How to eat healthily for £1 per day – version 0.2

http://supplementsos.com/blog/eat-healthily-for-1-pound-per-day-version-0-2/

by lenazegher • 13 years ago

98 81 13 years ago

lenazegher2• 13 years ago

v0.1 discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5685812

TamDenholm• 13 years ago

It'd be interesting to see if anyone could look at this from a more "business" point of view, basically investing money up front for a better quality diet for less cost over the long term. For instance, buying seeds and growing veg, herbs, etc. Even buying 2-3 chickens and keeping them in your garden for eggs and perhaps meat. It'd be interesting to see what kind of investment would be needed, what the running cost would be and how long before you got a 100% ROI back.

mitchi2• 13 years ago

If you make the calculations from "biological eggs produced from chicken in liberty", I'm sure it's profitable! These eggs cost a fortune now.

VLM9• 13 years ago

"basically investing money up front"

She came down pretty hard on that in the article, even to the point of not buying spices because the smallest container is an expensive three months supply. Which is too bad.

On the other hand allowing 80 pound sacks of rice vs the little 1 pound bags that cost 2x as much per pound is going to really distort and mess up her math, so maybe she needs to stick to her very strict budget.

deletes• 13 years ago

I really want to see some meat on that menu. I hope they do a 1.5£ or 2£ version.

antoko• 13 years ago

for an extra 25p /day you can spend an extra 1.75GPB a week.

so then you can buy these from asda and add it to whatever you want.... why wait for the OP to do the work?

http://groceries.asda.com/asda-estore/catalog/sectionpagecon...

ctdonath5• 13 years ago

Really depends on location. Cheap canned meats are available. Chickens are cheap but take work (see standard objections to gardening). Roadkill is viable (norm in rural areas). Hunting takes work but can be cheap per pound (somewhere around license around $20, gun for $100, $0.25 per shot).

ctdonath5• 13 years ago

I just grilled & ate a hamburger. Under $1 for meat, sesame bun, and salsa (easy mix of vegetables).

VLM9• 13 years ago

Lets flag last time's discussion of v0.1 ahead of time, so we can move on and advance rather than rehash.

1) A little too much oil/fat to be politically correct, a bit too little to be nutritionally correct. Canola oil? I wouldn't put that in my car. Eat half as much olive oil if you have to, but don't eat that rot.

2) Carbs about right to be politically correct, WAY too much grains/carbs to be nutritionally correct. Gonna get fat fat fat on this diet and feel miserable.

3) The guy from a culture where the average TV viewership per capita is 4 hours and 38 minutes per day (per Neilson 2012) could never have spare the five minutes to throw some beans in a slow cooker. Also all home cooked meals take 8 hours to prepare because he says so. Finally multitasking has not been invented (serious, HN?) so time spent stirring a pot must be spent 100% focused on the stirring never a single brain cell firing on any other task. I honestly believe there is some kind of cooking phobia loose on HN.

4) The point of the article was to set a ridiculously low standard while figuring out how to make it survivable, therefore at least 10% of HN posts will be along the lines of "her diet sounds boring". Well, congrats at missing the whole point. I will admit that around version 1.0 it would be interesting to see how you can improve her diet plan with the delta of $5/person-day to $6/person-day. I spend about $12/person-day but my family eats like kings, we really do enjoy our fancy stuff. I don't think it would be possible to cook at home more expensively without doing ridiculous stuff like upgrading us from organic grass fed beef to imported Kobe, or dumping genuine saffron all over everything. Maybe if we ate morel mushrooms with everything instead of an occasional delicacy, for example.

mitchi2• 13 years ago

314 carbs is around what a bodybuilder eats when he's bulking up. But bodybuilders eat 4 times this amount of protein (55 g). This diet is designed for a normal/small person obviously! How much would it cost to throw a multivitamin in there? Get some zinc, magnesium, fish oils in there since there's no meat at all. Zinc is obviously important if you're a man since you need it to produce testosterone.

VLM9• 13 years ago

"How much would it cost to throw a multivitamin in there?"

Supplements would be an interesting v0.3 or perhaps appendix to her next plan. I am well aware of body builders consuming 500 grams of protein/day in the form of weird expensive powders. But I wonder as a supplement to the existing diet how it works mathematically to eat perhaps 5 grams instead of 500 grams of supplement "complete" protein powder per day and then maybe cheap out on the bulk plant protein by selecting some plant that's not a complete protein. Carried out to a logical extreme I wonder if it "works" financially and nutritionally at $1/day or whatever to just eat rice and pop a multivitamin and a very small protein shake every day.

yummyfajitas2• 13 years ago

...what a bodybuilder eats when he's bulking up. But bodybuilders eat 4 times this amount of protein (55 g).

A midget bodybuilder. The rule of thumb is 0.75-1g protein/lb bodyweight, 0.5g for maintenance.

frou_dh2• 13 years ago

I'd rather flag the entire submission. Cooking cheap is one thing, but the "healthy" throughline continues to go nowhere.

The meal plan should be christened "This Week In Starch". Just look at it!

juskrey2• 13 years ago

After watching on my own eyes that unbelievable soylent mess, I'd rather leave that kind of topics for natural selection.

lenazegher2• 13 years ago

> I'd rather flag the entire submission. Cooking cheap is one thing, but the "healthy" throughline continues to go nowhere.

Perhaps a better title would be "how to eat as healthily as possible for £1 per day", but I tried to find a balance between precision and clarity.

Yes, the primary energy source is starch, but this is simply a necessity on such a limited budget. Even if you were comfortable getting the majority of your calories from vegetable oil or lard, it would be extremely difficult to find a palatable diet that incorporated such large quantities without breaking the budget.

skrause• 13 years ago

What's wrong with canola oil?

TillE• 13 years ago

Absolutely nothing. It's really strange that HN is filled with people who think they're experts on nutrition, even though their beliefs are often directly contradicted by scientific research.

http://www.hsph.harvard.edu/nutritionsource/fats-and-cholest...

eksith2• 13 years ago

When done in moderation, absolutely nothing :

http://www.livestrong.com/article/459116-can-you-replace-veg...

I think there's a perception of bad taste with canola oil, but in my experience, this is due to cooks inexperienced in cooking with canola oil. There are temperature and duration changes that must be taken to account. Some recipes need adjusting and calibration and that takes a bit of experimentation. Not everyone has the patience for that or is willing to research the differences.

dagw• 13 years ago

I had to Google Canola oil as I'd never heard of it, but it seems to be a product name for rapeseed oil. If so what have you got against rapeseed oil. It's a great oil and every bit as 'valid' as olive oil and I use both when cooking all the time.

Sure you can buy shit rapeseed oil, but you can also buy equally shit olive oil, and I fail to see why you would think one better than the other. Or is it just that the Canola brand produces bad rapeseed oil.

VLM9• 13 years ago

It has a few issues.

1) Depends on what you're using it for. Personally I think it tastes foul in salad dressing type applications. Olive oil is the gold standard for homemade salad dressings. I would imagine if you're frying donuts or potatoes or something, you'd want the more neutral flavor of canola instead of olive.

2) Rancidity issues lead to three problems. First is massively excessive processing which turns the healthy omega3 oils into trans fats, and also contamination from processing chemicals make the oil smell/taste weird compared to a more natural/real oil. The second is failure of the extensive processing means the stuff goes rancid really quickly, meaning you either dump half the bottle making it more expensive than olive or you eat rancid oil which is really unhealthy. The third problem is you can solve post-purchase rancidity issues by getting tiny little containers and using them up quickly, but that boosts the cost per oz way beyond something tastier, healthier, and longer shelf life, like olive oil or frankly pretty much anything else.

3) Its exceedingly heavily processed compared to most other off the shelf oils. This is not necessarily bad other than as noted above, but the more they screw around with it, the more chance to screw it up. Its easier to purchase un-screwed up evoo than canola.

4) Probably all that matters is your own local shopping experience, but I'm just saying where I live pretty much only shit grade canola is widely available, but pretty good olive (and other stuff) is available. I'm willing to believe there might exist a place, perhaps where you live, where really good excellent fresh properly minimally processed canola is available and no decent olive (and other) is available, although I find it pretty unlikely. The only oil worse than canola on my oil pecking order is generic "vegetable oil". Now that's not exactly made out of cucumbers carrots and tomatoes. Very disturbing, like a package at the butchers which refuses to officially identify itself beyond "meat, animal".

Those are the real world reasons why it usually sucks compared to olive oil. Outside of the real science based world, you run into stuff like over 90% of the canola is non-organic and GMO, so people who don't know anything about science are trained by advertising to respond by freaking out about it. I'm not so worried about pseudo religious "beliefs" as I am about real world biochemistry above. Everything is genetically modified to some extent or another, and as a class of product oil is processed a lot more than, say, lettuce, so being organic probably doesn't matter as much relatively for oil as for apples.

TLDR is its overly vulnerable to rancidity, so it either is super over processed to the point of icky, or has to be consumed while rancid which is icky, or goes bad fast so small bottles are more expensive per unit volume than a big jug of something that doesn't rot so quickly.

papsosouid2• 13 years ago

The fact that you got caught by poe's law is not reassuring.

eksith2• 13 years ago

I'm not sure if he was "caught" per-se. More like he preemptively objected to the opposition in the court of public opinion for this round using excerpts from the last round.

enraged_camel• 13 years ago

>>I honestly believe there is some kind of cooking phobia loose on HN.

If you think about the main demographic of HN - people in their 20s who have spent more time with computers than anything else - it makes sense. :)

obviouslygreen• 13 years ago

I have to wonder about this. Granted, many of my friends are in their late twenties, but the programmers I know are overwhelmingly more likely to cook than people I know from similar demographics in different occupations.

Perhaps -- assuming the cooking phobia does indeed exist -- it's something more specific to the kind of people who gravitate towards HN than it is an attribute of 20-something computer nuts.

VLM9• 13 years ago

But that's why I like cooking!

All the techniques you learn from simple knife cuts to measuring to cooking techniques like braising and roasting, all those are object oriented development methods that can be applied to objects, objects of food. There's a lot of object oriented analogies between programming and cooking. If you can apply the "Julienne knife cut" method to a potato object, you can do it to an apple object and probably a carrot too.

Its a big linear programming puzzle to scale recipes. Did I mention scaling? Cooking is a whole barrel of square/cube law scalability puzzles to get cooking rates of different ingredients to intersect at one completion time.

There are some pretty interesting software engineering principles WRT recipe and meal design. Do you "waterfall" your holiday dinner design, or "agile" it? There's the sheer queueing theory joy of arranging everything just so, such that its all just-in-time ready to be cooked, when it works its awesome and when you're stuck in the weeds its panic time, just like hacking something before a demo.

Its fun to iterate thru optimization getting the "design pattern" applied to the puzzle better and better. And there's so many design patterns, and if you stay out of pastry work, those design patterns are pretty flexible.

One point where you have me is most programmers hate testing, so I can see an issue with cooking.

I am kinda bummed that most "computer geeky" books about cooking fixate solely on gadgetry like liq N2 or molecular gastronomy, cool as that might be, there's a whole nother world of describing cooking with flowcharts and object oriented methods and development models and algorithms and "real computer geeky" stuff like that.

I have noticed that at least some people cook like they program, across a sample size of about 3. Here's to hoping that cooking something never becomes a technical interview fad stunt, although I suppose worse has happened in the past.

Kurtz792• 13 years ago

In many ways cooking is a form of "hacking" and creating, a form of human ingenuity that has very concrete and practical applications...

You take raw materials, in themselves nutritious but unappetizing, and create a final product that looks and feel completely different, and manages to be satisfying in addition to being functional and necessary to survival.

Making something like bread starting from flour, yeast and water... what a brilliant hack!

Since I have started looking at cooking from this point of view I have been hooked.

Nrsolis6• 13 years ago

Cooking is easy. What stumps people is the prep work and cleanup. That's rooted in laziness.

I worked in a kitchen for a bit and I learned how to cook meals the way that restaurants do:

1. Buy everything as fresh as possible. 2. Get your prep work done first. 3. Pre-cook what can be pre-cooked. 4. Don't let anything spoil. Cook what's about to turn. Don't buy more than you will consume or cook for later consumption. 5. Make stuff from scratch. It's cheaper in the long run. 6. Rotate your ingredients and buy what's in season. It's fresher (#1) and cheaper (#5).

If you are a smart chef, you cook on Sundays and Wednesdays. You make more than you need for that day's meal and assemble fresh meals from the cooked ingredients prepared on those days.

It's easy. Buy a pound of bacon and cook the whole pound in the oven at once. Now breakfast is an egg or two in a frying pan on the stove and some bacon reheated in the microwave. Vegetables? Buy a bunch of brocoli, blanch it and put it in the fridge. Buy a bunch of spinach, blanch it and put it in the fridge.

Lunch is precooked chicken breast over blanched vegetables reheated in the microwave. Add rice you've pre-cooked if that's your thing.

Dinner is a salad and protein that's reheated. Chicken/beef/whatever.

Food isn't hard. I spend less than 4 hours cooking per week and I eat super healthy using only fresh ingredients I buy at Whole Foods and the local natural market. Grass-fed beef, marinated chicken, etc.

The only reason people in their 20's haven't learned to live this way is because nobody has ever made it a priority for them. The plethora of fast-food, college meal-plans, and bar-food/takeout have made it possible for a 20-something to never be hungry but instead chronically malnourished.

Seriously, you can code C++ but Rachel Rae is better in the kitchen? WTF? This stuff isn't rocket science.

columbo2• 13 years ago

> 3) The guy from a culture where the average TV viewership per capita is 4 hours and 38 minutes per day (per Neilson 2012) could never have spare the five minutes to throw some beans in a slow cooker. Also all home cooked meals take 8 hours to prepare because he says so. Finally multitasking has not been invented (serious, HN?) so time spent stirring a pot must be spent 100% focused on the stirring never a single brain cell firing on any other task. I honestly believe there is some kind of cooking phobia loose on HN.

This is low quality, and doesn't add to the discussion.

Here's a real case study; a mother, two children under six years old, mid-twenties, high school dropout, only has a bus pass and foodstamps. The closest grocery store is 3 miles away and she lives on government checks.

How much time do you believe it would take her to go to the grocery store to get fresh produce? How much time does it take someone with kids AND a car to get to the grocery store and back?

How much time have you devoted towards helping the poor? I mean actually sitting down with someone in the bottom 15% (not your friends-friend who's eating ramen at college or someone you heard of from high school) and how successful were you in training them to spend less money?

These topics are fine for what they are: Affluent people trying to spend less. They lose value when people look at the numbers and say "Gosh, this is so easy, why don't the poor just do this! Why don't they just buy a hybrid and save money on gas? Or maybe order all this stuff online with their macbooks to save time?".

maratd3• 13 years ago

> Here's a real case study; a mother, two children under six years old, mid-twenties, high school dropout, only has a bus pass and foodstamps.

This is just as disingenuous as the parent and isn't even close to representing the most common situation. The majority of people don't live next to a market that has proper fresh produce, but demand drives supply and there's a reason they don't.

Most upper and middle class families have largely abandoned the concept of fresh produce. When the poor become not so poor, they follow the same pattern. Not because they don't have a choice, but because they choose to.

My parents live a very affluent area. Whole Foods, Trader Joes, Pathmark (large local grocer), Mitsuwa (large Japanese market). Four choices within 1 square mile. All walkable. Not a single one of them has any significant fresh food selection. Not one. Oh, they have a ton of prepared food that you can buy by the pound, but not a whole lot if you want to make it yourself.

I live in a less affluent area (putting it mildly) and there is a farmer's market 5 minutes walking distance from my house that has only fresh produce, absolutely no prepared food. It has more fresh produce than all the the other 4 combined. Why? Because the people who live here can't afford prepared food. It's that simple. They would, if they could.

lotharbot• 13 years ago

> "low quality, and doesn't add to the discussion"

That was my reaction to your last paragraph, as well. Every time there's a thread about dealing with certain challenges of poverty, someone comes along and accuses the rest of us of having unrealistic expectations of poverty, and makes some snarky remark about hybrids or hookers or macbooks.

Instead of dragging the thread down, why don't we elevate the discourse?

I personally have plenty of real case studies to go from. There was the divorced mom of 3 whose ex hid his assets so he could duck child support, who my wife and I helped move between 3 different shelters. There was the mentally ill guy on disability who I took to the hospital on occasion, and who thanked me for teaching him to shop because for the first time in his adult life he had food at the end of the month. There's the single mom, recovering from mental illness, and her son who live with me right now. There are over a dozen homeless guys who come to my church on Sunday mornings for free hot breakfast, and over 6000 families who come to our food bank each year.

Would the information in the original post, or the comment you were criticizing, help all of those people? No, but it could help some of them.

Knowing which foods give the best bang-for-buck in terms of calories and nutrients, and having some basic idea of how to combine them to make some viable meals, is a big deal for some people. Gaining the basic confidence to attempt actual cooking, instead of feeling like you must rely on pre-packaged convenience foods, is a big deal for some people. Learning certain time management skills, such as planning ahead and taking a few minutes to start beans soaking in the morning, is a big deal for some people. Yeah, this thread as a whole is a pretty theoretical exercise, but it does have valuable practical implications even for those dealing with real poverty.

ctdonath5• 13 years ago

His point is valid, albeit sarcastic. It's amazing how many respond with variations on "it's too hard" because various luxuries aren't trivial to acquire. Most of humanity spent most of history surviving on a lot less acquired with a lot more work.

We can continue the quibbling over narrow cases and solutions, but it all comes down to a phrase in a memorable HN thread: your life depends on it, so fucking figure it out. Some of us are trying to and doing pretty good at it; naysayers add nothing.

yummyfajitas2• 13 years ago

Many middle class women manage to care for two children while simultaneously shopping and preparing food. The husband fulfills the same economic role as the government does in your example - providing money while being otherwise absent. Why do you feel the poor lack the ability to do the exact same thing the middle class do?

Also, this situation is atypical. About 3/4 of the poor do have a car. 1/4 have more than one.

http://www.census.gov/prod/2008pubs/h150-07.pdf

ajays• 13 years ago

"The guy . . . . could never have spare the five minutes to throw some beans in a slow cooker."

If you just throw beans into a slow cooker without boiling them, you can risk haemagglutinin toxicity: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phaseolus_vulgaris#Toxicity

VLM9• 13 years ago

That was very interesting, thanks for pointing that out. I've never owned a cheap slow cooker that didn't end up boiling the product, so if ten minutes of boiling is safe, then 5 hours or whatever of boiling should be safe. I can see where a much more expensive theoretically "better" wanna be sous vide rig of a slow cooker could actually poison you by not getting hot enough due to extremely accurate temperature control. Its always interesting to see a scenario where doing a "worse" job is surprisingly "better".

I once read that a slow cooker that doesn't boil/simmer was dangerous and assumed with no evidence it was because of chicken salmonella and the other usual undercooked contaminated protein problems but that rule may have actually been due to this bean toxicity.

This could be a serious issue for people fooling around with sous vide rigs. I have not taken that plunge yet.

mseebach2• 13 years ago

I wonder what the "5-a-day" vegetable recommendation is based on - surely it can't be as simple as 5x80 grams of any plant?

ctz• 13 years ago

It's a UK government health recommendation: http://www.nhs.uk/Livewell/5ADAY/Pages/Whatcounts.aspx

mseebach2• 13 years ago

Yeah, I know. But that's just nanny-language telling me to eat my veggies (and I do and that's all fine) - it doesn't tell me the "why".

juskrey2• 13 years ago

Is naive diet rationalisation a new hacker's disease? To die for math that is not working in long period, anyway?

Come on, travel to South Africa and settle in savannah, hunting and gathering for free. Anything else will kill you in unnatural and premature way.

koide• 13 years ago

Whereas hunting and gathering for free in the South African savanna will kill you in a natural [1] and premature way.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wildlife_of_South_Africa#Predat...

solox3• 13 years ago

Apart from being cheap, this is also very denture-friendly. Chewing is absolutely required only 1/6 of the time (carrots, seeds).

Paul_S• 13 years ago

Buy spices in bulk - save lots of money. The price per kg is the same as per 100g at your supermarket. And then you can get away with eating the same staple foods all the time.

More meat and at least some beef. Obviously you can't eat steak for dinner every day for £1 a day but come on, a little thinly sliced beef stir fried with some teriyaki sauce - I can skip lunch for that.

Why no pasta? It's awesome to use up any leftovers you may have.

Then again you got your budget down to ~30 quid and I'm at more than twice that (though I never get over 80 except when it spikes around every 6 months when I buy spices) so clearly you must be making better choices. My excuse is that I eat meat and bake cakes.

DanBC3• 13 years ago

This is a mildly interesting experiment. I kind of wish a more realistic budget had been allocated.

The author is doing one portion for one person. The upfront costs of herbs would be easier if you do the plan for two people.

Kurtz792• 13 years ago

An interesting read, and I would still prefer spending an year with this diet than a week on Soylent.

pvnick• 13 years ago

Very interesting! I'm currently on a strength training/bulking diet, so I'll need about 3-4 times as much protein, but there are some interesting tidbits in here that I'll probably try and incorporate into my diet. I currently spend probably 10-15 dollars per day on food, so if I can cut that down to something like $5 that would be a huge accomplishment. If successful maybe I'll make a blog post about it ;)

danso• 13 years ago

I must have been drunk or dyslexic when I read the original article. I could've sworn that the URL was supplementacos.com and throughout the article, I was wondering, "OK, where is the call to action to buy a 1 euro supplement-taco?"

That said, virtually all of the ingredients listed (even oranges, in a citrus salsa) could be combined to make some tasty tacos.

yathern• 13 years ago

I read it as "supple mentos" and was, needless to say, confused how mentos fit into the "Eating Healthily" part.

ColinWright• 13 years ago

Why not do this as a more up-to-date, honest-to-goodness Linear Programming problem? Why all this faffing about with approximate sums by hand?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5775071

quantumpotato_2• 13 years ago

I pick vegetables from a community garden, buy lentils from the grocery store, cook them with spices.. add butter || peanut butter & quinoa for fats & more amino acids. Very healthy, very cheap, tastier than anything I find in restaurants.

Shorel• 13 years ago

My own version:

Buy palm oil, raw pork belly, plantains, milk and sugarless chocolate.

Palm oil and pork belly are rich in saturated fat, and they are cheap because of that.

Cut and fry the raw pork belly with a little bit of palm oil, then fry the plantains with the oil that's left.

Make the chocolate with half water-half milk.

Enjoy something really healthy for a keto-style diet. When the currently acknowledged science catches up with keto research, this will not be cheap anymore: remember the shortage of butter in Scandinavia. This food will be really expensive in 15-30 years. Enjoy while it lasts.

How to eat healthily for £1 per day – version 0.2

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