I think 'ramen profitable' is a great pithy phrase, but to work long hours effectively (and stay healthy) it always struck me as a false economy to live on rice & beans. Good to see some data on the topic.
I can't figure out if you're saying your expectations were confirmed or undermined. I don't know much about nutrition, but I was under the impression that noodles, rice, and beans are all high in starch, which the body turns into significant amounts of glucose in a healthy way (sustained blood glucose over time, instead of short spikes like with simple sugars). I'm sure surviving on Ramen is bad for you, but as far a…
There is no way to turn any carbohydrate into "significant amounts of glucose in a healthy way" unless you are talking about digestion or metabolism of fat.
One slice of "whole wheat" bread is worse for you than a teaspoon of sugar (Glycemic load versus Glycemic index), not to mention the wheat germ agglutinin and other insulin/hormone mimetics that come with the bread, nor the gut-tearing action of insoluble fiber.
Glycogen is touted as being your energy source, but it is not. How long can your muscles function on stored glycogen? Do you think humans would have survived (on an evolutionary timescale) if they'd had to eat pasta every 6 hours?
In any case, any carbohydrate/starch is converted to a fatty substance, stored subcutaneously and used as fuel in lean times (even rabbits and cows do this via rumen fermentation). If you keep eating carbohydrates, you turn on the "storage-mode" and accumulate fat. Repeated turning on of storage mode robs your body of insulin-sensitivity. You become a non-symptomatic diabetic (if you're lucky you'll skip Type 2 diabetes and go straight to Type 3 -- a.k.a. Alzheimer's disease).
Lastly, your body can easily convert (with hardly any usage of vitamins and other trace elements) fat into glucose (this process is done by the liver and is called gluconeogenesis). In contrast, digesting/utilizing carbohydrate has a high requirement in terms of vitamins etc., and even if it didn't, eating wheat blocks the absorption of most of these elements (especially zinc, vitamin C and calcium).
Your liver does gluconeogenesis because a very few organs in your body (primarily some regions of the brain) need glucose to function. The rest work just fine on free fatty acids in your blood (aka lipids/cholesterol/ketones). In contrast, sugar causes a rise in triglycerides, which are the molecules used to transport sugar.
While I don't have references right now, most of this can be found substantiated on pubmed/medline. An easily digestible summary can be found at http://wholehealthsource.blogspot.com
And a disclaimer: a year ago I would have thought all this very kooky. It is not. I think the news.yc folk can "handle the truth", as it were, and so I've written this comment. I hope it helps someone. If you're of an experimentalist bent, you can try it for yourself, it takes less than 2 weeks to adapt.
Yesterday I was on a 24-hour intermittent fast (I didn't expect it to get so long, I just wasn't hungry) and I was programming no worse at the end of it ;-) in fact, I'd say that free of sugar-highs I now program much better and can concentrate more consistently. That implies more self-control, does it not? YMMV.