4 ms·

Many of us have high caloric needs, high metabolism and have to eat 3 meals a day. This article is about people who would like to eat 3 meals but their financi

Many of us have high caloric needs, high metabolism and have to eat 3 meals a day. This article is about people who would like to eat 3 meals but their financial situation prevents them. Many people don’t have the amount of food they need. That sounds pretty damn scary to me.

tharkun__ 3y ago
Not to diminish the point you're making about the financial situation, I don't see how most people nowadays have high caloric needs. In fact I believe most people today have very small caloric needs. Definitely compared to the olden days, where a 4000+ calorie diet for a farm hand would totally be OK and nobody would get fat from that. But even physically active people won't need that today. What most people have is cravings for sugary stuff and way too easy access to sugary stuff and they get fat and unhealthy from it (even if they stay lean because of their specific metabolism and not putting on the kilos but they might still be diabetic, have high cholesterol etc.) You parent probably eats a diet that (costs more but) is skewed towards proteins and fats and fiber and more akin to a diet one might have found prior to us discovering cheap and easy ways to make sugar and mass produce grains and process them into dead white flour. Personal anecdote to corroborate your parent's view (i.e. `anecdata+=1`): When I went full on Keto I could easily go for just one meal a day. I just wasn't hungry and the body used up my fat stores instead. It somehow learned over some time that it no longer had access to all that quick sugar and the cravings stopped. And when I did eat, it was lots of veggies, fat and protein and only incidental carbs from those veggies basically. On the other hand, when I came off Keto I immediately noticed again that if I do eat normal carb-y breakfast, I get hungry for lunch time again, while on Keto with nothing but a coffee w/ some butter or coconut oil in it, I wouldn't get any feeling of hunger during the entire day. Now with that said, it's probably cheaper for people to eat a sugary 3 meal diet than to eat a healthy diet of lots of protein, fat and veggies, as that's even more expensive if you don't grow a lot of it in your own garden from heirloom seeds. And who's got the time (or garden) for that like grandma did.
zamadatix 3y ago
The underlying variable here is meal size, not meal count. You can easily eat thousands of calories in a single meal every day given it's what your body is used to instead of 3 separate meals and it's often even cheaper to plan for (going so extreme with the freuqency isn't necessarily without downsides though). For simplicities' sake though let's make the assumption every one of this 38% not eating 3 meals a day are also actually eating that much less overall food each day. This seems to be more what the article is trying to assume anyways, so it's easier to talk about that way. At this point the article still isn't quite claiming what you took from it. The 38% is the percentage that responded "regularly" or "sometimes" to the question "I no longer eat three meals a day". At the same time only 12% reported "being hungry but skipping a meal" in the last 6 months. The majority of that 38% aren't thinking they don't have the amount of food they need. While any % of the European population will be many people it's not necessarily the only thing the article contains. It's also worth noting here are subgroups with many people (e.g. parents) cutting how much they eat to feed their kids fully at uneasily high numbers though.
maximus-decimus 3y ago
Sumo fighters eat a single meal a day. Without context and knowing how big are their other meals, it's pretty hard to make sense of these stats.

tharkun__ 3y ago

Not to diminish the point you're making about the financial situation, I don't see how most people nowadays have high caloric needs. In fact I believe most people today have very small caloric needs. Definitely compared to the olden days, where a 4000+ calorie diet for a farm hand would totally be OK and nobody would get fat from that. But even physically active people won't need that today. What most people have is cravings for sugary stuff and way too easy access to sugary stuff and they get fat and unhealthy from it (even if they stay lean because of their specific metabolism and not putting on the kilos but they might still be diabetic, have high cholesterol etc.) You parent probably eats a diet that (costs more but) is skewed towards proteins and fats and fiber and more akin to a diet one might have found prior to us discovering cheap and easy ways to make sugar and mass produce grains and process them into dead white flour. Personal anecdote to corroborate your parent's view (i.e. `anecdata+=1`): When I went full on Keto I could easily go for just one meal a day. I just wasn't hungry and the body used up my fat stores instead. It somehow learned over some time that it no longer had access to all that quick sugar and the cravings stopped. And when I did eat, it was lots of veggies, fat and protein and only incidental carbs from those veggies basically. On the other hand, when I came off Keto I immediately noticed again that if I do eat normal carb-y breakfast, I get hungry for lunch time again, while on Keto with nothing but a coffee w/ some butter or coconut oil in it, I wouldn't get any feeling of hunger during the entire day. Now with that said, it's probably cheaper for people to eat a sugary 3 meal diet than to eat a healthy diet of lots of protein, fat and veggies, as that's even more expensive if you don't grow a lot of it in your own garden from heirloom seeds. And who's got the time (or garden) for that like grandma did.

zamadatix 3y ago

The underlying variable here is meal size, not meal count. You can easily eat thousands of calories in a single meal every day given it's what your body is used to instead of 3 separate meals and it's often even cheaper to plan for (going so extreme with the freuqency isn't necessarily without downsides though). For simplicities' sake though let's make the assumption every one of this 38% not eating 3 meals a day are also actually eating that much less overall food each day. This seems to be more what the article is trying to assume anyways, so it's easier to talk about that way. At this point the article still isn't quite claiming what you took from it. The 38% is the percentage that responded "regularly" or "sometimes" to the question "I no longer eat three meals a day". At the same time only 12% reported "being hungry but skipping a meal" in the last 6 months. The majority of that 38% aren't thinking they don't have the amount of food they need. While any % of the European population will be many people it's not necessarily the only thing the article contains. It's also worth noting here are subgroups with many people (e.g. parents) cutting how much they eat to feed their kids fully at uneasily high numbers though.

maximus-decimus 3y ago

Sumo fighters eat a single meal a day. Without context and knowing how big are their other meals, it's pretty hard to make sense of these stats.