[jfritsch1984]

Healthy food is typically less expensive than junk food. The problem is education and motivation. I think diabetes is more a disease of affluence. When you can buy twinkies and pork chops you're not actually poor. When you are really poor you eat rice and beans and some vegetables you grow for yourself. And then you don't have diabetes typically.

Disclaimer: Not every T2D is purely from a bad diet. But many are.

[pengaru]

> When you can buy twinkies and pork chops you're not actually poor. When you are really poor you eat rice and beans and some vegetables you grow for yourself. And then you don't have diabetes typically.

The EBT program here in the US completely distorts the situation.

My local grocery store serves a very poor community, most of the customers pay with EBT. I get to see what kind of things these folks buy, it's idiotic. We could do a lot of good if EBT were only applicable to fresh perishable goods like produce/eggs/milk/fish/meat.

It almost seems like people on EBT hate themselves for being poor and lean in on being self-destructive while at the store paying for things with EBT. They largely buy processed/prepared junk food, it's unbelievable, but if you view the food they buy as another drug prodding the reward centers of their brains, it's making them feel good in the short-term while giving them diabetes and other ailments in the long-term. EBT enables affording it by being almost equivalent to cash.

[jfritsch1984]

As I said: These people should be educated and motivated. They have to learn about the consequences of these decisions. Only if that does not work I would restrict EBT to healthier foods.

On a personal note: I agree with you. It‘s hilarious what people buy even when they are on a tight budget.

[ficklepickle]

Is it hilarious? Is the misfortune of others humorous?

Perhaps it's the people with poor impulse control and lack of education that end up economically poor. Maybe they never learned better.

Taking pleasure from those less fortunate than yourself is a trick of the ego. It makes you feel better about yourself by labeling someone else inferior. It comes from a place of insecurity about one's own worth.

By simplifying the problem to a group of people simply being inferior, you miss all the nuance, the complex system of factors that created the result.

It's much easier to dehumanize. But if we don't counter these primitive tribal urges, we are bound to repeat the tragedies of history.

[flexblue]

> Healthy food is typically less expensive than junk food.

This isn't true, at least in the US. Or maybe we have a very different idea about what "healthy" food is.

Rice, beans and starchy vegetables are problematic for various (different) reasons and non-starchy vegetables generally aren't very nutritious from a macro perspective, which makes them relatively expensive.

[pengaru]

It is true, the produce department has some of the cheapest food in the store. How much is a bundle of bananas? That's a week's breakfast.

Unless you only buy organic, then you might go broke while hungry.

[flexblue]

Bananas by themselves are not healthy food, they're very high in sugar and have little else to offer.

Produce may look cheap, but if you add up the macros (and also some of the micros), it doesn't look cheap at all.

[bsanr2]

Also, the time cost of preparation.

I don't think there's a common understanding of how much time working class people have to spend on work. It's frequently on the order of 50-60 hours across more than one job, plus the attendant transit and pre-work chores. Your job doesn't provide you with cheap, healthy food on-site. You frequently can't eat on the way to or from work, per transit rules or enhanced police presence on your route. Lunch breaks are a strict 30 minutes, and being late can get you fired (hope whatever you're eating doesn't have too much fiber). You may have to go out of your way to shop, if you live in a food desert, and apartment fridges preclude buying in bulk. Oh, and for a racial angle, produce in cities (and, not uncommonly, in majority-minority suburbs) costs more than in white suburbs and rural areas.

We have so many UX experts on here, is it really that difficult to think of this problem as an experiential narrative instead of an engineering problem that can be solved by tweaking a few variables?

[pengaru]

> Bananas by themselves are not healthy food, they're very high in sugar and have little else to offer.

That depends on ripeness [0], I eat a mostly green banana every morning and it doesn't have much sugar at all while keeping my bowels very regular.

It's been my breakfast for decades, I'm quite healthy, and eat a diet almost entirely composed of raw produce. The rest is nuts/seeds/legumes and canned fish. I rarely ever cook, and if I didn't go for organic produce this would be a very cheap diet except for the nuts.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Resistant_starch#Nutritional_i...

[flexblue]

> It's been my breakfast for decades, I'm quite healthy, and eat a diet almost entirely composed of raw produce. The rest is nuts/seeds/legumes and canned fish.

You get virtually all of your macronutrients from the nuts, seeds, legumes and the fish - not the produce.

> I rarely ever cook, and if I didn't go for organic produce this would be a very cheap diet except for the nuts.

So it would be cheap if it was something else, but it's not.

In any event, I consider any diet high in grains/legumes a science experient which may or may not work out. I don't consider it a healthy diet.

[pengaru]

> So it would be cheap if it was something else, but it's not.

By volume most of the "nuts" are roasted unsalted peanuts, which are very cheap, and as you know actually legumes.

I just have a taste for expensive walnuts and cashews, and like organic produce, but I'm not poor.

Everyone can afford peanuts, or peanut butter. I prefer roasted intact peanuts since there's less opportunity for fuckery like replacing peanut oil with palm oil and adding sugar.

[jfritsch1984]

People eat beans for decades. Why should this be an experiment? Because people like Dr. Gundry want to sell books? He‘s even admitted on TV that cooking mitigates the whole problem. And who eats raw beans? I think it‘s pure hysteria. In observational studies „anti-nutrients“ are mostly associated with better health outcomes.

[jfritsch1984]

Bananas are high in potassium. And for a healthy individual fruit consumption has never been a problem. Please show me a study that fruit consumption is linked with higher rates of disease in healthy individuals.

[jfritsch1984]

Could you tell me why rice and beans are problematic? The studies I know are typically in favor of these kinds of food. Bean consumption is typically a good predictor for survival in elderly people. Is this some kind of carb-phobia?

[flexblue]

In the context of T2 diabetes, white rice is a high GI food. Brown rice, legumes and grains contain plant toxins and antinutrients which are poorly researched, but at least anecdotally can cause all kinds of issues especially in sensitive people.

Also, in the west, a lot of the culture of preparing these foods (such as fermenting or vigorous soaking) is bypassed.

> Bean consumption is typically a good predictor for survival in elderly people.

That data suffers from the usual issues related to nutritional studies. Consuming beans in place of donuts may be a good predictor of health, that doesn't mean that beans themselves are healthy relative to other healthy foods.

[read_if_gay_]

Rice may be relatively high GI but it and similar foods do not usually give you type 2 diabetes. Junk food does. Rice is far cheaper than that. I don’t really think you can make the case that T2 diabetes is a poor man’s sickness.

[friendlybus]

White rice is linked with 10% increased chance of t2 with each serving per day(1).

I don't know if poor Americans are doomed to diabetes, but it is certainly orders of magnitude easier for the poor to eat poorly compared to the rich. Boosting morale in the poor is difficult without cheap fatty/sweet food and drugs, other poor people have nearly nothing else to get by excessive stressors except exercise. Running a perfectly clean life is admirable and very difficult with limited resources, social standing and spare time.

(1)https://www.webmd.com/diabetes/news/20120315/white-rice-link...

[jfritsch1984]

I‘m pretty sure that that‘s a reverse causation. People who eat very high amounts of rice are the poor who can not afford a better mix of food. They are then malnourished as rice is not providing all needed nutrients. Also being poor means often no health care. Controlling for these socioeconomic factors is very difficult.

Rice in itself is a healthy food, especially when it is brown. I read a study some years ago where a doctor even cured mild forms of diabetes with high loads of rice instead of junk food. Don‘t have a link handy though.

Americans are not doomed to diabetes. Diabetes T2 is one of the easiest diseases to prevent. Vegans for example have 60-70% less diabetes according to observational studies like Adventist Health II.

[jfritsch1984]

Your beanphobia is even addressed by the Huffington Post: https://www.huffpost.com/entry/beans-calmin-the-fears_b_6464...

[Arubis]

When you’re sufficiently poor and live in a society that insists that you work to qualify for benefits, you absolutely do not have time to cook healthy meals. Prepared, junky food is a staple.

[jfritsch1984]

If you are well informed you could just cook once a week and eat that. I do that on the weekend with my family of five and it's quite a nice ritual. We cook rice and potatoes, put beans and sauce on top. And then put it in 20 containers for the week. I can prepare these meals within 2 minutes with a microwave. Breakfast is basically the same every day: Oat meal with some fruits. In the evening we eat bread with spread (which we also make on the weekend).

I would say we spend way less on food than your typical American. It's really THAT cheap. Also we have a lot of food for CoViD-19 as we store a lot of food in our cellar all year around (lentils, whole oats, canned beans, etc.).

Ah, and we are not poor in any way. I'm among top 5% in Germany. I think it's just healthy and sustainable (for the same reason we don't own a car).

[flexblue]

Without any further context, this is most likely not a healthy diet. You're certainly missing out on B vitamins and heme iron due to lack of meat and likely have a poor Omega 6 to Omega 3 ratio due to the use of plant oils over other fats. Just a guess.

You also probably get way too much sugar from sugary fruits which you overindulge in because your diet otherwise is so "healthy". Instead of soft drinks you have fruit juices, which have effectively the same amount of sugar. Again, just a guess.

You probably got your nutrition advice from ideologically based publications, or you're just "winging it" based on what makes sense to you, in which case you're likely going to be wrong as well.

[jfritsch1984]

I did my research. Also I tracked my nutrition with Cronometer in the first weeks. Not a single day did I miss on B-vitamins.

Heme iron is associated with disease in all major studies. I don‘t see a reason to ingest it.

I have a great O3/O6 ratio. I don‘t use oil at all and avoid foods that are filled with plant oils. My breakfast contains lots of flax seeds. Our usual foods contain hemp seeds. All good sources of O3. And all without pollutants from fish.

I get a lot of information from nutritionfacts.org. Dr. Greger offers free information as in free beer. No ads, no sponsors, even the earnings from his books are given to charity. I highly recommend you check him out. He certainly has his biases but still way less than most other doctors.

[flexblue]

> I did my research. Also I tracked my nutrition with Cronometer in the first weeks. Not a single day did I miss on B-vitamins.

If you didn't have any animal foods, you're going to be missing out on B-vitamins, because of low bioavailability[1].

> Heme iron is associated with disease in all major studies. I don‘t see a reason to ingest it.

An excess of many essential nutrients and vitamins is associated with disease, that doesn't mean you should cut them out. Non-heme iron is way less bioavailable, especially in combination with plant antinutrients[2], so you can end up iron-deficient.

> I have a great O3/O6 ratio. I don‘t use oil at all and avoid foods that are filled with plant oils.

You probably should be using oil, just not plant oils.

> My breakfast contains lots of flax seeds. Our usual foods contain hemp seeds. All good sources of O3.

Unfortunately not, because those sources also have low bio-availability.

> And all without pollutants from fish.

Pollutants are unfortunate, but when it comes to nutrition, you have to pick your poisen. Salmon roe is a good source of Omega 3 that is low in pollutants.

> I get a lot of information from nutritionfacts.org. Dr. Greger offers free information as in free beer. No ads, no sponsors, even the earnings from his books are given to charity. I highly recommend you check him out. He certainly has his biases but still way less than most other doctors.

A plant-based diet is ideology that is cherry-picking and misrepresenting some insights of nutrition science while sweeping others under the rug. With his exaggerated claims[4], Greger isn't any more credible than certain people on "the other side".

[1] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/2843032

[2] https://academic.oup.com/ajcn/article/91/5/1461S/4597424

[3] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/24261532

[4] https://sciencebasedmedicine.org/death-as-a-foodborne-illnes...

[jfritsch1984]

I think it is not productive to have this discussion. I have good blood markers after 6 years on this diet. LDL of 52. BP of 101/74. So for me this diet is way healthier than the omnivorous diet that I had before. If you want to believe that animals are essential for human health, go on. But in my opinion science does not back this up. But that is my interpretation.

Your thoughts on bioavailability are also outdated. It has been shown for protein, iron and some vitamins that bioavailability in practice is very good for plant sources. E.g. iron is converted as good as heme iron when combined with vitamin C. And it‘s hard to avoid C on a plant based diet.

May I ask where you get your information from?

[jfritsch1984]

Regarding B6. The last days that I tracked I had 3-4 times the RDA of B6 with ~4mg. Even if the absorption were really low I still meet what my body needs. And other sources report way better absorption rates.

[pengaru]

This is nonsense, you don't even need to cook anything at all to eat healthy from the grocery store.

You just have to get off your ass and actually go buy perishable fresh groceries regularly and plan for the week ahead.

Laziness and convenience prevails.

If it's a lack of time, then it's a lack of time to even hit the grocery store. Which depending on where you live, if it's a food desert situation, may be valid.