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Comment by nkozyra | Hacker News Reader

I like the idea but it's producing a lot of ... unappealing combos like peanut butter and honey ... sandwich? on ... rye? With a random side of red pepper hummus?

I think what's missing is some graph of compatible ingredients per type of food. Things that generally require some companion (what am I eating that hummus with?) You could generate a pizza via compatibility scores. Same with curries, sandwiches, etc.

And of course hinting at the type of macros one might want. 60% of my diet as fat is probably not a good regular day.

But very compelling. I struggle with meal planning and the state of recipes and meals and the seo gamesmanship makes the whole thing very arduous.

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Counterpoint: peanut butter and honey sandwich is delicious, and a worthy competitor to the king of childhood sandwiches, the venerable PB&J.

Peanut butter and bacon sandwiches are even better

Just ask Elvis. You'll probably see him soon if you eat too many of these ;)

Peanut butter, bacon, and molasses is even better.

Bacon, bacon, and bacon without bread is my goto.

Uh, this doesn't sound very delicious. Have you considered adding bacon?

I feel like what it really misses is a slice or two of bacon, to make it nice and rounded.

Can I have that without the bacon?

This

I'm not sure if this will be great or I'm being punked.

PB goes kind of well with meat, as do peanut sauces in Asian cuisine. I get the same vibe out of it but only eat organic PB, not the processed garbage which has the texture of liquid plastic.

Peanut butter and honey on cinnamon bread is fantastic. I'm not sure how good it would be on rye though.

add some banana, cinnamon and you've got my favorite healthy breakfast! fancy coffee shop next door puts pollen on too, subs in almond butter, and it's amazing.

“Healthy” is a bit questionable but that does sound delicious.

Can you detail your complaints against peanut butter, honey, banana, and rye bread?

I studied nutrition in a formal setting for four years, so I could detail some complaints, but I’d like to head yours first.

The peanut butter we buy is peanuts made in to butter. But in the supermarket it has a lot of sugar, and some salt to cover the sweetness, I don't understand why - I guess some far rich twat realised her could pack it out with a cheap sugar source and reduce the peanut cost.

Similarly honey is, I gather from various media, not usually just honey but has quite a lot of sugar syrup added.

So, just saying "peanut butter and honey" you'll get quite different supermarket products on different geographies (I'm in the UK, fwiw).

This is odd from my perspective (in Canada). Sweetened peanut butter is there for people who have a taste for it. You can usually find unsweetened right next to it for the same price at any store. Salt is surely added for flavour and preservation. It doesn't cover sweetness.

Not sure about honey but just check the peanut butter ingredients? There are some in the shop here which have some sugar and salt added, but there are also varieties with 100% peanuts, though you need to mix the oil before you eat each time.

You pay quite a bit extra for peanut butter without sugar or corn syrup as the second listed ingredient, in the US, and have to look around a bit to find it on the shelves that are 95%+ full of peanut+sugar butter. That's "normal" peanut butter here and lots of folks will wonder WTF you're feeding them if you sub in "real" peanut butter (it tastes quite a bit different and the consistency's different)

haha i would hope the $10 single slice of this toast at the fancy coffee shop uses real stuff :)

i once looked at the almond butter label that I buy and it has a TON of calories!

Sorry for the late reply.

Peanut butter, if it’s made with just peanuts is fine, assuming that the person can tolerate legumes well. There are better actual nut butters though with better omega 3 to 6 ratios.

Honey is just sugar. The supposed pollen allergy prevention benefits people tout is questionable at best.

Banana is just some potassium with a tiny bit of fiber and lots of sugar. One can get their fiber and potassium from greens or tart fruits easily.

Refined carbs is just not good for you.

Again, I have no problem eating it. I just wouldn’t do it regularly and I wouldn’t personally call it healthy.

Sounds like too much sugars/simple carbs for my breakfast taste. The rest of the content (fat, protein, fiber) seem rather OK.

Agreed, but on rye with a side of red pepper hummus?

With a side of hummus?

sure, but on rye?

it's the caraway you're objecting to. Simply purchase a hearty rye wheat loaf, and it'll work perfectly.

Yes absolutely! rye is amazing!

So is ice cream, but I wouldn't want chunks of steak on top.

Pairings have been tough for us to get right. Your nutrition targets and meal/food filters have the biggest impact on what foods show up together, and then we have some weightings that influence pairings, but relatively minor.

It's also tricky because while some people balk at certain food pairings, others think they're perfectly fine. Our main approach has been to just try to make it easy to swap things out if you don't like a suggestion (on the logged-in planner, you can tell a meal to give you a big list of alternatives to skim through instead of refreshing one at a time).

One thing to try is bumping up the allowed complexity of a meal. Click the 3-dot menu next to the meal's name, edit the settings, and bump it up from Simple to Moderate. Then regenerate the meal to see if you get more appealing results.

Any sort of feedback mechanism / collaborative filtering in place? Seems a good spot for data collection upon reroll to develop better recommendations

No, that will just lead to useless feedback like you saying something delicious is unappealing.

I was told to eat a serving of almond butter and some almonds as my lunch. Maybe flag some things as 'snacks' and try and pair a meal item like a sandwich with a snack item like 8 almonds.

For what it's worth, that pairing sounds fine to me.

In Australia at least, peanut butter and honey sandwiches are a thing. The taste is actually not bad, and it is possibly healthier than peanut butter and jam sandwiches.

Honey is almost pure sugar. Healthier than white sugar, maybe, but unlikely to be healthier than high-quality jams made from whole fruit.

Jam is basically a 50/50 mixture of whole fruit and white sugar.

That really depends on how it is made. It's not useful to make blanket statements like this when there can be a significant amount of deviation from what you expect to be true without it not being jam anymore.

I think the parent comment was implying that jam can be healthy just because it uses whole fruit as an ingredient. The chemistry behind turning a mixture of fruit and sugar into something called jam is pretty well known - there has to be a certain ratio of sugar for it to "set". Usually this is 1:1.

I wrote my comment because I think that people are shocked when they actually see jam being made at home and how much sugar goes into a batch.

https://www.compoundchem.com/2014/09/22/what-makes-jam-set-t...

I am looking at a whole jar of plum jam made by my grandpa with 0 added sugar.

Then that is not jam...jam is defined as fruit with added sugar to act as a preservative.

The question is what did you granpa use as a preservative? The preservative is going to be the difference between say: jam, marmalade, chutney, etc...

>but unlikely to be healthier than high-quality jams made from whole fruit.

Healthier is a bit of a misnomer here. Honey is nothing but sugar (no micro nutrients or negligible at best), still it is the easiest sugar for humans to process and convert to energy.

"high-quality jams made from whole fruit" is just a giant broad brushstroke, you may as well just broadly say fruit is healthier than honey (as if all fruit is created equally), sure there are some micronutirents in most fruits which you don't get from honey, but most fruits are also going to spike insulin...and coming back to the idea of "high-quality jams made from whole fruit", the reality is most store bought jams will be highly processed (so most of the beneficial fiber and micronutrients will be replaced with refined sugar and/or HFCS).

most store bought jams will be highly processed

Those are the jams I had in mind, specifically to exclude, when I used the qualifier “high-quality.” In a similar fashion, I would not consider Wonderbread to be “high-quality” bread.

Admittedly, it’s a bit of a weasel word, but I think it’s still important to recognize that jam can be healthier than honey. Homemade jam made from whole, ripe strawberries will have fibre, vitamins, and essential minerals like potassium, whereas honey does not.

>it’s a bit of a weasel word, but I think it’s still important to recognize that jam can be healthier than honey.

I agree with your points on vitamins/minerals (like I said above, jams will have micro-nutrients which the honey does not).

So its pros and cons not healthy/healthier...the person who obtains their micro-nutrients elsewhere doesn't need them from jam and probably better off getting the sugar/calories from honey over the fruit jam. Again the honey is just more easily converted into energy and generally will cause less of an insulin spike than sugar from jam.

So whats healthy/healthier often depends on purpose or needs...are you eating the jam/honey for energy only? Honey is better. Are you eating it to as your source of those certain vitamins/minerals? Obviously honey is void of those, so jam. That said no one eats Jam for the vitamin/mineral or fiber content, there are just better sources. Then again you may get some great anti-oxidants from various jams made from berries specifically (of course you would get the same from the berries themselves without the added sugar in jam).

Getting more into the weeds of "health", many people will "use" honey for coughs, sore throats, etc... because its anti-bacterial properties and use local honey as an anti-allergen (exposure to small dose of local pollen) all to great effect.

Can confirm PB&H is a thing in Aus - however peanutbutter and Vegimite is where it's at

Hahaha, of course I know I’m not alone, but honestly didn’t think I’d see someone here saying that!

Peanut butter and Vegimite, and lots of butter.

I'm so trying this with Marmite when i get back home.

Marmite sell this pre-made.

https://www.marmite.co.uk/products/marmite-crunchy-peanut-bu...

Ah, I kinda forget when it’s not in the house, but randomly remember just now.

Try using meso instead of vegimite / marmite.

I'm curious where this is a thing more specifically, never heard of this living in Victoria and Queensland

This was often a food for kids (<10yo) in Utah, USA, and other rocky mountain states.

I've eaten this often, in the Southeast US.

There are a lot of things that go great with peanut butter and bread if you are open to it besides jam or honey - cheese, butter(toast), hazelnut spread, fresh fruit like bananas. Running out of groceries and living 20 miles from the nearest store leads one down this path of trying whatever is in the refrigerator/pantry.

It was pretty normal for me in NSW. I used to add sliced banana sometimes as well.

I grew up eating this (and odder combinations) in new england.

Second Aussie checking in. Lived in every capital along the east coast, bar Hobart.

Also swear I've never heard of this in Australia :\ Make of that what you will.

Very common in rural or frontier USA

Definitely a thing growing up in central Victoria in the 80s/90s.

Was a thing for me in Queensland!

me either in WA

The PB and honey sandwich was a childhood favourite for me. I must revisit one day to see if it's all I remember it being.

an adult version with quality peanut butter and raw honey on a suitable bread can be quite nice. even better toasted.

It's pretty good on crumpets.

If peanut butter and honey isn't your thing, try a banana and mayo sandwich.

FWIW, Peanut butter and a drizzle of honey on rye is one of my goto sandwiches...

I have peanut butter and honey often, but on a single piece of toast. And not for dinner, typically :)

This is what I miss about the internet from 15 years ago.

You looked for a recipe back then you'd get a bunch of simple websites with concise instructions that made a fair amount of sense. People wrote it like an old cookbook. Wanted diet advice? Sure there were a few snake oil salesmen but the nutrition information you could find was pretty decent for those people who had put things up.

Today you have a bunch of food entertainers who have turned the entire gambit into such of an utter clown show. You can get a recipe but you'll have to wade through 10 half-page pictures of food that are completely unrelated to what you want to make and clickbait in a scrolling never-ending screen. You can find a video, but instead of it being literally someone's grandma making it with real expertise, it's some 20-something insecure chef emulating what they saw on TV. This level of FUBAR goes way beyond marketing; we have people competing in a race to the bottom.

You try to find a cookbook today, and you've got the same garbage. 90% pictures, 10% text.

"Eat this Much" is just a continuation of this trend; you aren't marketing this as a resource for me to use, if you were, it'd be named something else. The first thing I see when I visit your website isn't something useful. You've got a completely useless webapp, then a bunch of assurance crap below that. If this were a website being shown in the 90's everyone would think you're a scammer. You're marketing this to me like I'm a child and must be instructed on what to do; your brand is looking for guillable people, that's why it's marketed as an instruction, not a tool.

You're doing that because once you have people eating, literally, from your hand, you will !@#! them hard by making marketable suggestions that you will get other companies to pay you top dollar for because they are building relationships with guillable people.

The last thing I need is an app interpreting my cravings for me; It's bad enough you have food companies hiring nutritionists and psychologists to figure out what to put in their products to addict their constituency.

It's a digusting business model and pollutes the information supply for profit.

I'm fairly health conscious and spend weeks at a time logging calories in either a deficit or a surplus.

I do enjoy cooking but, day to day, it's more important for me to meet my macros with minimal investment.

I'm also a vegetarian. It's generally quite difficult to meet your protein goals without meat (especially when out) so I end up eating the same meals quite often.

On entering my calories, this app spun up a number of sensible high protein suggestions and has given me some inspirations for how I can make my diet more interesting.

tldr: I have an above average knowledge of nutrition and a lack of imagination. I found this app useful.

I’m a very active vegetarian that runs/bikes and strength trains 9 times a week (some days include a cardio and strength training session separated by 12 hours). So, needless to say, I need a lot of calories and protein.

I’d recommend you checkout some vegetarian recipes books at the local Barnes and Nobles or on Amazon. The “Complete Vegetarian” is the first cookbook I bought. It offers a great foundation for building some tasty recipes with variety. Roughly 75% of the recipes turned out so well that I shared them with friends and family that enjoyed them equally as much.

For protein, you can get a lot of variety with: tempeh, tofu, millet, peas, quinoa, lentils, black beans, buckwheat, peanut butter etc. The average individual only needs from 50-70g of protein/day according to the USDA. Tempeh has 15g/serving (3 oz) — you can easily eat 2 servings of that and get to about half your daily needs. A serving of quinoa+peas will get you 16-20g protein.

There’s a lot of easy ways to get your daily macros as a vegetarian. Of course, for me, I supplement with 1-2 protein shakes just as I did when I used to eat meat because my requirements are far above-average.

Yes, "Complete Vegetarian" is a great recipe book even if you aren't vegetarian! Many of the recipes are just darn good.

I struggle with finding food that fits my plans that isn't boring and monotonous. To that end, this seems like a useful endeavor, though I'm not sure if it's all the way there.

> peanut butter and honey ... sandwich?

Hey, my 5 year old daughter loves that!

Honestly, I think you should give some of the combinations a try.

1. Peanut butter and honey (or brown sugar) sandwiches were my favorite as a kid and nowadays I just ditch the bread 2. Peanut butter can be a substitute for tahini as a hummus ingredient

Heck, I recently tried: * Pumpkin pie dessert hummus from Costco and loved it. With some strawberries it was gold. * Peanut butter and bacon cheeseburger

Now when it comes to rye, I think the lack of also there is that it's just not good IMO.

I make pancakes, from oats and cream cheese, with peanut butter and honey (or maple syrup) on top. I'm sorry.

Pancakes from oats & cream cheese sounds interesting - what's the ratio of ingredients?

About 1/1.

1dl oats, blend them first 1dl cream cheese 2 eggs 1dl (almond) milk (because I like them thinner) 1tbsp butter 1tsp cinnamon 1tsp baking powder

My version of something like this one: https://www.tasteefulrecipes.com/cream-cheese-oatmeal-pancak...

I got Sandwich with carrots and raisins. I don't really see that staying together.

Peanut Butter & Mustard is where its at! Sounds terrible, tastes like ambrosia.

There are cooking 'bibles' which go into extreme depth of flavours and textures combinations. Someone could try to codify them

I actually enjoy peanut butter and honey sandwhichs.

I'm pretty sure that's a recipe on the site rather than a random combination. You can alter what recipes it will offer you.

My favorite combos:

- Peanut butter + Nutella (add banana for bonus points)

- Peanut butter + chocolate sprinkles

- Strawberry jam + Gouda cheese

Put this on brioche bread... heaven!

My brother's bees make delicious honey, way better than store bought, and it goes fantastically with PB.

peanut butter on honey is good, better than jelly or jam.

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