Honest question: Although food choices are affecting health & lifespan of the average American, is it affecting the HIG as well?. Is the health & longevity impacted by generally available food options (not weighing in the effects of better health insurance & lifestyle comforts)?
It would be extremely valuable to understand if there is still reasonable impact from the quality of food produce (as a byproduct of intensive cultivation & other agriculture practices in N America). Health issues and obesity issues are significantly worse in US as compared to other developed countries - and how much food is responsible in middle- and high-income group is worthwhile to understand
I try to just keep up with the latest science without any regard for what's natural.
I don't eat meat, I minimize non whole grains, I take Centrum, choline, and DHA+EPA Algae oil(Roughly equivalent to vegan fish oil as far as I can tell), and generally try to not eat a lot of food overall.
I don't make any effort to avoid additives aside from a few like titanium dioxide.
Unfortunately, I also have had a rather bad sugar and non excercise problem, and didn't start taking choline till recently.
A choline supplement is certainly necessary for someone who does not eat any kind of meat.
However, I strongly suspect that the official recommended daily intake of choline is wrong, because it is practically impossible for someone eating a healthy diet to reach that level of choline intake.
Except for eggs, liver is the food with the highest content of choline, much higher than almost everything else. Nevertheless, it is impossible to eat enough liver daily to get enough choline, because that would require to eat an excessive amount of vitamin A. With eggs it would possible to get enough choline, but that would require eating 4 eggs every day, which is considered too much by many studies.
I believe that the study that established the recommended daily intake of choline based on the appearance of fatty liver was flawed, because there must have been some other factor, in the diet or in the diseases of the monitored patients, which diminished their internal capacity of choline synthesis, so they required supplementation with a higher quantity of choline than most people.
Among the extra minerals that vegans need, is also calcium. Some types of Centrum contain calcium, but not all of them. Most types of Centrum should include the other supplements needed by vegans and not explicitly mentioned by you, e.g. iodine, vitamin B12, vitamin D.
Many micronutrient USRDA recommendations are mere guesses. Evidence is mounting that consuming the recommended 1g of calcium daily may actually be harmful for your health. Saturated fat - once painted as the enemy by doctors and nutritionists - has since been found to be negatively correlated with heart disease. I think before we get anywhere near trying to regulate or even recommend what people eat we first need to do a lot more study.
Re school lunch: that one doesn't fit. Eating at school is of course better than starving at school, but US school food is terrible and part of the "deadly" diet.
Re czar: Come on. Hoping some rando in Washington fixes diet (and doesn't get regulatory captured like... school lunch did) won't help.
Probably the very last thing you would want is for anything to become entangled in the US pharma owned 'health'-care system.
2. Focus on quality of calories, not just quantity
If one thing was taboe in dietary advice past the 1980's, it was suggesting comsuming less. No, every fad diet and health plan had you eat 'different', but certainly not less. Think of the GDP and the markets you selfish health freak!
3. Expand access to dietary and lifestyle counseling
Sure, because those armies of. 'Dietitians" and 'lifestyle coaches' have been so successfull in curbing obesity thus far. At least they slimmwd your wallet queen.
4. Support food entrepreneurs
Them new patentable lab foods sure sound like a good plan ... for those 'entrepreneurs'. Best ged rid of them stinkin non=patentable seed crops as fast as we can. They are distorting the free market of proper IP attrbuation.
5 Increase the number of new farmers growing healthy foods using regenerative farming techniques
Sure. Sounds good. Let them eat cake!
6 Make school meals free for all students
Does a burger with fries and ketchup still count as a healty 2 vegs school lunch? Sure way to reduce them waistlines.
7. Establish a federal 'food czar'
Seriously, it would make ut so much easier for us to co-opt a 'czar' than this mess with all them different entities. There's always some rogue advocating real heath over a decent profit margin. Who cares abiut the czar's polutical affiliatiation. Just maje sure she has enoug 'industry experience' to tackle all the 'complexities and nuances' of this subject matter. We'll even make sure the 'czar' can come advice us after her 'tour of duty'. I'll book a few very nice speaking engagements already in advance.
Nothing will change until the culture itself changes. In my American city, there are plenty of healthy eating options, both at the grocer (a bundle of bananas for $1.50) and dining out (lots of salad places, meatless places, etc).
Fact is, Americans want giant portions, a dessert, endless refills of Cola, and so on. You can get apple slices at some places instead of fries -- I've never seen anyone other than myself get them.
I believe that the most important means of eating healthier is to cook at home the food from raw ingredients, instead of buying industrially-produced food.
Only this gives complete control over the content of the food. Whenever food is made to be sold for profit instead of being made for personal consumption, there are too strong incentives for continuously searching for ways of replacing more expensive components with cheaper but unhealthier components, while adding scents, colorants and other supposedly inert additives, to mask the true composition of the food.
Many people have become reluctant to cook at home like their parents or grandparents because they believe that cooking requires too much time.
Nevertheless, the cooking techniques can be modernized to take less time without significantly altering the traditional recipes. For example many traditional methods for boiling or steaming vegetables, for cooking meat and even for baking bread can be replaced with doing them in a microwave oven in a much shorter time.
> The U.S. food supply is awash in cheap calories. And when you're on a tight budget or relying on benefits like SNAP (food stamps), processed foods like chips and soda can set you back less than fresh produce.
How is this even remotely true? Fresh produce is cheap. A 13oz bag of potato chips at Wal-Mart costs more than a 5lb bag of potatoes. An eggplant is $2.50. Dried beans are 8c an ounce. It's hard to take stuff like this seriously when the writer themselves doesn't know what it's like being poor (or even seem to do any grocery shopping)!
These ideas seem pretty lame because because they all assume the only solutions are moralist ones - people are making bad choices and we need them to make better ones.
Please don't let facts get in the way. Of course the raw materials are cheaper, especially if purchased with some care and not at some fancy, organic market.
My feeling, though, is that the people making these arguments want to hide their moralism. So they talk about things like "cheap calories" and "food deserts" even those these ideas don't stand up to scrutiny. They don't want to blame the people making decisions they don't like so they want to imagine that it's because of external forces.
But the fact remains that if you're smart about it, you can live well on very little. This article from 2010 describes how a hipster foodie was shocked how well he could live on food stamps, all by being a bit careful and cooking for himself.
While the author very clearly is at least a bit out of touch (no one's living off chips and soda), the fact is that cheap calories do tend to come from unhealthy sources, particularly if they make up the bulk of your diet. For example peanut butter on white bread - super cheap and quick to make, but living off of it is going to ruin your body.
The biggest issues are the hidden costs of healthy foods. When people complain about processed foods, they often forget what the point of processing the food is: making it last longer. You can buy lots of it and store it for long periods of time without much difficulty. For fresh produce you're buying smaller amounts (less discounted) and you need to buy it more frequently (more time wasted shopping, higher commuting costs). Then of course there is cooking - when you've been slaving away at a low paying job all day, the prospect of spending an hour and a half preparing something nice is extremely unappealing compared to something you can just stick in the microwave for 2 minutes. The mass produced and highly processed foods are optimized for convenience - they cook quickly and consistently with minimal effort. Honestly this more than price alone is likely the reason the nominally wealthiest nation in the world has such poor nutrition. Even at minimum wage, a half hour difference in cooking time probably dwarfs the price of the actual difference in price between two food brands for all but the most expensive options.
The claim people just need to make better choices is a non-starter. Essentially no one wants to be fat and unhealthy, and all else being equal would not choose to be. But all else is not equal. Other factors are influencing the decision making process such that eating unhealthily is the lesser of two evils. If you want people to make different choices, you need to address why they are making their current choices, regardless of what those factors may be.
Your example of what will ruin your body is interesting. Peanut butter and white bread.
But why is that going to ruin your body? Pure peanut butter is actually quite healthy. It's got lots of good fats and other nutrients. Just don't buy it salted or sugary and leave out the white bread. Put it on vegetables, made into a sauce. The vegetables can be frozen and the sauce is made in the time it takes to microwave unfreeze and 'cook' the frozen veggies. Just to counter your "microwave for 2 minutes" example.
Another great, filling and healthy choice: frozen peas, microwaved, put Mayo on top, stir.
And those are just to replace the quick "white bread w/ peanut butter" choice.
Want something nicer, e.g. an equivalent of an unhealthy Kraft Dinner? Make Baked Beans. These are great because you can make them from healthy dried beans (cheap) and any meat you can find. If you want (can afford) bacon, that's great but any cheap meat you find works. The beans go in the oven for 8 hours at low temp w/ the meat, water, salt, pepper, some sugar to taste - as in, less than bought baked beans! - and mustard. You can leave this in the oven over night if you don't have an 8 hour stretch where you're at home otherwise but put more water. You do want to have a large bean pot for doing that ideally but it's a lifetime purchase.
These baked beans you can eat all by themselves. Keep in fridge, i.e. microwave portions when needed. Add cheese on top if you like or use as a side or as filling for a burrito/quesadilla. Those 'dishes' take less than 5 minutes to make. E.g. Quesadilla you just heat up a pan while doing something else (like turning on the TV and finding a series to watch or whatever) and slapping the ingredients down in the pan. Cook for a minute or so on each side. Burrito on the other hand is microwaveable.
That wasn't the example I gave. The issue is living exclusively off peanut butter and white bread. Specifically it is the lack of dietary variety to get a proper mix of various nutrients which is the issue. There are lots of things out there that will give you about 80% of what you need, the issue is that all the cheap options are giving you roughly the same 80%, consistently and completely filling in that gap is hard.
For example iodine is critical for regulating metabolism, but most foods which contain significant amounts (like seafood) are expensive, and cheaper sources (like eggs) need to be consumed in large amounts, offsetting their low expense, and causing other issues balancing diet. If you have an iodine deficiency you don't die, but with your metabolism out of whack it is again harder to maintain your health. Now if you go to your doctor they might be able to identify an iodine deficiency and get you supplements or have you buy specialty products like iodized salt, but this reduces to the more general problem that healthcare in the US is incredibly messed up and disproportionately difficult for those in poverty to access reliably. 92% of the US population has some vitamin or nutrient deficiency.
Basically, mistaking the malnutrition issue as just people not having access to a good cookbook is exactly the problem.
I just think it's a mistake to instinctively associate wealth to diet quality. When I was poor I had time and incentive to do a lot more home cooking. Now that I'm doing okay, I eat out much more and eat more convenience items. Trader Joe's has a fairly well-to-do clientele, but the store is little but packaged and frozen processed foods.
In my mind, it's a much stronger connection to point out that wealth and delayed gratification are very, very highly correlated. So I think the relationship is backwards.
First, hope the below doesn't sound mean, I'm just being direct. Direct without being a jerk, I hope. :P
In my super strong opinion, everything, everything that you write is incorrect, except for maybe very few exceptions.
I'm going to use a metaphor here. What you say is incorrect in the sense that if you are in Seattle Washington, and decide to drive to Portland, Oregon, but don't because you say that you have to drive From Seattle to Maine, then down to Florida, over to San Diego, then up to Portland. And it takes 30 days and $5,000 to do that loop. So you say it is too difficult and expensive and time-consuming to travel from Seattle to Portland, Oregon.
I mean, if someone doesn't know how to drive directly south from Seattle to Portland for 3 hours because they don't bother looking at a map, and insists that it takes 30 days and $5,000 in travel costs to go from Seattle to Portland, what do you want me to do about it? I can't help everyone that doesn't know how to figure shit out.
The reality is that one can buy fresh food and make it last, buy in larger quatities, spend less time cooking than shopping. I know this because I actually do this. This is not "theory."
I see people write what you just wrote all the time and I'm convinced that people like you are just repeating what you read other people wrote, and don't think it through or read on how to actually solve those non-existent issues that you just raised incorrectly. You and so many others are taking the long way from Seattle to Portland and think that is the way to do it, and you don't get how you can drive south for 3 hours instead of 30 days.
>The claim people just need to make better choices is a non-starter.
It is a total starter. I guess one has to have knowledge before one can make the correct choices, though. But if one knows, it is the simplist and easiest thing in the world, but it takes that dreaded action: learning something new and throwing away the old worldview, which is SUPER difficult, I admit.
>all else being equal would not choose to be.
Not true, completely not true.
>But all else is not equal.
Yes it is. In first world countries, we have everything. Everything.
>If you want people to make different choices, you need to address why they are making their current choices, regardless of what those factors may be.
I agree with this, but this is really a situation for psychiatrists and therapists. I have the time or therapy background or ability to talk to people 3 times a week for months at a time to change their behavior and thought patterns.. It takes a long time and a lot of effort for someone to change their own minds, and most will flat out refuse.
I'm 100% positive that if I create a house attached to a grocery store that only stocked healthy vegetables and healthy fruits and healthy dairy, and no unhealthy foods, and the nearest place that people could buy junk food is 5 miles away, I'm totally convinced that people would make the long trek to get their Doritos and Twinkies and donuts. 100% convinced.
I spend about $25 per month on produce and fruit per month. I must at huge platefuls of veggies every night, otherwise, all the produce will rot if I don't. Huge heaping plates. Every night. Twenty five bucks. Per month.
I hear this all the time, how fast food and potato chips are inexpensive. Are people out of their pea-pickin' minds?
I mean, SURE, if you are a marketing brainwashed nonthinking zombie that is convinced that you have to shop at Whole Foods where one stalk of celery costs $4,284.28. Then yeah.
I shop prices HARD, and can buy a ton of food for so cheap. Inflation hurts, but not me very much. I hardly notice it. Spend 10% more, so $27.50 per month? $32/month? $35 per month? Who cares?
But, no, I'm not buying a t-bone steach that was $7 a year ago and now is $22 or whatever, nope. But then again, I don't eat beef as it is super crappy thing to eat on so many fronts, including climate change. But if I DID eat beef, I still wouldn't buy it at that price, so the price increase wouldn't affect me at all, and I don't sit around crying about how unfair the price of meat is, first world problem crybabies. Waaa, waaaa.
This issue sets me off, man. I get irrationally angry when people write this lie.
Don't even get me started on the "food desert" lie.
I’m biased towards European cuisine as an ethnic European (English+Polish) but I think every cuisine has their healthy and unhealthy parts. The US, for whatever reason, allows people too easily to avoid the healthy parts.
You shouldn’t eat pie and chips for every meal in the UK. You can also scoff pease pudding, kippers, porridge or mashed turnip to be healthy. Asian food is super popular and available too.
Similarly in Poland you aren’t scarfing down kotlet and szarlotka every day. You have salads, pickles, cabbage rolls and soup to round it all out.
In the US I think it’s considered somewhat normal to live off fried foods, hungry man and hamburgers at least among certain groups. You have interesting healthy cuisine of your own like succotash, collard greens and various squash yet I’m not sure if these are all too popular across the shared US culture.
Also, I think a Pole who didn’t like bigos, or a French person who didn’t like pot au feu would be slightly ashamed to admit it, but in the UK some people seem almost proud that they won’t eat something. Maybe the US is similar there too.
It's funny, as an American I had this high impression of European cuisine... until I spent time in Europe (lots more fried food than I was expecting!).
I know a lot of people who had this stereotype that all Americans were fat and overweight, and then they get here and say "oh, it's really just the same as back home".
I think the only difference in America is that there is this long tail at the end of the distribution. 95% of us look and eat roughly as healthy as any other population, and then there is this 5% of extremely obese people that they show facelessly on the news.
Haha! Fair enough. My takeaway is that there was nothing magically different about the average diet in both places. Maybe slightly more sugar in one and more cheese in the other.
Even Harvard health articles say saturated fatty is correlated with diseases but it's all wrong. Processed foods are bad, they happen to have fat, not causation.
There are lot of studies and documented cases, there is no evidence saturated fat is bad.
Substitute carbs with fat.
Your food pyramid should look like this
Fat } fiber } protein } carbs
I've lost 40 lb and high BP + cholesterol all fixed in 3 months
Never eat processed food primarily because preservatives kill good bacteria
Eat during only 6 hour window as that keeps insulin level low which allows fat to energy conversion. Eventually this becomes better and you start feeling less hungry. Your eating fewer calories but metabolism doesn't slow down as much since stored fat can be used for energy.
If you're not sodium sensitive have more salt, potassium and water
If you're stressed forget about it. Stress increases insulin as it cause glucose to rise even if you haven't eaten any carbs.
Omega-6 is pure evil. Inflammation= insulin resistance = fat = more insulin resistance = the end
Walk 2 miles daily and don't stay sitting for 30+ min
Do HITT even for just 10 minutes
If you can do long water fast 2-3 days once a month
Your taste changes, first you will miss carbs then in few weeks everything even remotely sweet will feel like artificial medicine
37 comments
[ 3.2 ms ] story [ 89.2 ms ] threadIt would be extremely valuable to understand if there is still reasonable impact from the quality of food produce (as a byproduct of intensive cultivation & other agriculture practices in N America). Health issues and obesity issues are significantly worse in US as compared to other developed countries - and how much food is responsible in middle- and high-income group is worthwhile to understand
I love seafood.
but i doubt their food is as processed as most of the food in the US is.
I don't eat meat, I minimize non whole grains, I take Centrum, choline, and DHA+EPA Algae oil(Roughly equivalent to vegan fish oil as far as I can tell), and generally try to not eat a lot of food overall.
I don't make any effort to avoid additives aside from a few like titanium dioxide.
Unfortunately, I also have had a rather bad sugar and non excercise problem, and didn't start taking choline till recently.
However, I strongly suspect that the official recommended daily intake of choline is wrong, because it is practically impossible for someone eating a healthy diet to reach that level of choline intake.
Except for eggs, liver is the food with the highest content of choline, much higher than almost everything else. Nevertheless, it is impossible to eat enough liver daily to get enough choline, because that would require to eat an excessive amount of vitamin A. With eggs it would possible to get enough choline, but that would require eating 4 eggs every day, which is considered too much by many studies.
I believe that the study that established the recommended daily intake of choline based on the appearance of fatty liver was flawed, because there must have been some other factor, in the diet or in the diseases of the monitored patients, which diminished their internal capacity of choline synthesis, so they required supplementation with a higher quantity of choline than most people.
Among the extra minerals that vegans need, is also calcium. Some types of Centrum contain calcium, but not all of them. Most types of Centrum should include the other supplements needed by vegans and not explicitly mentioned by you, e.g. iodine, vitamin B12, vitamin D.
Re czar: Come on. Hoping some rando in Washington fixes diet (and doesn't get regulatory captured like... school lunch did) won't help.
Quote from MIB 3: Agent K: Do you know the most destructive force in the universe? Agent J: Sugar?
https://www.regulations.gov/document/HHS-OASH-2022-0005-0001...
Probably the very last thing you would want is for anything to become entangled in the US pharma owned 'health'-care system.
2. Focus on quality of calories, not just quantity
If one thing was taboe in dietary advice past the 1980's, it was suggesting comsuming less. No, every fad diet and health plan had you eat 'different', but certainly not less. Think of the GDP and the markets you selfish health freak!
3. Expand access to dietary and lifestyle counseling
Sure, because those armies of. 'Dietitians" and 'lifestyle coaches' have been so successfull in curbing obesity thus far. At least they slimmwd your wallet queen.
4. Support food entrepreneurs
Them new patentable lab foods sure sound like a good plan ... for those 'entrepreneurs'. Best ged rid of them stinkin non=patentable seed crops as fast as we can. They are distorting the free market of proper IP attrbuation.
5 Increase the number of new farmers growing healthy foods using regenerative farming techniques
Sure. Sounds good. Let them eat cake!
6 Make school meals free for all students
Does a burger with fries and ketchup still count as a healty 2 vegs school lunch? Sure way to reduce them waistlines.
7. Establish a federal 'food czar'
Seriously, it would make ut so much easier for us to co-opt a 'czar' than this mess with all them different entities. There's always some rogue advocating real heath over a decent profit margin. Who cares abiut the czar's polutical affiliatiation. Just maje sure she has enoug 'industry experience' to tackle all the 'complexities and nuances' of this subject matter. We'll even make sure the 'czar' can come advice us after her 'tour of duty'. I'll book a few very nice speaking engagements already in advance.
Fact is, Americans want giant portions, a dessert, endless refills of Cola, and so on. You can get apple slices at some places instead of fries -- I've never seen anyone other than myself get them.
Only this gives complete control over the content of the food. Whenever food is made to be sold for profit instead of being made for personal consumption, there are too strong incentives for continuously searching for ways of replacing more expensive components with cheaper but unhealthier components, while adding scents, colorants and other supposedly inert additives, to mask the true composition of the food.
Many people have become reluctant to cook at home like their parents or grandparents because they believe that cooking requires too much time.
Nevertheless, the cooking techniques can be modernized to take less time without significantly altering the traditional recipes. For example many traditional methods for boiling or steaming vegetables, for cooking meat and even for baking bread can be replaced with doing them in a microwave oven in a much shorter time.
How is this even remotely true? Fresh produce is cheap. A 13oz bag of potato chips at Wal-Mart costs more than a 5lb bag of potatoes. An eggplant is $2.50. Dried beans are 8c an ounce. It's hard to take stuff like this seriously when the writer themselves doesn't know what it's like being poor (or even seem to do any grocery shopping)!
These ideas seem pretty lame because because they all assume the only solutions are moralist ones - people are making bad choices and we need them to make better ones.
My feeling, though, is that the people making these arguments want to hide their moralism. So they talk about things like "cheap calories" and "food deserts" even those these ideas don't stand up to scrutiny. They don't want to blame the people making decisions they don't like so they want to imagine that it's because of external forces.
But the fact remains that if you're smart about it, you can live well on very little. This article from 2010 describes how a hipster foodie was shocked how well he could live on food stamps, all by being a bit careful and cooking for himself.
https://www.salon.com/2010/03/16/hipsters_food_stamps_pinche...
The biggest issues are the hidden costs of healthy foods. When people complain about processed foods, they often forget what the point of processing the food is: making it last longer. You can buy lots of it and store it for long periods of time without much difficulty. For fresh produce you're buying smaller amounts (less discounted) and you need to buy it more frequently (more time wasted shopping, higher commuting costs). Then of course there is cooking - when you've been slaving away at a low paying job all day, the prospect of spending an hour and a half preparing something nice is extremely unappealing compared to something you can just stick in the microwave for 2 minutes. The mass produced and highly processed foods are optimized for convenience - they cook quickly and consistently with minimal effort. Honestly this more than price alone is likely the reason the nominally wealthiest nation in the world has such poor nutrition. Even at minimum wage, a half hour difference in cooking time probably dwarfs the price of the actual difference in price between two food brands for all but the most expensive options.
The claim people just need to make better choices is a non-starter. Essentially no one wants to be fat and unhealthy, and all else being equal would not choose to be. But all else is not equal. Other factors are influencing the decision making process such that eating unhealthily is the lesser of two evils. If you want people to make different choices, you need to address why they are making their current choices, regardless of what those factors may be.
But why is that going to ruin your body? Pure peanut butter is actually quite healthy. It's got lots of good fats and other nutrients. Just don't buy it salted or sugary and leave out the white bread. Put it on vegetables, made into a sauce. The vegetables can be frozen and the sauce is made in the time it takes to microwave unfreeze and 'cook' the frozen veggies. Just to counter your "microwave for 2 minutes" example.
Another great, filling and healthy choice: frozen peas, microwaved, put Mayo on top, stir.
And those are just to replace the quick "white bread w/ peanut butter" choice.
Want something nicer, e.g. an equivalent of an unhealthy Kraft Dinner? Make Baked Beans. These are great because you can make them from healthy dried beans (cheap) and any meat you can find. If you want (can afford) bacon, that's great but any cheap meat you find works. The beans go in the oven for 8 hours at low temp w/ the meat, water, salt, pepper, some sugar to taste - as in, less than bought baked beans! - and mustard. You can leave this in the oven over night if you don't have an 8 hour stretch where you're at home otherwise but put more water. You do want to have a large bean pot for doing that ideally but it's a lifetime purchase.
These baked beans you can eat all by themselves. Keep in fridge, i.e. microwave portions when needed. Add cheese on top if you like or use as a side or as filling for a burrito/quesadilla. Those 'dishes' take less than 5 minutes to make. E.g. Quesadilla you just heat up a pan while doing something else (like turning on the TV and finding a series to watch or whatever) and slapping the ingredients down in the pan. Cook for a minute or so on each side. Burrito on the other hand is microwaveable.
For example iodine is critical for regulating metabolism, but most foods which contain significant amounts (like seafood) are expensive, and cheaper sources (like eggs) need to be consumed in large amounts, offsetting their low expense, and causing other issues balancing diet. If you have an iodine deficiency you don't die, but with your metabolism out of whack it is again harder to maintain your health. Now if you go to your doctor they might be able to identify an iodine deficiency and get you supplements or have you buy specialty products like iodized salt, but this reduces to the more general problem that healthcare in the US is incredibly messed up and disproportionately difficult for those in poverty to access reliably. 92% of the US population has some vitamin or nutrient deficiency.
Basically, mistaking the malnutrition issue as just people not having access to a good cookbook is exactly the problem.
In my mind, it's a much stronger connection to point out that wealth and delayed gratification are very, very highly correlated. So I think the relationship is backwards.
Compared to places where people walk, its easy to just pick up what you need almost every day.
In my super strong opinion, everything, everything that you write is incorrect, except for maybe very few exceptions.
I'm going to use a metaphor here. What you say is incorrect in the sense that if you are in Seattle Washington, and decide to drive to Portland, Oregon, but don't because you say that you have to drive From Seattle to Maine, then down to Florida, over to San Diego, then up to Portland. And it takes 30 days and $5,000 to do that loop. So you say it is too difficult and expensive and time-consuming to travel from Seattle to Portland, Oregon.
I mean, if someone doesn't know how to drive directly south from Seattle to Portland for 3 hours because they don't bother looking at a map, and insists that it takes 30 days and $5,000 in travel costs to go from Seattle to Portland, what do you want me to do about it? I can't help everyone that doesn't know how to figure shit out.
The reality is that one can buy fresh food and make it last, buy in larger quatities, spend less time cooking than shopping. I know this because I actually do this. This is not "theory."
I see people write what you just wrote all the time and I'm convinced that people like you are just repeating what you read other people wrote, and don't think it through or read on how to actually solve those non-existent issues that you just raised incorrectly. You and so many others are taking the long way from Seattle to Portland and think that is the way to do it, and you don't get how you can drive south for 3 hours instead of 30 days.
>The claim people just need to make better choices is a non-starter.
It is a total starter. I guess one has to have knowledge before one can make the correct choices, though. But if one knows, it is the simplist and easiest thing in the world, but it takes that dreaded action: learning something new and throwing away the old worldview, which is SUPER difficult, I admit.
>all else being equal would not choose to be.
Not true, completely not true.
>But all else is not equal.
Yes it is. In first world countries, we have everything. Everything.
>If you want people to make different choices, you need to address why they are making their current choices, regardless of what those factors may be.
I agree with this, but this is really a situation for psychiatrists and therapists. I have the time or therapy background or ability to talk to people 3 times a week for months at a time to change their behavior and thought patterns.. It takes a long time and a lot of effort for someone to change their own minds, and most will flat out refuse.
I'm 100% positive that if I create a house attached to a grocery store that only stocked healthy vegetables and healthy fruits and healthy dairy, and no unhealthy foods, and the nearest place that people could buy junk food is 5 miles away, I'm totally convinced that people would make the long trek to get their Doritos and Twinkies and donuts. 100% convinced.
It's so dumb that people keep saying this.
I spend about $25 per month on produce and fruit per month. I must at huge platefuls of veggies every night, otherwise, all the produce will rot if I don't. Huge heaping plates. Every night. Twenty five bucks. Per month.
I hear this all the time, how fast food and potato chips are inexpensive. Are people out of their pea-pickin' minds?
I mean, SURE, if you are a marketing brainwashed nonthinking zombie that is convinced that you have to shop at Whole Foods where one stalk of celery costs $4,284.28. Then yeah.
I shop prices HARD, and can buy a ton of food for so cheap. Inflation hurts, but not me very much. I hardly notice it. Spend 10% more, so $27.50 per month? $32/month? $35 per month? Who cares?
But, no, I'm not buying a t-bone steach that was $7 a year ago and now is $22 or whatever, nope. But then again, I don't eat beef as it is super crappy thing to eat on so many fronts, including climate change. But if I DID eat beef, I still wouldn't buy it at that price, so the price increase wouldn't affect me at all, and I don't sit around crying about how unfair the price of meat is, first world problem crybabies. Waaa, waaaa.
This issue sets me off, man. I get irrationally angry when people write this lie.
Don't even get me started on the "food desert" lie.
You shouldn’t eat pie and chips for every meal in the UK. You can also scoff pease pudding, kippers, porridge or mashed turnip to be healthy. Asian food is super popular and available too.
Similarly in Poland you aren’t scarfing down kotlet and szarlotka every day. You have salads, pickles, cabbage rolls and soup to round it all out.
In the US I think it’s considered somewhat normal to live off fried foods, hungry man and hamburgers at least among certain groups. You have interesting healthy cuisine of your own like succotash, collard greens and various squash yet I’m not sure if these are all too popular across the shared US culture.
Also, I think a Pole who didn’t like bigos, or a French person who didn’t like pot au feu would be slightly ashamed to admit it, but in the UK some people seem almost proud that they won’t eat something. Maybe the US is similar there too.
I know a lot of people who had this stereotype that all Americans were fat and overweight, and then they get here and say "oh, it's really just the same as back home".
I think the only difference in America is that there is this long tail at the end of the distribution. 95% of us look and eat roughly as healthy as any other population, and then there is this 5% of extremely obese people that they show facelessly on the news.
If you grew up there and had food from your granny or something I bet you’d be eating less exciting (and more boiled) food.
Ways society can collectively act to reduce stress:
* reduce crime/criminality, and street disorder like vagrancy and open-drug use
* create more walking/biking friendly cities
* increase incomes
The latter two would be greatly facilitated by encouraging/allowing densification.
https://www.aeaweb.org/articles?id=10.1257/mac.20170388
Candied almonds consist of almonds and sugar. Sugar is cheaper, by weight, than almonds.
This tells us everything we need to know.
Eat fat but avoid omega-6
Even Harvard health articles say saturated fatty is correlated with diseases but it's all wrong. Processed foods are bad, they happen to have fat, not causation.
There are lot of studies and documented cases, there is no evidence saturated fat is bad.
Substitute carbs with fat.
Your food pyramid should look like this
Fat } fiber } protein } carbs
I've lost 40 lb and high BP + cholesterol all fixed in 3 months
Typical day / diet
2 fried eggs, almonds, tea with milk, Banana
Cheese sticks, coffee, vitamins
Beef, vegetable soup, beans, lentils, olives, carrots, boiled egg, and chickpeas.
Tea, butter
≠==========≠
Never eat processed food primarily because preservatives kill good bacteria
Eat during only 6 hour window as that keeps insulin level low which allows fat to energy conversion. Eventually this becomes better and you start feeling less hungry. Your eating fewer calories but metabolism doesn't slow down as much since stored fat can be used for energy.
If you're not sodium sensitive have more salt, potassium and water
If you're stressed forget about it. Stress increases insulin as it cause glucose to rise even if you haven't eaten any carbs.
Omega-6 is pure evil. Inflammation= insulin resistance = fat = more insulin resistance = the end
Walk 2 miles daily and don't stay sitting for 30+ min
Do HITT even for just 10 minutes
If you can do long water fast 2-3 days once a month
Your taste changes, first you will miss carbs then in few weeks everything even remotely sweet will feel like artificial medicine