132 ms·

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

98 points by lenazegher 13y ago

lenazegher 13y ago
v0.1 discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5685812 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5685812
TamDenholm 13y 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.
- mitchi 13y 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.
- VLM 13y 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 13y ago
I really want to see some meat on that menu. I hope they do a 1.5£ or 2£ version.
- antoko 13y 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/sectionpagecontainer.jsp?skuId=1000000473493&departmentid=1214921923780&aisleid=1214921924895&startValue=%27%27 http://groceries.asda.com/asda-estore/catalog/sectionpagecon...
- ctdonath 13y 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).
- ctdonath 13y ago
  I just grilled & ate a hamburger. Under $1 for meat, sesame bun, and salsa (easy mix of vegetables).
deleted 13y ago
[deleted]
VLM 13y 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.
- mitchi 13y 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.
  - VLM 13y 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.
mseebach 13y 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 13y ago
  It's a UK government health recommendation: http://www.nhs.uk/Livewell/5ADAY/Pages/Whatcounts.aspx http://www.nhs.uk/Livewell/5ADAY/Pages/Whatcounts.aspx
  - mseebach 13y 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".
    - VLM 13y ago
      Top down you'll get studies with graphs of veg intake vs "illness" and pretty much the more veg you eat, the better. This is an outcome based "why" not a biochemical based "why". Bottom up there really are no completely ideal foods, but there are foods that specialize in certain things, and much as animal meat specializes in protein, veg specializes in fiber and the micronutrients (vitamins, minerals, etc). This specialization is not absolute. You could get your vitamin A from a meal of liver once a week or so, but it seems easier just to eat a carrot every day or two. Unless you really like liver. Fruits are almost as good as veg other than having lots of sugar. The "why" for the hair shirt crowd is its pretty easy to F up vegetables such that they taste horrible, therefore they feel better because you're suffering, because you deserve it. Why? Doesn't matter much. They'd probably be really pissed off that I actually enjoy the taste of a salad of proper proportions, or a snack of eating a carrot or whatever. You guys in the UK are pretty lucky to have science based guidelines, in the USA our govt enforced guidelines are based solely on who paid politicians election funds, so we're stuck with "eat as much grains as you can" and stuff like that, designed to make us fat.
juskrey 13y 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 13y 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#Predators http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wildlife_of_South_Africa#Predat...
solox3 13y 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 13y 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.
DanBC 13y 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.
Kurtz79 13y ago
An interesting read, and I would still prefer spending an year with this diet than a week on Soylent.
pvnick 13y 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 13y 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 13y ago
  I read it as "supple mentos" and was, needless to say, confused how mentos fit into the "Eating Healthily" part.
ColinWright 13y 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 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5775071
quantumpotato_ 13y 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 13y 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.

98 points by lenazegher 13y ago

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

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.

mitchi 13y 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.
VLM 13y 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 13y ago

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

antoko 13y 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/sectionpagecontainer.jsp?skuId=1000000473493&departmentid=1214921923780&aisleid=1214921924895&startValue=%27%27 http://groceries.asda.com/asda-estore/catalog/sectionpagecon...
ctdonath 13y 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).
ctdonath 13y ago
I just grilled & ate a hamburger. Under $1 for meat, sesame bun, and salsa (easy mix of vegetables).

deleted 13y ago

[deleted]

VLM 13y 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.

mitchi 13y 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.
- VLM 13y 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.

mseebach 13y 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 13y ago
It's a UK government health recommendation: http://www.nhs.uk/Livewell/5ADAY/Pages/Whatcounts.aspx http://www.nhs.uk/Livewell/5ADAY/Pages/Whatcounts.aspx
- mseebach 13y 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".
  - VLM 13y ago
    Top down you'll get studies with graphs of veg intake vs "illness" and pretty much the more veg you eat, the better. This is an outcome based "why" not a biochemical based "why". Bottom up there really are no completely ideal foods, but there are foods that specialize in certain things, and much as animal meat specializes in protein, veg specializes in fiber and the micronutrients (vitamins, minerals, etc). This specialization is not absolute. You could get your vitamin A from a meal of liver once a week or so, but it seems easier just to eat a carrot every day or two. Unless you really like liver. Fruits are almost as good as veg other than having lots of sugar. The "why" for the hair shirt crowd is its pretty easy to F up vegetables such that they taste horrible, therefore they feel better because you're suffering, because you deserve it. Why? Doesn't matter much. They'd probably be really pissed off that I actually enjoy the taste of a salad of proper proportions, or a snack of eating a carrot or whatever. You guys in the UK are pretty lucky to have science based guidelines, in the USA our govt enforced guidelines are based solely on who paid politicians election funds, so we're stuck with "eat as much grains as you can" and stuff like that, designed to make us fat.

juskrey 13y 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 13y 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#Predators http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wildlife_of_South_Africa#Predat...

solox3 13y 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 13y 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.

DanBC 13y 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.

Kurtz79 13y ago

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

pvnick 13y 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 13y 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 13y ago
I read it as "supple mentos" and was, needless to say, confused how mentos fit into the "Eating Healthily" part.

ColinWright 13y 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 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5775071

quantumpotato_ 13y 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 13y 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.