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I’m curious whether the study accounted for the confounding variable of wealth. Wealthier women eat fast food less and have more access to fresh fruit. Wealth

I’m curious whether the study accounted for the confounding variable of wealth. Wealthier women eat fast food less and have more access to fresh fruit. Wealthier women are more likely to exercise and be in general more healthy. In other words, without taking care of the data, this might just be saying that wealthy people are more fertile.

philliphaydon 9y ago
Problem of the West, not wealth, I think. In Asia fast food is often more expensive than fresh fruit or better meals.
- amelius 9y ago
  I once heard a story about Asian people dressing up before going to McDonald's.
  - knicholes 9y ago
    In Japan ~5 years ago, I went to a McDonald's that was pretty dang fancy. Shockingly, and unrelated, people were smoking in the dining area. Weird.
collyw 9y ago
I struggle to believe that wealth is what is missing. You can eat healthily for very little money. It does however require time to cook / prepare, which maybe be tricky if you have two jobs.
- calvinbhai 9y ago
  True. Time, more than money is wealth. Earning $50k per year working 20 hrs a week may be better than earning $95k working 60 hrs a week. I cook a lot, and love to cook at home, using fresh vegetables, lentils and legumes, constantly aware of the fact that it is such a luxury to be able to cook and eat at home. Fast food and pizzas are so cheap, for someone starved of time, it can be the only option, to make ends meet, in terms of time. I have been in that situation of living on fast food for more than a year, and have been grateful to be out of such poverty of time, which has slowly yielded benefits in health, and monetary wealth.
  - mrob 9y ago
    If you have a freezer, you can save a lot of time substituting frozen vegetables for fresh. The texture is often inferior, but nutritionally they're just as good if not better, because they're picked in peak condition instead of early for longer shelf life. They're usually sold pre-chopped, and you can buy them infrequently in bulk. You can also save a lot of time using an automatic electric pressure cooker. Frozen vegetables can be cooked at the same time as dried grains and legumes, and the timer won't start until the correct temperature is reached, so there's no need to defrost the vegetables first. The pressure cooker will cook things faster than a conventional cooker, but the biggest time saving is from the automation, allowing you to run it unattended.
    - calvinbhai 8y ago
      Agree on all points. Haven't tried using electric pressure cooker for frozen veggies. Will give that a try when I stock up on required frozen veggies.
- graphitezepp 9y ago
  People who are not wealthy often do not have the nutritional knowledge or easy access to grocery stores with good produce. The issue is deeper than time.
- VLM 9y ago
  The vast majority of the people repeating the irrational meme are doing it to fit into the groupthink; its an irrational meme, the whole point is its not supposed to make sense, you only know and repeat it if you're one of the cool kids who've observed its part of the local groupthink. Consider almost any discussion of politics or urban lifestyle here on HN, same issue. Magic dirt exists, strange creationism theories, cars are evil, etc. Given that almost everything here thats non-tech is a groupthink meme, it makes you wonder if any of the tech discussions are real, or are also just people meme-ing at each other. I know at least some of the tech discussions are real, maybe nothing else here is... The meme probably should be banned because its racist in the same sense that anti-weed laws were invented to be anti-mexican before they branched out. A white woman buying a $6 pre-made organic salad is the theoretical ideal whereas a black woman buying $4 of take out soul food or a $8 bucket of fast food fried chicken is gross and disgusting and the people initially promoting the meme were not talking about the food as the topic being gross. For another example, McDonalds for a variety of reasons marketed sharply downscale a generation ago to swap their white customers for minority customers, and now McD are almost entirely full of minority customers, therefore the same food that was yummy in the 80s is for no reason we can admit in polite conversation, now gross and disgusting, of course the change is because the people buying it are now non-white instead of white. Complaining about diet as a thinly disguised dog whistle is literally the polite politically correct left wing equivalent of /pol/ complaining about black crime and black music. To be as clear as possible about what I'm claiming, most "progressive" diet complaints originated as racist dog whistles complaining about non-whites. No one ever complains about the conformist young white girl eating avocado toast, huh. Obviously NOT everyone involved in the groupthink, especially dozens of generations later is a klansman brother; but the origin of the meme surely was racist, thus the meme probably deserves the banhammer. To some extent the meme is tired because its so one sided. Yes yes we get the idea, ya all don't like soul food or fried chicken or McD because of the black people who eat it and we'll get endless rationalization about how black people eating chitlins are evil while old white guys eat pork rinds which are some kind of manna from heaven. But its so boring to see the same tired one sided memes thousands of times with essentially no response. If meme jokes about casserole eating, mayo smearing, cheese eating, Panera Bread shoppin white people were even a thousandth as popular as the anti-minority-food memes, it would at least be entertaining, despite the tasteless racism. There's also a side dish of humblebrag along the lines of, I'm not saying I'm rich, which means I want to draw lots of attention that I'm rich, but the only healthy food humans can eat is multiple pounds at a time of $25/pound beef tenderloin which I sous vide in my $499 dedicated appliance and the poor rabble will just have to eat (corn syrup) cake and die young after laboring ceaselessly to make me rich (insert Simpsons laugh). The point being look at me I eat well because I'm rich and most are not rich, look at me, look at me, look at me. Ironically with sane portion control, its cheaper to serve my family home made beef tenderloin than to pay for decent fast-ish food as a total meal cost, and food cost of homemade grilled burgers are practically a rounding error compared to an equivalent or even somewhat substandard fast food meal. A similar humblebrag for "Everyone needs to know that I like to appear very busy, far too busy to open my own pre-made salad container or pour a bag of salad onto a plate, instead I'll spend a half hour traveling and sit around for an hour each meal in restaurants while explaining how busy I am, and did I mention I'm really important because I'm so busy, only (lazy, aka minority aka yet another racist dogwhistle) poor people in foreign (more racism) countries have enough spare time to fry an egg or make a sandwich (gasp!) by hand at home.". A third tradeoff aside from cooking labor vs money is flavor or monotony. The local progressive hipster organic market has take-and-go premade Chicken Ceasar salads fairly cheap, and from a purely nutritional standpoint I think a human could live on nothing but that single food item in perpetuity, perhaps with a daily multivitamin pill for the most obscure trace elements. Only maybe a billion of the world population spend more than a dollar per meal, and they don't seem to be dying off strictly due to not spending $200 at the steakhouse every lunch hour, although poverty meals are often incredibly monotonous. Stir fry veggies on rice or rice -n- beans are some other meals that will keep you alive a long time for practically no money although its terrifyingly boring. Making it worse, is given the ageism, this dietary advice is mostly coming from a generation that famously thinks tide pods are gourmet food. Twenty year old kids can and will eat anything and be perfectly healthy ... for awhile, a short while, then they get fat, sick, die, etc. If you want to discuss healthy diet you need to talk to the village elders not recent high school grads who read something once on instagram. To summarize my rant, the overall "HN" opinion on proper diet not supposed to make sense because its a tired overdone racist meme used as groupthink to show who's paying enough attention to fit into the "in" crowd by follower-like repetition of the groupthink. Once you figure out that if white people buy it from the progressive hipster market and eat it, then its good, and if minorities buy it from minority areas and eat it, then its bad, then you can use that carefully crafted scientific model to almost as a root password to figure out every discussion on HN about diet, and thereby fit in.

philliphaydon 9y ago

Problem of the West, not wealth, I think. In Asia fast food is often more expensive than fresh fruit or better meals.

amelius 9y ago
I once heard a story about Asian people dressing up before going to McDonald's.
- knicholes 9y ago
  In Japan ~5 years ago, I went to a McDonald's that was pretty dang fancy. Shockingly, and unrelated, people were smoking in the dining area. Weird.

collyw 9y ago

I struggle to believe that wealth is what is missing. You can eat healthily for very little money. It does however require time to cook / prepare, which maybe be tricky if you have two jobs.

calvinbhai 9y ago
True. Time, more than money is wealth. Earning $50k per year working 20 hrs a week may be better than earning $95k working 60 hrs a week. I cook a lot, and love to cook at home, using fresh vegetables, lentils and legumes, constantly aware of the fact that it is such a luxury to be able to cook and eat at home. Fast food and pizzas are so cheap, for someone starved of time, it can be the only option, to make ends meet, in terms of time. I have been in that situation of living on fast food for more than a year, and have been grateful to be out of such poverty of time, which has slowly yielded benefits in health, and monetary wealth.
- mrob 9y ago
  If you have a freezer, you can save a lot of time substituting frozen vegetables for fresh. The texture is often inferior, but nutritionally they're just as good if not better, because they're picked in peak condition instead of early for longer shelf life. They're usually sold pre-chopped, and you can buy them infrequently in bulk. You can also save a lot of time using an automatic electric pressure cooker. Frozen vegetables can be cooked at the same time as dried grains and legumes, and the timer won't start until the correct temperature is reached, so there's no need to defrost the vegetables first. The pressure cooker will cook things faster than a conventional cooker, but the biggest time saving is from the automation, allowing you to run it unattended.
  - calvinbhai 8y ago
    Agree on all points. Haven't tried using electric pressure cooker for frozen veggies. Will give that a try when I stock up on required frozen veggies.
graphitezepp 9y ago
People who are not wealthy often do not have the nutritional knowledge or easy access to grocery stores with good produce. The issue is deeper than time.
VLM 9y ago
The vast majority of the people repeating the irrational meme are doing it to fit into the groupthink; its an irrational meme, the whole point is its not supposed to make sense, you only know and repeat it if you're one of the cool kids who've observed its part of the local groupthink. Consider almost any discussion of politics or urban lifestyle here on HN, same issue. Magic dirt exists, strange creationism theories, cars are evil, etc. Given that almost everything here thats non-tech is a groupthink meme, it makes you wonder if any of the tech discussions are real, or are also just people meme-ing at each other. I know at least some of the tech discussions are real, maybe nothing else here is... The meme probably should be banned because its racist in the same sense that anti-weed laws were invented to be anti-mexican before they branched out. A white woman buying a $6 pre-made organic salad is the theoretical ideal whereas a black woman buying $4 of take out soul food or a $8 bucket of fast food fried chicken is gross and disgusting and the people initially promoting the meme were not talking about the food as the topic being gross. For another example, McDonalds for a variety of reasons marketed sharply downscale a generation ago to swap their white customers for minority customers, and now McD are almost entirely full of minority customers, therefore the same food that was yummy in the 80s is for no reason we can admit in polite conversation, now gross and disgusting, of course the change is because the people buying it are now non-white instead of white. Complaining about diet as a thinly disguised dog whistle is literally the polite politically correct left wing equivalent of /pol/ complaining about black crime and black music. To be as clear as possible about what I'm claiming, most "progressive" diet complaints originated as racist dog whistles complaining about non-whites. No one ever complains about the conformist young white girl eating avocado toast, huh. Obviously NOT everyone involved in the groupthink, especially dozens of generations later is a klansman brother; but the origin of the meme surely was racist, thus the meme probably deserves the banhammer. To some extent the meme is tired because its so one sided. Yes yes we get the idea, ya all don't like soul food or fried chicken or McD because of the black people who eat it and we'll get endless rationalization about how black people eating chitlins are evil while old white guys eat pork rinds which are some kind of manna from heaven. But its so boring to see the same tired one sided memes thousands of times with essentially no response. If meme jokes about casserole eating, mayo smearing, cheese eating, Panera Bread shoppin white people were even a thousandth as popular as the anti-minority-food memes, it would at least be entertaining, despite the tasteless racism. There's also a side dish of humblebrag along the lines of, I'm not saying I'm rich, which means I want to draw lots of attention that I'm rich, but the only healthy food humans can eat is multiple pounds at a time of $25/pound beef tenderloin which I sous vide in my $499 dedicated appliance and the poor rabble will just have to eat (corn syrup) cake and die young after laboring ceaselessly to make me rich (insert Simpsons laugh). The point being look at me I eat well because I'm rich and most are not rich, look at me, look at me, look at me. Ironically with sane portion control, its cheaper to serve my family home made beef tenderloin than to pay for decent fast-ish food as a total meal cost, and food cost of homemade grilled burgers are practically a rounding error compared to an equivalent or even somewhat substandard fast food meal. A similar humblebrag for "Everyone needs to know that I like to appear very busy, far too busy to open my own pre-made salad container or pour a bag of salad onto a plate, instead I'll spend a half hour traveling and sit around for an hour each meal in restaurants while explaining how busy I am, and did I mention I'm really important because I'm so busy, only (lazy, aka minority aka yet another racist dogwhistle) poor people in foreign (more racism) countries have enough spare time to fry an egg or make a sandwich (gasp!) by hand at home.". A third tradeoff aside from cooking labor vs money is flavor or monotony. The local progressive hipster organic market has take-and-go premade Chicken Ceasar salads fairly cheap, and from a purely nutritional standpoint I think a human could live on nothing but that single food item in perpetuity, perhaps with a daily multivitamin pill for the most obscure trace elements. Only maybe a billion of the world population spend more than a dollar per meal, and they don't seem to be dying off strictly due to not spending $200 at the steakhouse every lunch hour, although poverty meals are often incredibly monotonous. Stir fry veggies on rice or rice -n- beans are some other meals that will keep you alive a long time for practically no money although its terrifyingly boring. Making it worse, is given the ageism, this dietary advice is mostly coming from a generation that famously thinks tide pods are gourmet food. Twenty year old kids can and will eat anything and be perfectly healthy ... for awhile, a short while, then they get fat, sick, die, etc. If you want to discuss healthy diet you need to talk to the village elders not recent high school grads who read something once on instagram. To summarize my rant, the overall "HN" opinion on proper diet not supposed to make sense because its a tired overdone racist meme used as groupthink to show who's paying enough attention to fit into the "in" crowd by follower-like repetition of the groupthink. Once you figure out that if white people buy it from the progressive hipster market and eat it, then its good, and if minorities buy it from minority areas and eat it, then its bad, then you can use that carefully crafted scientific model to almost as a root password to figure out every discussion on HN about diet, and thereby fit in.