What Google's Famous Cafeterias Can Teach Us About Health | Hacker News Reader

What Google's Famous Cafeterias Can Teach Us About Health

theatlantic.com

210 pointssasvari66 comments

One correction and one comment:

The article says cafeterias are available 24/7. That is not technically correct. The cafeterias are open for various meals on various days (eg one might do breakfast and lunch 5 days a week, another might do lunch 5 days a week and dinner 4 days a week).

What are available 24/7 are the micro-kitchens, which have coffee machines, breakfast cereal, various snacks, sodas, ice tea, etc. It is true that these do tend to have a healthier focus but it depends on what office you're in.

Also, I don't know what vending machines there are. I haven't seen any but then again I'm based on New York (although I've spent quite a bit of time in Mountain View).

So I'm not sure how the article reaches the conclusion it does because, at least in Mountain View, it's entirely possible to eat nothing but Oreos and Kit-Kats from the MKs 24/7.

It is true however that those items do tend to be on the lower shelves.

Lastly, this article seems very focused on Mountain View but that's only one of many offices, although it is by far the largest. In New York for example there are no bikes but there are scooters (the building we're in is an entire downtown city block and one of our floors is the entire floor so scooters actually do come in handy for traversing level 4).

I haven't seen bikes or scooters outside of these two offices however.

> I'm not sure how the article reaches the conclusion it does because [...] it's possible to eat nothing but Oreos and Kit-Kats [...]

What conclusion do you think it reaches that's incompatible with that?

It looks to me as if the article says that Google's facilities encourage healthy eating, not that they force it. That's perfectly consistent with not making it impossible to subsist on Oreos and Kit-Kats if you're determined to do so.

There's a vending machine in 43, second floor.

...which is a prank, actually. Google's first SRE bought it as a joke, and stocks it out-of-pocket. I've heard he actually loses money on it.

> I haven't seen bikes or scooters outside of these two offices however.

FWIW, Santa Monica has a number of cruiser bikes to quickly cover the few blocks between the two local offices (or to go for a ride along the beach ;) ). And I think I saw a scooter at the Irvine office...

In Chicago,

* There are no scooters or bikes

* The cafeteria is only open for breakfast and lunch

* The microkitchens are slightly smaller but very similar to the ones in MTV. There are a lot of "healthy" options but the choice is less eclectic.

So depending on your office YMMV.

The vending machine isn't quite what the article makes it out to be. For starters, it's one vending machine in all of Google (as far as I know).

It magically appeared one April Fool's day, and has been attributed to some of the SREs in charge of keeping web search running, but credit has never been claimed. There was a rather funny "I am spartacus" thread about the vending machine that appeared on a major email list after one of the facilities or kitchen management asked who was responsible, ostensibly so they could congratulate them.

I no longer work at Google (though I used to work downstairs from the vending machine), so it's awesome to hear it's still up and running and being stocked. I believe, at least for a while, facilities/cafe staff were officially condoning it if not restocking it. Definitely one of the more clever pranks I saw around campus.

Does Google have a culture of pranks/hacks? It certainly makes sense, but I've never really heard anything about it

Gmail is an ongoing April fool's prank.

Also http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Googles_hoaxes

I'd say so. The most recent which I am aware of was the nyan cat youtube video had a nyan cat progress bar. http://venturebeat.com/2011/06/17/youtube-nyan-cat-progress-...

Yes, some places more than others, though. It's not highly generally highly publicized.

That is, other than the "offical" April Fool's jokes. Googlers LOVE April Fool's day, and there's generally a solid handful of nonpublic April Fool's day jokes on campus.

But there's also just random pranks. Some I'm aware of:

- Everyone's photos on the internal people database (available on an internal website) showed up with either crazy sunglasses or mustaches. Someone, probably a vision researcher, used facial recognition to do in bulk.

- Eric's picture had a photo on the wall behind him, and the photo was very subtly swapped with a picture of Bill Gates.

- There was a long series of pranks having to do with pink plastic flamingos and the T-Rex skeleton in Mountain View that were quite funny, though I forgot the full sequence. It had to do with T-Rex being surrounded by pink flamingos, then someone changed it to flamingos attacking T-Rex, then someone else brought a giant can of "flamingo bait", and all the flamingos were lying dead around T-Rex. It unfolded over a week or two, with it changing every few days.

- I was on a team that pranked each other whenever someone went on vacation. The most memorable of which involved filling a 12'x12'x8' glass walled office from floor to ceiling with pink balloons: http://www.menalto.com/photos/miscellaneous/google/Pranks/20...

Couple other recent ones:

- For April Fools day this year, the internal corp login page rick-rolled everyone.

- Larry Page has this crusade to make meetings more efficient, so all around campus are these posters that say things like "All meetings should have a single decider" or "Meetings should not have more than 10 people". Well, soon after, a bunch of posters appeared saying motivational things like "You're building the future. Make it awesome." I couldn't tell if this was a very subtle troll or a well-intentioned but ultimately condescending attempt at motivating people, but in either case, the response is the same: troll harder. So with a couple friends, we put up posters that said things like "Read slogans", "You will do whatever this poster says", or "All meetings require a unicorn and a pony." Well, sure enough, after a couple days another round of posters went up that said things like "Red" (on a yellow poster) or similar absurdities. Then a day or so after that, another round of posters went up with "The posters will continue until morale improves."

- (I was on the same team as Scotty, but a couple years later, so we didn't overlap except socially.) When we got back from a team retreat in Pittsburgh, our work area was all cordoned off with police tape, with all the furniture turned upside down, courtesy of the people who hadn't gone.

Still, it sounds a lot better than some of the 'healthy eating' vending machine gimmicks. Most (in)famously, in my area, are the ones that introduced the "heart smart" stickers by raising the price of unhealthy foods by 50% and raising the price of healthy foods by 25%. I guess in some sick, twisted way that's a "discount on healthy foods" but it wasn't very useful. Since everyone knew the machines would rip you off regardless of what you chose, they just bought their candy bars elsewhere.

The only place on the campus where employees pay for food is from a vending machine. The pricing strategy is based on nutrient content, again according to the Harvard pyramid plan. For the vended products, you pay:

  one cent per gram of sugar
  two cents per gram of fat
  four cents per gram of saturated fat
  one *dollar* per gram of trans fat

That's very cool. I'd love to see this concept get wider usage.

It would be very cool if it was correct. How is sugar the cheapest?

Agreed. The idea is very good, but the implementation sucks.

Not so sure about the quality of the idea. It's very hard to objectively quantify nutritional value to the precision required, igniting controversy about the right price point.

It's good to make sure healthy food is available, but ultimately only people themselves can decide what to eat - the fact that candy and snacks with saturated fats are available in the first place illustrates that very clearly.

It saddens me to see that sugar costs less than fat.

ObReference to "Good Calories, Bad Calories."

Well technically, sugar costs more per calorie than fat. As one gram of sugar is 4 calories and one gram of fat is 9 calories.

Right, but it's not the total calories that folks like me and mslyuter are worried about. Sugar and other carbs, when digested, raise blood sugar levels, which in turn raises insulin. Then, blood sugar gets sucked into fat cells and converted into fat simply because of the insulin. So those calories don't even get a chance to be used in their original form before they're stored as fat.

IMO the various ways blood sugar affects your appetite and your body chemistry are probably more responsible for the obesity epidemic than the high-calorie content of fatty foods.

So those calories don't even get a chance to be used in their original form before they're stored as fat.

Sure they do! Don't forget about glycogen.

I don't know if we're understanding each other... I'm saying that there are carbs that get transformed into fat. These calories, by definition, do not get used until the fat is released from that cell. Which could be a loooong time.

You're right, glycogen is another place that carbs can go. But unless you're exercising there probably isn't a lot going there.

Lipogenesis is legitimate, but it's not the primary pathway for carb metabolism if you have a healthy diet. Glycogen is the primary way that blood sugar levels are regulated, and your body greatly prefers glycogenesis to lipogenesis.

If you're exercising, your body doesn't build glycogen; rather, it shuts down the metabolic pathways for glycogenesis because burning glycogen while building it is very inefficient. (It's a form of hysteresis.)

... painting with broad strokes because my background is in biochemistry, not nutrition.

I think the difference here is that glucose can be converted to glycogen, but fructose can't. Both high-fructose corn syrup and sucrose are a combination of approx. 50/50 fructose/glucose (the most common HFC in use is a 55/45 split; sucrose has a chemical bond between the two sugars, but HFC doesn't). My understanding is that when most people refer to sugar, they are talking about sucrose, and not glucose in isolation; therefore, ~50% of 'sugar' can't be converted to glycogen.

Fructose can be metabolized to glycogen via DHAP and glyceraldehyde. IIRC, it's a limited pathway though.

By exercising, I meant exercising regularly. In my understanding, you don't make new glycogen unless your glycogen stores are down. And the body can only store about 3 pounds of glycogen from what I've read.

So what I'm saying is if you're mostly sedentary, eating a high-carb diet, your blood sugar levels will rise to the point that insulin is secreted. And then some of that blood sugar will be converted to fat, and its energy will be 'lost' - it won't be used unless blood sugar levels go down again and glucagon is released. But many people eat way too much and too often for this to happen, and they just keep on packing on the pounds. Thus, carbs causing weight gain while fat gets the blame.

I mean, think about it. All the sugar that comes into your bloodstream from, say, two bowls of cereal in the morning. You have about 3 cups of milk, 3 cups of grains. This is a pretty big amount of carbs that gets digested very quickly. Then you drive to work and sit on your bum for 4 hours. Don't you think some of that carbohydrate energy could be converted to fat before your next meal?

Insulin is secreted every time you eat. It's not a bad thing, it's a very fundamental part of regulating your blood sugar. (Ask someone with type I diabetes -- it's a royal pain to control blood sugar manually.) It's released whether you're active, sedimentary, eating a healthy diet, or junk food.

When you eat breakfast in the morning, you're most certainly replenishing glycogen. While you sleep, it's the primary source of blood glucose. Your body will prefer to replenish the glycogen before beginning lipogenesis.

So... there's no such thing as too much insulin?

There is, if a person's diet is consistently high in sugary foods. They can build up insulin resistance as a result of a constantly high insulin level, and ultimately develop type 2 diabetes.

ObReference, haven't seen that in a while! Former rec.arts.books reader or device driver writer?

Heh, neither, but I'm pretty sure I got it (or terms like ObJoke) from some usenet group back in the day.

Unfortunately it seems to penalize people who choose to eat more fat vs. carbs.

That's a problem with the entire green/yellow/red color-coding system at Google as well - the labels seem to be in line with the common belief that whole grains = always good and dietary fat = always bad.

Then again, it's not really difficult to figure out from the list of ingredients whether food is in line with your personal dietary belief system, so the color-coding system isn't really all that valuable to begin with.

"personal dietary belief system", that's how I imagine Google employees talking about food.

That problem stems from the source that Google chose to base their system off - the Harvard Pyramid. They wanted to be as least controversial as possible (aka popular conventions) so whole grains are viewed as healthy, and fatty foods aren't. That's the principle we've been hammered from the government and food associations since forever. Unfortunately, it's wrong, and just a little research reveals it. But people will always want to refute you... because they've been so used to it, and they don't want to give it up.

Unfortunately, not being controversial is also the same as being wrong in this case

I'm very very sympathetic to this view. I eat a high-fat diet, and have for over a year. But Google is probably right to act conservatively here. Don't blame Google for following the Harvard Pyramid, blame the Harvard Pyramid. They're the ones with the responsibility to update the status quo.

You should probably look at the Harvard Pyramid before making judgments based on Google's interpretation:

http://www.personal.kent.edu/~cearley/ChemWrld/foodpyramid/H...

They recommend eating lots of healthy fats such as olive, canola, and peanut oil. They also have refined carbohydrates in the "use sparingly" category.

Thanks, but I did. And I'm still not criticizing their interpretation (which seems like a good faith read of the pyramid). I just disagree that the HP is the only way to eat healthily, and I'm mixed on whether the HP is a generally healthy way to eat.

Also, you may wish to dismiss me as crazy. I eat almost exclusively from the top left triangle. :)

It's not the whole grains I'd be worried about. "Granola bars" are sugar/candy bars disguised with some granola and "healthy" labelling (usually upselling the fiber content).

Indeed. Quaker chewy granola is identified (by price -- $0.15) as a good food, which may be true if you're out hiking, but as part of an urban lifestyle, granola bars are a glycemic disaster.

By contrast, someone who eats an otherwise moderately healthy diet can eat the caloric equivalent of several granola bars worth of walnuts -- identified by google as a "yellow" food -- with no ill effects, and certainly no insulin spike.

No, since (as someone pointed out elsewhere in this thread), a gram of sugar has less than half of the calories in a gram of fat.

If Alice and Berta both choose to consume exactly 2000 calories a day, but Alice chooses a low-fat diet while Berta chooses a low-carb one, then Berta will pay less according to that system. So it's not really a problem that sugar costs less; low-fat diet are still cheaper.

(Duh. I meant of course "low-carb diets are still cheaper")

I'd love to see sample prices from said vending machine. I.e. 2oz bag of m&m = $1 or snickers bar = $2

The pricing strategy is based on nutrient content, again according to the Harvard pyramid plan. For the vended products, you pay: one cent per gram of sugar, two cents per gram of fat, four cents per gram of saturated fat, one dollar per gram of trans fat...

Reminds me of the time I encountered a world renowned nutritional expert...

edw519: "I'm having trouble understanding these food labels."

expert: "Don't eat anything with a label."

Jack LaLanne made two relevant comments (http://www.jacklalanne.com/jacks-adventures/lalanneisms.php):

>If man makes it, don’t eat it.

>If it tastes good, spit it out.

Trying to include vegetables in everything? Smart. But in no way are SunChips "eat anytime" food...certainly not healthier than walnuts. You don't see a page like this (http://whfoods.org/genpage.php?tname=foodspice&dbid=99) about SunChips.

If you want sound nutritional advice, I would tweak the Harvard pyramid in two ways: there's nothing you can gain from whole grains that you can't gain from fruits and vegetables. They should generally be regarded as yellow. The other thing is that they feature some really unhealthy fats that they consider to be healthy: soy, canola, sunflower, peanut, and other vegetable oils. Truly healthy fats would be red palm, coconut, olive and macadamia.

And while I applaud the idea of making junk food more expensive, their implementation based on macronutrients is horribly flawed. Sugar (which could include high-fructose corn syrup) is cheaper and offers virtually no benefit unless you are priming for a workout and require the energy and insulin spike. Fat provides satiety and promotes hormonal balance, particularly if the omegas (3,6,9) are balanced. They're off to a good start, but the article did a horrible job of illustrating how healthy they are.

Canola oil is basically the only mainstream cooking oil with a somewhat healthy omega-3/6 ratio. Why do you think it's unhealthy?

It stops being healthy if you heat it enough. Like frying stuff with it.

I think it boils down to canola oil being highly processed, which makes it contain trans fats.

Would you like to know more? http://www.marksdailyapple.com/dear-mark-canola-oil/

I really dislike these "what X can teach us about Y" titles, especially when they are misused. Like in this case, where "Google's Famous Cafeteria" has nothing to teach us about health which we did not know. It can make us jealous, though.

Sun Chips get a GREEN while 0.8 ounces of walnuts get a YELLOW label. What the hell?!

It's crazy to charge twice as much for fat as for sugar. Sure, fat has a little over twice as many calories as sugar, but fat won't give you diabetes and kill you. Sugar is actively dangerous. The country is still in the grip of the low-fat diet fad which has had the result of...wait for it...making us all fatter. And sicker.

My fav:

Smaller plate -> smaller portion.

That should be something easy to get started for any company.

The food network did a big segment a while back on obesity and concluded that the simplest and most effective lifestyle choice you can make is using smaller plates.

I do wish more companies would take lessons from this. Sadly it seems like this will only ever work for relatively big companies. Having to hire someone to cook for a team of 10 doesn't really seem worth it. And feeding a team of 10 anything other than sandwiches seems impractical.

There are many catering services out there that (pardon the pun) cater to smaller crowds, but in my experience their food is invariably crap. Think hospital chow. I'd like to see this void filled. Surely there's room for a "health lunches delivered on your doorstep"-startup? Because face it, we programmers need to be fed healthy food, because our natural instincts seem to direct us to the nearest pizza place.

I work in a office building, and the company has two of the floors. In a small area on the first floor, there's a little cafe. They make awesome sandwiches and they cater to companies as well.

From what I understand though, there are only two of these under this brand. I believe it's called Cafe and Catering Co.

These are beginning to pop up. A couple of ex-Google chefs started Gastronaut (http://www.gastronautsf.com/), and I swear I saw something about YC funding a similar concept recently but I can't for the life of me find the name.

Were you thinking of ZeroCater?

http://www.zerocater.com/

Yep, that's the one. Thanks!

"health lunches delivered on your doorstep"

This exists. There was a NYT article a few years ago about options in New York:

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/05/dining/05diet.html

In Chicago, I use Organic Life:

http://www.organiclifeonline.com/

Why not bring your own food? Some sandwiches for example. Nuts and seeds (flax, hemp) or (canned) fish (salmon, sardines, mackerel, tuna) are also a good option.

Yeah, I almost always bring leftovers from our dinners as lunch. I only buy lunch when we for whatever reason don't have any leftovers.

Laziness!

1. The food is not available 24/7. There are snacks 24/7 but not the "famous food program".

2. Not all of it is totally free. There are paid breakfast services in some offices.

In our office, the cupboards are stocked with Coke, V, Potato Chips and snack bars.

i think i would be hungry all the time at google

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