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Keep in mind this is a dangerous route to go down long term. Optimising for economic cost with the only requirement being "fill your belly" and "be palatable e
by tomxor 2y ago
Keep in mind this is a dangerous route to go down long term.
Optimising for economic cost with the only requirement being "fill your belly" and "be palatable enough", tends to result in poor nutrition. This is roughly how the industry optimises food - minimise economic cost, maximise yield, and maximise sales (make everything artificially hyper palatable), with terrible results.
In the long term this is partly covered by the economic cost on a personal basis because of the cost in health care and loss of ability to produce income due to deteriorating health. But this is displaced in time, and you do not want to do this experiment on yourself, it's not reversible.
Calories are not equal, as a general rule, buying cheap food often means cheaping out on nutritional value. If you want to frame it in terms of money, buying good quality food now is an investment in your future.
- valval 2y agoI’d argue this as well. I eat mainly meat and other animal products, and get by on less than $10 a day just fine while hitting optimal nutrition. Trying to gather a cheap and healthy nutrition profile from random items in a grocery store is a task doomed to fail.
- nutrifiedrock9 2y agoYou bring up a great point, and the article linked does indeed mention this in on of it's core goals: >3. Be Safe! Maintain and track nutrition, get enough calories, and don't eat rotten food.
- tomxor 2y agoStill, it's at odds with the premise. A more compatible goal would be to minimise cost of nutritional value rather than cost of calories. Unfortunately this is very hard to measure, so the best we have is to gauge it by proxy.
- helboi4 2y agoyeah every now and then i think about bringing my food bill down like i used to in uni but i just know now that that food was literally fake nutrients and i can't do that to myself - my health is the cornerstone of everything else i do.
- francisofascii 2y agoHow about frozen fruits, veggies, potatoes, nuts, canned beans and canned beets?
- MuffinFlavored 2y agofrozen fruits and veggies or frozen fruits and frozen veggies?
- stronglikedan 2y agosame difference nowadays with everything being flash frozen
- dymk 2y agoAbsolutely not, where do you live where you don’t have access to non-frozen foods?
- francisofascii 2y agoyes, both. sorry I wasn't clear. Assuming frozen fruit and frozen veggies are much cheaper compared to fresh.
- JustBreath 2y agoI'd agree if you're talking about alternating ramen and cereal, but the diet prescribed here seems pretty reasonable. Good even, in comparison to a lot of people. Either way you can weigh both factors and 90% of diets can be easily and cheaply improved by just adding a hefty dose of frozen veggies to every meal. Plenty of variety these days too, lots of premixed medleys.
- Maxatar 2y agoI don't think your premise is true, that cheap food means poor nutrition. Also the actual website doesn't have anything remotely unhealthy or lacking in nutrition, on the contrary, with the exception of the first day, it's actually quite healthy and balanced. The first day is an outlier because it was on a day of fasting among many Christians.