for £1 per day

#168

If you want to save some money, save some time and eat healthy, try this: Go to the grocery store, buy these 3 items: 1 bag of frozen vegetables. 3 chicken breasts 1 bag of dried lentils. Sunday night: Cook lentils in water, don't add anything Slice chicken breasts down the side, add seasoning, no oil, just seasoning, don't bread it etc. Bake the chicken breasts Monday for lunch: Microwave a bunch of the vegetables,…

Go with chicken thighs instead. It's cheaper and better tasting. Just takes a tiny bit longer to cook.

Re: Actually eat healthily for £1 per day

#169

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

check your privilege

This is the most useless comment you can possibly post. If your only contribution is "check your privilege" then your contribution is worthless and you shouldn't even bother.

It's playground sarcasm and offers nothing.

Re: Actually eat healthily for £1 per day

#170
post #156
post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"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)." No, definitely false. Dietary cholesterol has definitely been considered a bad thing and for the last 30 years people were told to avoid it, by heart doctors, in the form of avoiding cholesterol in your diet, in that specific terminology. It…

Please read my comment again. You rant about cholesterol. Cholesterol is an example I give of advice that has changed. You appear to misunderstand that very simple point I made. > Low fat diets have been advocated for decades now without a word given to what the fat was replaced with, because the fat was considered So Obviously Bad it didn't matter, anything was better. No, this is wrong. Calm dieticians have been su…

Fair enough about your point about the cholesterol.

However, I'd challenge you with this. Go back and look at how the cholesterol error was made. It's a instructive microcosm of how we got to having such bad advice about health, where a tiny little sample of the vast multidimensional space of health was taken because we happened to develop a test that could see cholesterol, and we radically, radically over-interpreted the results. (Arguably without even doing the test we could have done right then, which is to directly ask the question of whether eating cholestThen ask if you're really, really sure that's the only time that happened, in our set of health advice that largely was created in the same era (if not a decade or two before) and hasn't changed since. Because I do agree that consensus hasn't changed much over the past 50 years; what I am saying is that change is inevitably coming, and if you know where to look you can already see its shape.

"Salt is still harmful, btw."

There are significant studies that suggest it's only harmful if you already have hypertension. There's also some serious question in my mind about how salt can be harming the population when studies can also show that people actually maintain a very constant level of salt intake and have historically maintained that same salt intake for as far back as we have records that can reasonably answer that question.

"Calm dieticians have been suggesting that people cut down fats, but not replace those with weird sugar-foods."

And I still think this is revisionism. I've been reading recommendations from the government and other sources for my entire lifetime and I've only recently seen anyone making the point that replacing fat with sugar is a bad thing, and it is usually still people not in the scientific mainstream until very recently. (Sure, Atkins said it in the 1970s, but I'm sure you wouldn't count that.) The government has been pushing low-fat everything for a long time. If perhaps the point was being made in some academic journal somewhere, I don't really care, I'm talking about what the general population was told. The idea that low-fat itself might be bad can probably be dated to when it finally broke through that transfats (margarine) was worse than what it was replacing (butter), which was a relatively recent development (~10 years ago), and that's when it finally became politically viable to even ask the question of whether low-fat foods were actually better for you.

And I could quibble further (the badness of red meat is highly dubious from what I can see, fruit's virtues seem oversold), but it doesn't matter. The change is coming, because the advice we've been given for decades is unbelievably awful, "our grandchildren will ask us how we could believe that" awful. It won't stand, and when the authorities try to rewrite history to claim nothing has changed I will not forget that it's not what they told us.

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