The poor can’t afford to follow public health advice

I find this very interesting. I'm a graduate student in Midwest of the US. My income places me in the bottom 20% of household incomes. Not poor, but money must be carefully managed. In my experience, eating well isn't that expensive in terms of time or money, provided you are willing to adjust your diet. I keep good track of my finances and diet, and I spend nowhere near that figure (and I still wouldn't, even if I made half of what I do) and I have a pretty healthy diet and reasonably active lifestyle.

What are in these guidelines making them so expensive? Or in the US, particularly in the Midwest, is the cost of food that much cheaper than the UK?

Bullshit.

I'll preface what I'm going to say next by saying I'm in the US and I know this was a UK report - but I highly doubt things are so incredibly different over there in terms of cost. That being said, there's utterly no way that has to be the case. Raw produce (not meats) from a farmer's market or most major supermarkets are very cheap. I can spend $30-$40 and have enough for 3-4 people for a full week. Also, sausage is usually very cheap. I buy the store brand (which happens to be delicious) and it's usually <$3 per lb. The 73% beef from Walmart is cheap as hell and usually hovers around $3-$3.25 per lb most of the time. One of those burgers (quarter-pounder, so 4 oz) has 340 calories and is a dream for anyone doing keto. So that $3 package contains about 1350 to 1400 calories! The cereal I make myself has only 4 ingredients and is loaded with healthy carbs (steel cut oats, flax seed, walnuts, and raisins). $12 to $15 dollars buys a bag of each of those ingredients which all have around 15 or so servings - that's over two weeks...or less than a dollar a day (per person). And that is a very high calorie breakfast, BTW. Water costs essentially nothing per gallon. Eggs are cheap and super healthy. There's plenty of cheap, tasty cheeses you can buy in bulk, too. You can get whole seasoned, rotisserie, cooked and ready-to-eat chickens for $5! That's multiple meals for a single person or a meal for an entire family. And I don't live in a rural part of the US where prices are cheaper - I live in an expensive area of the northeast.

You can easily feed a family of 4 on $125 a week using the items I outlined above (along with other cheap options).

The problem is that the person at the sharp is incapable for whatever reason of providing nutritious meals despite the basic conditions generally being available for them to do so. It's a poverty of history, culture, community, education, imagination, willingness, instinct, morale perhaps, but not money. None of that is the fault of the socially deprived, but the idea that more money will magically fix everything (as the left constantly parrot) is just as much of an untruth as the idea that the poor are too stupid and lazy to sort out their own lives.

Apart from that I do think it's amazing that politicians are surprised that despair is increasing. When was the last time you heard a politician stand up and praise Britain and the British people absent virtue signalling about diversity etc.? Constantly demoralise people for decades, do nothing to properly integrate minorities nor construct a cohesive unified nation: get demoralised people.

It's absolutely insane to look back on, but it makes me understand how people fall into eating so terribly when you're poor.

Looking back I would instead just eat potatoes, carrots, rice, beans, and try and throw some apples/oranges in there occasionally. Homemade bread when you've got time is a nice and cheap addition as well. You can live just fine on everything I just listed and it won't cost you much.

You can feed someone very well for $50/week. And you can even do it in a way that requires only low-effort cooking: meat that can be baked, microwaveable vegetables, eggs that can be simply boiled or cooked in a pan with butter, pasta and oatmeal. Dairy products, fruits, some vegetables, and nuts can just be eaten without processing. Canned food that can be eaten right out of the can or just heated up.

Assuming a main reason poor people don't eat healthier food is due to lack of time, cognitive overhead, or lack of knowledge (not only re: what food is healthy or not, but also how to optimize nutrition/f(cost, time, effort)) it could help. I don't have time to go into how it's even possible healthy food could take 75% of someone's income (assuming that person has an income of $10k/year, that is over $140/week) but there are surely compromises you can make to get the majority of the benefits of eating healthy food without spending nearly that much.

The full report doesn't have much to support it, it never shows us what food cost, how they're unable to afford it. At best it talks about "availability" of healthy food as if the supermarkets doesn't sell it.

The report never considers that the unhealthy food might be a taste preference just like smoking even though everybody knows it's very unhealthy and very expensive. Giving up smoking isn't expensive, it's not money that stops people from quitting smoking.

Low-income groups are more likely to consume fat spreads, non-diet soft drinks, meat dishes, pizzas, processed meats, whole milk and table sugar than the better-off (pg 133)

My personal observation from observing shoppers in a number of supermarkets: poor people buys quite a lot more soft drinks than the well educated.

The health of the poor is not improved much by giving them (free) fresh produce when they drink a couple of liters of non-diet Coca Cola every day. They end up obese or with diabetes which are the mother of all ills. An ounce of broccoli can't cure 2L of Coca Cola.

I think the single most effective policy would be to ban sugar in drinks and severely restrict its use in fast food (and bread). The fat-free policies must be reverted to avoid foods using sugar as replacement for fat.

Going to McDonalds is much more expensive, something like 20$ per day!

With the proper education, you can eat cost effectively and very healthily. And, I know it's really controversial to say this because of the decades of conditioning we've received from the dairy and meat industry, but Meat and Dairy aren't needed in the diet, and have been shown to even cause cancer, heart disease and heart stroke for many. (source Forks over Knives, the documentary, plus the China study -> check it out, seriously.)

Lean meat and fish in particular are also expensive and over-emphasized. You can get a similar protein/fat ratio by eating cheap meat or cheese with legumes or oats and it comes with fiber.

Eggs are unfairly demonized. Only a tiny proportion of the population needs to limit egg consumption beyond what taste will do naturally. But protein is the most expensive macronutrient and eggs are a cheap source with relatively low fat and loads of vitamins. Cheese also falls into this category, with many people who do not currently have any tumors rigorously avoiding a small increase in their IGF-1, a hormone which performs many essential functions but slightly increases tumor growth rates. You can thank T. Colin Campbell for this absurdity.

Potassium is very confusing. The most economical sources for most people are probably from canned tomato products, beans and fresh potatoes — the latter being a cheap vegetable whose nutritional value is highly underrated thanks to a proliferation of processed potato products. Most people, however, will reach for bananas and avocadoes — delicacies to the poor.

Bread, too, deserves a more nuanced look. It ranges from sweet, thick and highly glycemic to relatively health-neutral and highly pragmatic wrt home-made lunches. “Bread” here can be extended to wraps and tortillas. “Don’t eat bread” is very often impractical. Pasta, on the other hand, is loved by diet authorities for its satiating bulk, but it’s a mess to make and requires you to wash a pot and a bowl. The rice cooker has yet to assume its rightful place on the counter.

Home cooking in general has been neutered by making everyone terrified of adding butter or salt. So people choose between bland foods with no butter or salt or packaged foods with absurd amounts of salt, palm oil and artificial flavor. This advice should be revised with an eye to taste.

It is not too surprising that health advice designed for the rich does not serve the poor. I don’t think the obesity crisis can be solved with health advice alone, but I also think the advice could be a lot better than it is. I don’t think we need to teach people to cook — people can learn to cook. Most people, however, do not have the number sense to assimilate hundreds of nutrition labels and prices into a diet strategy. That is difficult and boring. It doesn’t help that many products have such tiny serving sizes that the nutrient label is meaningless thanks to rounding errors. The system could be simpler and clearer. (Even with extreme effort I find myself constantly revising my own plans.)

We always did eat very healthy at home. First because my parents saw that as one of the priorities (they never went to dinner out, lunch out, even coffee out in my early years, since they couldn't afford that lifestyle and keep their finances in a proper state... I guess the only luxury we had was having a dog - for which I am very grateful), second because they would take the time and effort to prepare a proper meal (yes, even after arriving home from working all day in their physically demanding jobs) and the ingredients to a healthy meal are cheap, but it takes effort to put that kind of meal together.

All this happened in what is today a somewhat rich western European country.

It really bothers me (and I guess other people like me), this culture of constantly dismissing people lack of self responsibility. In the EU (and I would go as far as saying, in the all 1st world), if you are willing to work and to watch how you spend your money (and this means closely, no 5$ latte like another article today just talks about, or ordering pizza because you don't want to prepare dinner), anyone can end up having a comfortable life.

“I’ll give you an example,” he adds, “If everyone followed Public Health England’s eating advice, people in the bottom decile of household income would spend 74 per cent of their income on food. So, there’s not much point telling them follow the healthy eating advice they can’t afford.

I think I can see why. Here is Public Health England's "A Quick Guide to the Government’s Healthy Eating Recommendations":

https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/...

It advises people to eat more expensive meat (oily fish) in place of cheaper meats, and to eat large portions of fruits and vegetables. Those two factors look to explain the cost increase. The other advice (choose unsaturated oils, eat complex carbohydrates instead of simple ones) does not require buying more expensive foods.

If you just bought foods according to the pictures and examples in the Public Health England brochure, you could spend a lot more money on food. It's possible to follow dietary recommendations without spending much (if any) more if you know how to budget and optimize, and if you already have a stove and refrigerator/freezer. I don't really think it's possible if you don't have a refrigerator/freezer. Limited transportation options can make it harder too.

Worst of all, IMO, is that the brochure and linked eating guides contain no sample meal plans, shopping plans, or example prices/budgets. Bridging this sort of gap used to be (still is?) sometimes taught in Home Economics and Personal Finance classes in the United States. (I took both in high school.) It's also the sort of skill that children often used to acquire from their parents, but perhaps acquire less often now. It's way too hard for someone without that skill to go from this Healthy Eating brochure to a cost-and-health satisficing shopping plan with accompanying meal plans.

It's funny how I don't use as much money since I went carnivore. My health has improved greatly, my depression went away.

For about 3 months I was keto, basically unaffordable, so I cut the fresh greens and went with meat alone.

3 months of eating 1.5 KG pork every day, still expensive. went with about 500 grams of ground meat for about a year and after I figured out the keto-carnivore thing it's about

1 block of butter every 3 days as well as 250 grams of beef is enough to survive.

I'm building my own mealworm farm for protein and fat as well as a snail hatchery for giant african snails for protein.

as poor person you basically never know when you will have to rely on yourself. So I'm trying to build for self sufficiency with solar panel and car battery as well as my own food production.

so many questions help! 1. Why? - I wanted to try it for the depression - it worked for multiple other ailments https://meatheals.com has a lot of similar stories - some people live like that for a long time now.

2. Will I die from scurvey or other nutrient deficiency? - I dont't know. Bloodwork looked okay. Cholesterol is high (Dave Feldman has some interesting things to say about that) Yes I do fear that I don't get some nutrients but I eat some organ meat now and then, add gelatine to my meat, drink milk and eat butter, eggs, cheese, fish, different animals, different states of fermentation now and then.

3. Did I supplement? - yes, I took magnesium citrate for a while but not taking any now, except for when I have a headache. When I still ate "normal", zinc did a lot for my depression.

4. why insects rather than plants? - Plants in general seem to give me allergic reactions -> Carbs and sugar seem to make me depressed, greens and onions seem to amplify anxiety, plant oils give me headaches. After having symptoms every time I tried another plant, I stopped trying and these trials are getting less and less. There is something about anti-nutrients in plants that seems to screw with the absorbtion of minerals and vitamins from food.

5. Did I talk to a doctor? - Yes, I did, she just sat there and noded asked for a blood test and that's it. LDL is high, trigs are low (Dave Feldman prediction for cholesterol)

6. what about cancer? protein spikes IGF1 or something? I don't know... I don't want to go back to Plants because they make me feel like shit. Everyone dies and I will too one day. There is some article of someone who researched the WHO connection of cancer and red meat, and it doesn't seem to hold up.

7. do I still have symptoms? - Yes, depression is there sometimes and anxiety as well. I've lived with them for so long that I still have the habits of depression and they're hard to break. But I've accomplished about 500 km of the camino trail in europe as well as worked 9-5 hours which was never possible for me before. Childhood hunger never leaves you,(also it feels like germany is destabilizing as a democratic system) hence the preparation for crisis.

Not sure why there is no question if the Public Health advice is actually good to begin with. In France for decades the French authorities heavily promoted the consumption of milk-derivative products as part of a "healthy diet" and this seems to have sparked the percentage of people suffering from lactose intolerance.

Eating advice is usually based on very poor quality data to begin with, and observational studies is not really good science either.

For instance, the food bank around here gives out cans of "tuna fish" that contain about 10% protein from soy that are imported from Mexico. They also have Peanut Butter imported from India.

There was an article the other day about how you shouldn't give cans to charity because it is more cost effective for them to buy food through their supply chain but in this case it is more cost effective because their supply chain is getting worse stuff.