Interesting discussion form another forum recently - about the first thing a vet asks when you take your pet to them is "what have you been feeding them?", yet doctors? This guy had been hospitalized and had a battery of bacterial tests run before anybody asked him about his diet.
Diet and health are absolutely a big problem. One of my big problems is not access, but the amount of work needed to have a well-balanced meal. Most of the time I would eat unhealthy just because it is more convenient.
How about everyone else, and do you guys have tips?
For someone who prizes convenience over maximizing health, just take a multivitamin. Assuming you're a healthy weight, you'll get 70% of the health benefit of all these cooking instructions everyone is so eager to provide, but with 0.1% of the effort.
It can be a lot easier if you focus on longer periods, eating healthy over 2 days is much less effort than trying to pick ideal meals you could have unlimited quantities of.
Try unusual things regularly. If you find yourself really enjoying the taste of something odd, it's probably because your missing out on a nutrient it has.
EX: If you eat animals don't just eat fat and meat, liver pate for example can be a really good dip.
There are pretty simple meals that are healthy, nutritious, and delicious. Eg baked chicken and roasted cauliflower. For that matter, don't hate on most vegetables just because your parents got them canned or cooked them terribly.
eg this tastes amazing, and you're looking at like 2 - 3 minutes of prep time, and makes enough for a couple days. Ditch the thyme if it's a hassle, and you don't have to cut the cauliflower that finely. http://www.foodnetwork.com/recipes/food-network-kitchens/roa...
Baked chicken (buy it skin-on -- it's both cheaper and it retains moisture) is similarly easy to cook. Dump random spices on it, roast. Here's a recipe
http://www.gimmesomeoven.com/baked-chicken-breast/
Most people I find who don't like chicken breast dislike it because someone -- probably parents -- cooked the shit out of it and it was dry as a bone. That's not how chicken breast should taste. If your chicken breast is dry you're overcooking it. Pay the $1 or $2 premium for locally raised, never frozen chicken breasts at your local butcher. You'll taste the difference. Feel free to ask them how to cook it; generally they'll be happy to give you advice.
Sweet potatoes taste great with nothing else and require you to score them and put them in your oven.
For that matter, get a crock pot. There's dozens of variations of a recipe like this: buy tough meat cut (and hence cheap!), roughly chop some vegetables, put in water in crock pot, let crock pot cook it for 8 hours. Come home to amazing hot food. I'm not exaggerating when I say 10 minutes of prep time, and it's enough food for 2 people to eat 2 large meals each.
This might still be on the complex side, but I've been doing this diet on and off for about 2 months. I created a webapp to do the simple math of counting calories and other macros, but a simple spreadsheet would also work.
Breakfast: Coffee
Lunch: Turkey and avocado sandwich (1 Avocado, 4 slices bread, lettuce, cucumber, 4 slices of sliced smoked turkey).
Afternoon snack: 1 banana and 43g pure almond butter.
Dinner: Varying meals made in batches to make up ~2000 calories per day. This week (qty per day) was turkey chili: 1 can red kidney beans, 8oz ground turkey, spices, and a few corn tortillas.
I started out with much more complex recipes, but simplified the diet to minimize preparation time. Also the lettuce, cucumber and bananas I get from work.
Beans and rice or potatoes with milk are both nutritionally complete diets. I've never lived off of rice and beans but I got an awful lot of my calories in university from mashed potatoes with milk and butter.
Frying mixed frozen vegetables in butter and dumping spices on top is very fast, ten minutes cooking max, and tastes pretty good.
tl;dr: spend 3 hours a week doing food prep such that you can throw together many quality meals with minimal fuss over the next week.
Food prep: buy your veggies, Broccoli, Asparagus, meat, potatoes et al on Saturday.
Boil, bake and prepare the food on Sunday so that on Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, an easy breakfast, lunch or dinner is made by tossing two eggs (or other protein source: roasted turkey or whatever you prepared on Sunday), roasted potatoes, spinach, Broccoli and the like and you're good. At least one good meal per day.
I do this for our family of three and we eat at least two high quality meals per day.
Food prep takes practise. Eventually its like clockwork and you can crack out a lot of food in 3 hours.
I just try to eat a footlong Subway sandwich with all the veggies every few meals.
It doesn't taste great, but it doesn't cost much (in terms of both time and money), and I assume it should be pretty decent in terms of nutritional variety, if nothing else. And it allows me to just eat whatever I'm in the mood for for all my other meals without having to plan out my nutrition intake super meticulously.
I might replace Subway sandwiches with a Soylent-type meal-replacement product in a decade or two, when hopefully most of the issues are worked out and risks made evident.
see if you like cooking. it makes eating a hobby you do every day with the side effect of nutrition. it can be frustrating at first but as with most things the key is patience and consistency.
If you have money and no time just outsource to a local meal delivery service that specialises in nutrition. They are about $250-500/mth CAD here depending on what you want (weight loss, gourmet, paleo, vegan ect).
Please drop some names if you've seen meal delivery services that are rigorously quantitative in nutritional checking. It's common for these services to check off requirements for different food groups, but rare to see a meal delivery service show how their daily set of meals satisfy all the 30+ dietary reference intakes/upper limits/adequate intake for specific age/gender/weight of patrons, at least in the United States under the Institute of Medicine's guidelines.
I don't believe "a guy who is sick and doesn't mention that he eats only white bread and American cheese" is a sign of a scurvy epidemic. In fact, I actively disbelieve it.
My issue with articles like these is people start to think things like vitamins are a problem in their diets.
They are not!
Vitamins don't matter. They are a religious/marketing gimmick!
The people in these articles are extremes and most likely have bigger issues (and are not HN readers)
Study after study has shown vitamins supplements in rich countries (and hence vitamins in food) don't mater. Yes, the food religious types think pills are different to food. Once again that's just not science, it's (marketing) religion.
As long as you are not in the .1% with extreme issues (Or a few well known exceptions like pregnant, vegan, lacking sunshine), worry about the bigger issues.
What matters is the bad stuff you put into your body like highly refined energy, alcohol, smoke.
Micronutrients only matter for the extreme poor. Which there's a billion of, but once again not HN readers looking at their personal diets.
[+] [-] bigiain|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] kevindeasis|10 years ago|reply
How about everyone else, and do you guys have tips?
[+] [-] jessriedel|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Retric|10 years ago|reply
Try unusual things regularly. If you find yourself really enjoying the taste of something odd, it's probably because your missing out on a nutrient it has.
EX: If you eat animals don't just eat fat and meat, liver pate for example can be a really good dip.
[+] [-] x0x0|10 years ago|reply
eg this tastes amazing, and you're looking at like 2 - 3 minutes of prep time, and makes enough for a couple days. Ditch the thyme if it's a hassle, and you don't have to cut the cauliflower that finely. http://www.foodnetwork.com/recipes/food-network-kitchens/roa...
Baked chicken (buy it skin-on -- it's both cheaper and it retains moisture) is similarly easy to cook. Dump random spices on it, roast. Here's a recipe http://www.gimmesomeoven.com/baked-chicken-breast/
Most people I find who don't like chicken breast dislike it because someone -- probably parents -- cooked the shit out of it and it was dry as a bone. That's not how chicken breast should taste. If your chicken breast is dry you're overcooking it. Pay the $1 or $2 premium for locally raised, never frozen chicken breasts at your local butcher. You'll taste the difference. Feel free to ask them how to cook it; generally they'll be happy to give you advice.
Sweet potatoes taste great with nothing else and require you to score them and put them in your oven.
Roasted brussel sprouts are similar: prep time 2-3 minutes. Taste great. http://www.foodnetwork.com/recipes/ina-garten/roasted-brusse...
For that matter, get a crock pot. There's dozens of variations of a recipe like this: buy tough meat cut (and hence cheap!), roughly chop some vegetables, put in water in crock pot, let crock pot cook it for 8 hours. Come home to amazing hot food. I'm not exaggerating when I say 10 minutes of prep time, and it's enough food for 2 people to eat 2 large meals each.
[+] [-] google15|10 years ago|reply
Breakfast: Coffee
Lunch: Turkey and avocado sandwich (1 Avocado, 4 slices bread, lettuce, cucumber, 4 slices of sliced smoked turkey).
Afternoon snack: 1 banana and 43g pure almond butter.
Dinner: Varying meals made in batches to make up ~2000 calories per day. This week (qty per day) was turkey chili: 1 can red kidney beans, 8oz ground turkey, spices, and a few corn tortillas.
I started out with much more complex recipes, but simplified the diet to minimize preparation time. Also the lettuce, cucumber and bananas I get from work.
[+] [-] rwallace|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] pjc50|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] barry-cotter|10 years ago|reply
Frying mixed frozen vegetables in butter and dumping spices on top is very fast, ten minutes cooking max, and tastes pretty good.
[+] [-] mipapage|10 years ago|reply
Food prep: buy your veggies, Broccoli, Asparagus, meat, potatoes et al on Saturday.
Boil, bake and prepare the food on Sunday so that on Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, an easy breakfast, lunch or dinner is made by tossing two eggs (or other protein source: roasted turkey or whatever you prepared on Sunday), roasted potatoes, spinach, Broccoli and the like and you're good. At least one good meal per day.
I do this for our family of three and we eat at least two high quality meals per day.
Food prep takes practise. Eventually its like clockwork and you can crack out a lot of food in 3 hours.
[+] [-] lewisl9029|10 years ago|reply
It doesn't taste great, but it doesn't cost much (in terms of both time and money), and I assume it should be pretty decent in terms of nutritional variety, if nothing else. And it allows me to just eat whatever I'm in the mood for for all my other meals without having to plan out my nutrition intake super meticulously.
I might replace Subway sandwiches with a Soylent-type meal-replacement product in a decade or two, when hopefully most of the issues are worked out and risks made evident.
[+] [-] staunch|10 years ago|reply
1/2 cup oats + 1 cup water + pinch of salt + ~2 minutes on high. Optionally, add sugar, butter, milk, and/or fruit.
[+] [-] spedru|10 years ago|reply
Vitamin supplements.
Start packing yourself lunch.
[+] [-] skybrian|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] beachstartup|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] puredemo|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] pakled_engineer|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] frofroggy|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] powera|10 years ago|reply
I don't believe "a guy who is sick and doesn't mention that he eats only white bread and American cheese" is a sign of a scurvy epidemic. In fact, I actively disbelieve it.
[+] [-] Grue3|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] aaron695|10 years ago|reply
They are not!
Vitamins don't matter. They are a religious/marketing gimmick!
The people in these articles are extremes and most likely have bigger issues (and are not HN readers)
Study after study has shown vitamins supplements in rich countries (and hence vitamins in food) don't mater. Yes, the food religious types think pills are different to food. Once again that's just not science, it's (marketing) religion.
As long as you are not in the .1% with extreme issues (Or a few well known exceptions like pregnant, vegan, lacking sunshine), worry about the bigger issues.
What matters is the bad stuff you put into your body like highly refined energy, alcohol, smoke.
Micronutrients only matter for the extreme poor. Which there's a billion of, but once again not HN readers looking at their personal diets.
[+] [-] soared|10 years ago|reply