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Comment by ianai | Hacker News Reader

In my experience, society pressures many bad decisions on people out of social conformity or expectations. For instance, it’s pretty hard to live a genuinely healthy lifestyle in the US. Most jobs are sedentary. Diet options tend to be heavily animal based and fatty or otherwise nutrient poor and calorie rich. Everybody loves tailgating the car going the speed limit, etc. simply opting out of those things will probably result in better health outcomes.

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It's funny. I see heavily animal based and fatty as healthy.

I'd write this as: "diet options tend to be sugar based and nutrient poor, filled with soy and corn syrup."

It depends on the animals and fats. eg red meats correlate with heart disease and some cancers.

On mobile, sorry for my lack of sources. If I recall, the animal meats/fat's linked to cancer studies claim themselves that it could be the way factory farms work or the meats being processed that caused the correlation, and they did not reproduce results with organic meats. As for the heart disease, there is a well known heart sergeon who seems to have studies supporting that it is excess carbs that lead to inflammation in the arteries that leads to plaque build up that leads to heart disease. Food for thought.

And there are other well known surgeons that have articles indicating animal based diets lead to inflammation and etc. I’m not trying to argue vegan vs Keto or whatever here. If you choose either of those options you’re almost immediately looking to cook more for yourself -the diet equivalent of being a loner (sorta). (Side note, though, the animal based options are much more prevalent than the vegan options.)

This may seem a small thing, but people really do socialize around food to a large extent.

This is contested now--in part due to the sugar industries tactics of trying to make saturated fat the evil.

They didn't control for nitrates/processed meats either in some of the studies.

https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0095ZMPTU/ref=dp-kindle-redirect?...

As well, the fact that starch and sugar are essentially identical metabolically is a key point that people don't believe, mostly because they don't want to at a deep emotional level. Replacing doughnuts and chips with bagels and pasta can make no difference, except other people's perception.

Don't let perfect be the enemy of good here, replacing doughnuts , chips, bagels and pasta with say black rice or boiled potatoes still has nutrients benefits. Just choose something with an incrementally better nutrients profile.

Totally. I deliberately chose bagels and pasta as being foods as calorie rich and nutritionally empty as a can of coke. Yet people think their pasta salad is healthy.

And I completely misread what you wrote at first, we're in perfect agreement :)

Oh absolutely. Trying to diet in a major city without spending a lot of time cooking is impossible. And it feels like most cuisines are vegetable-phobic which I cannot for the life of me understand.

> Trying to diet in a major city without spending a lot of time cooking is impossible

What? Are you expecting to be able to eat high quality, nutritious, and tasty food without investing either more time or money? I live in NYC and you can absolutely eat healthy food without cooking, it just costs a bit more.

Beans, gluten, rice, potatoes, etc are all commodity goods and very cheap. Nuts can get pricy but they’re so calorically dense that you don’t need many of them either. You’re not going to convince me that cooking a baked good with a chia substitute for egg is more resource intensive.

Where this argument fails is probably due to lack of economies of scale. Ie if those substitutions were made with the subsidies and scale of their animal based contemporaries they would be dramatically cheaper.

Maybe I'm misunderstanding you, but why do you associate chia substitute for egg with health?

If for nothing else, it’s a choice society makes for me and does not offer the later substitute. This reinforces the original post. Much of modern food have ingredients with sizable populations of people with allergies to those ingredients - gluten, peanut, etc. There may be more options now, but those allergies still force people out of the usual options most of the time. “Being alone” in this context would mean cooking those things at home - and generally be healthier as a result, for whatever that person deems healthy.

From what I can see, an issue here is the default experience of going out for a meal in the US. Food is very associated with social activities pretty much everywhere, but the United States restaurant experience too often involves way too huge portions. This portion size ballooning certainly has contributed to the United States' obesity (https://www.nhlbi.nih.gov/health/educational/wecan/news-even...).

From what I see, in New York City and other major cities, it's a lot easier to find restaurants that are more balanced in portions and/or promote healthier fare. This is not necessarily true everywhere in the United States... and even in NYC, I'm sure there are quite a number of restaurants that fall into that ballooned portion size category. If a group of folks decides that this type of restaurant is what they want, if you are on a diet, what do you do?

In this sense, I actually think the introvert has an advantage here. Heck, so many of the US social activities revolve around often junk-y food and/or alcohol... whether it be a celebratory party, a pancake breakfast, a picnic lunch, a potluck social, gathering to watch a game, etc...

Yes, and as I have been trying to go vegan I’ve noticed how many animal products are put into food needlessly. I shouldn’t have to eat egg or milk in a tortilla, salsa (animal stock), bread, burrito, McDonald’s French fries (!), cupcake, etc.

It's not needless, the reason for all of this is flavor. Meat fats/proteins have a very appealing flavor for most people. So when companies perform taste tests, the richer, meatier flavors have more broad appeal.

I absolutely understand your frustration with this. Especially because it's certainly not obvious that many of these items contain animal products. I hope that one day the US adopts the green/red mark system for distinguishing between vegetarian foods, but for now, it's probably best to assume that all ready-made food in the US contains meat products, unless it's explicitly labeled otherwise.

I doubt anyone can taste the difference in a tortilla. You probably can in French fries, but that’s hardly a common practice outside of McD. Umami definitely wins approval, but I doubt meat would provide umami in so many foods without the subsidies in place.

> I shouldn’t have to eat egg or milk in a tortilla

Correct.

Lard, OTOH...

Lots of healthy stuff that doesn't take long to cook!

Sprouts or similar type stores have pre-prepped ready-to-cook (sometimes even just microwave!) fresh veggies and the like. Lentils will get you a bunch of protein and fiber and cook in ~30min, without a bunch of excess carbs or sugars. Legumes in general are going to be your friend. If you want meat, do something like get a bunch of frozen tuna steaks or chicken breasts and then toss one in the oven - under an hour total, most of which is just oven pre-heating. Beans take longer to cook, but it's mostly just occasional stirring, so not that big a deal.

The secret to keeping cook time down is to minimize prep and ingredient count but experiment a bit to find good combinations of minimal seasonings and such. Or just accept a blander main course as a trade for not spending hours prepping and all.

One of my tricks is to invest time on the weekend to making something very spicy and flexible. I can stir my vegan “carne adovada“ into a can of cooked vegetables and have a decent spicy soup in microwave time.

So interestingly I found a way. I am not in a major city though. Whole Foods! They have cooked food inside this magical place. I eat there every single day.

Used to feel that way until I got a high-power blender (Vitamix, Blendtec, Ninja, etc) and a juicer. It's very easy to make vegetable soups with a blender. I still eat meat though.

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