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GuiA

There's probably a culture clash here but... is this considered a balanced nutritious meal in the US?

http://i.imgur.com/cVpnXJB.png

I'm French, a country that has a certain reputation for eating healthy, and where a meal is typically:

- an "appetizer" (small salad or crudités)

- a main course (typically meat/fish + vegetable/starch)

- cheese & bread

- dessert (often fruit, or rarely something sweet like a slice of cake)

(breakfast is typically cereal with coffee/tea, maybe some fruit)

I'm not a nutritionist, but the recommended meals strike me as very unbalanced.

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Yes, it looks like it's picking 3 random "parts of meal" but not necessarily in 3 different categories...

But maybe it's also linked to the fact that you're asking for 3400 calories? 2500 seems more reasonable for an adult male.

I don't know how much calories I need, I gave it my stats (23 yo male, moderately active, 85 kg, 1m 86) and it auto-populated the field for me.

‘Moderately active’ may not mean what you think it does. Farmers and professional athletes are ’moderately active’. People who work at home all day using a computer are ‘sedentary’.

(Given your gender, age, height and weight:) Unless you work out for >4 hours every day, 3500 kcalories is way more than your body uses, so you’re sure to gain weight if you were to ingest that many calories every day. If you have a desk job or if you’re a student, choose ‘sedentary’ in the app. The result will be 2300 kcalories, which is most likely enough for you. On days in which you workout a lot, you can ingest a few hundred kcalories more.

To add to what Samuel_Michon wrote, I'm 38, 103kg at the moment (I'm substantially above averagely muscular, but also somewhat overweight now), 1m 85, and I exercise hard 5 days a week - 1 hour of heavy weights 3-4 times/week, and cardio the rest. I work in an office, so my work day is fairly sedentary. I also have a young son which keeps me more active than I've ever been before during the evenings.

I burn ~2800 kcal/day when I exercise.

This is an estimate based on tracking every meal, and tracking my weight every morning, rather than what I "should" be burning.

Unless you have a very active job, or exercise hard (think stumbling out of the gym) for substantially more than an hour a day, or spend every moment of your spare time being highly active, you're likely not burning 3400 calories.

But really, write down what you eat for a couple of weeks, count the calories, track your weight, then adjust the number of calories to target up/down depending on whether you want to increase/decrease your weight, as there are so many factors that can change what how much you need.

Also, contrary to what you might think, even spending an hour per day in the gym weight lifting is not burning a lot of calories. It won't take you from 2300 calories expended per day to 3400, for instance.

One hour of weight training for a 200 lb man is only 450 calories burned, or a Medium Fries at McDonalds. You have to really be running or other high cardio sports to burn even 1000 calories per hour.

Working out has also been shown to cause people to eat more subconsciously, so those 450 calories burned end up being only 100-200 net calories burned once you've had the protein shake after the hard workout.

Those meals are unreasonable, but it's because you're asking for an unreasonable amount of calories, apparently. The tool can help you calculate your calories (very intelligently, I might add).

The algorithm primarily targets the nutrition constraints that you ask for, with only a few other rules about how meals should be structured. It makes more realistic looking plans (I feel) at lower calorie values, but you're right that the meal plan you posted doesn't look great. It would probably suggest more fruits and vegetables if I required all of the necessary vitamins and minerals to be constraints, but in the interest of algorithm speed, I mostly suggest adding a multivitamin to your diet :-) Definitely not ideal, but adding a few vegetables on your own shouldn't change the nutrition too much if you're watching your calories.

I actually built the first version of the site to make it easier for me to gain weight, and my strategy now is to lock a few cups of whole milk into each meal and then tell it to generate around it, giving me much less to cook.

Cool, thanks for the reply.

As far as what I asked for, as I replied to another commenter[1], I let the website decide what my caloric intake should be, and I selected "stay at my current weight".

[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5640663

No, it's a commonly unbalanced US meal. (and is ~1.5 people's worth of calories.) But it doesn' seem do different from your example: meat, vegetable, dairy, starch, sweet.

And the Nutrition guide's recommended protein level is insanely high.

Well in my example, you get 2 servings of vegetable and 2 servings of fruit a day (with potentially 1 or 2 more for breakfast + snack)– here we barely have 2 portions of fruit/vegetable.

Then just add some extra vegetables and fruit, if that's what you want...

I think you're misinterpreting my comment.

My culture and upbringing have given me broad indications on what consists "eating healthily"; here I am seeing a tool made by a citizen of another culture, that claims it will produce healthy meal recommendations.

But the recommendations it gives me are wildly different from my cultural expectations.

All I'm trying to do is understand why there is this discrepancy.

This is a pretty interesting question IMO. I spent 8 years living in Spain where people are convinced that their diet is the healthiest in the world, but by any "modern" standard is a nutritionist's nightmare: often no breakfast and fatty/sugary if you do eat it, tons of coffee, generally extremely high levels of fat including saturated animal fats, very high in salt and alcohol. Nearly all carbs are white and processed, very few vegetables. Breakfast, if eaten, is normally 10am, lunch at 2pm-4pm, and dinner at 9pm-10pm. No-one sleeps 8 hours.

That said, it does have some remediating factors - generally lots of fish and olive oil and (much) smaller portion sizes than the US. Also my cardiologist here in New Zealand said that they have a much lower incidence of heart disease than you would expect given the above, and no-one knows why. Maybe it's genetic, maybe olive oil is better for us than we currently understand.

Interesting stuff.

It's also likely that different environments (sun exposure; humidity; food availability; water availability) have contributed to cultural traditions. That may or may not factor into genetic traits.

Because you didn't have enough confounding variables already. :P

The default (33%/33%/33%) carb/protein/fat split is similar to that proposed by the Zone diet: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zone_diet

I'm guessing most people in Europe would eat (a lot) less fat than 33%.

33% of calories from fat means less than 33% by weight, since it's more calorie dense, and I actually don't doubt that they eat that much. If you've never cooked much French cuisine, there are a lot of cream based sauces...

The site had a nice breakfast suggestion for me: ‘Tofu Scramble’, containing: tofu (14g fat), vegetable oil (14g fat), dijon mustard and low-fat milk. The dish contains 400 kcalories, 260 of those are from fats (that’s 65 percent!).

http://www.eatthismuch.com/recipe/view/tofu-scramble,1565/

I don't want to speak for the site creator, but that seems fine for me as long as other parts of the diet balance it out. Contrary to common American nutritional wisdom, fats are not the root of all evil.

I agree wholeheartedly. My point was that 33% of fats in your diet isn’t hard to accomplish. Also, as far as ‘good’ vs ‘bad’ fats go, aforementioned recipe did quite alright. It’s transfat and saturated fats you have to watch — fat in and of itself is needed for our bodies to function.

However, I wouldn't just eat Tofu Scramble for breakfast. I need complex carbs not to feel hungry soon after. I can do without carbs for dinner, but not for breakfast or lunch. A typical breakfast for me consists of 0% fat Greek yogurt, mixed with oats, linseed, nuts and fresh fruit. That still has plenty of fats, but also carbs.

Ah yeah, interesting feedback, maybe there's some tweaking to be done to take satiety into account.

It’s not so much about feeling satiated, I can be satisfied with just a simple green salad. I choose oats and flax for breakfast because they have a low glycemic index (GI), which means they’re turned into energy over a longer period of time, keeping me from feeling hungry longer.

But yeah, it would be good if the site would take the GI index of ingredients into account.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glycemic_index

You’d be surprised how easily you can get 33% of your daily caloric intake from fat.

1 gram of fat equals 9 kcalories, while 1 gram of protein or carbs equals 4 kcalories.

That means if your total caloric intake is 2000, you only need 74 grams of fat to reach 33%.

How can we know if your typical French meal is balanced or not, since you didn't indicate the portion size of any of those foods?

Idk, portion size seems fairly explicit in my post. This picture sums up nicely what a french meal would look like:

http://i.imgur.com/5XRulJK.png

With the appetizer plate topmost, dessert in the middle, main course at the bottom of the picture.

It's also common for hungry/active people to have a second serving of the main course; a third helping would be rare.

How is that a "French" meal? You can eat those types of foods anywhere... I have had many meals that look exactly like that here in the U.S., both cooked at home and out at restaurants.

Don't believe what you read on Reddit, HN, and other websites that hate Americans. Not all Americans eat McDonald's burgers and fries and other crappy processed food for every meal. We are just like anyone else. Some of us (not all) are healthy and eat very balanced and healthy meals, and some of us are in very good shape physically. On the other hand.... some other Americans (not all) are obese, unhealthy, eat bad food. It's a mixture. Not every American is the same. And there is not one "typical American meal" in my opinion.

You asked for portion size, I've sent you a picture of what typical portions look like in France.

As far as judging American nutrition, I've lived here for almost 4 years now, so I'm not basing my remarks solely off HN/Reddit/etc. :)

My point is that there is no such thing as "American nutrition". What does that term even mean?

A total lack of portion control.

I have to say I think this is true.

Of course not every single American eats the same. But, probably the best reflection of the "average" American diet is via "mainstream" restaurants (i.e. chains, but not fast food).

Look at places like Chili's, Friday's, Ruby Tuesday, and (gasp) Cheesecake Factory. Their portions are out of control and they are laden with fat and sodium. It is not unusual for a single meal at those places to nearly meet or exceed one's allowance of, calories, etc., for an entire day. And some meals (ex. Just about every entree at Cheesecake) are cartoonishly huge.

It's ridiculous. But, I think that defines the "average" American diet in the sense that these guys are all targeting the mass market. So, what they serve is the product of much research into what people want, and then is constantly being tweaked based on observation.

Let me get this straight: you are looking for healthy, sensible meals at a place called THE CHEESECAKE FACTORY. Are you serious? Read that again and think about it: the name of the place is The Cheesecake Factory. You're trying to say that this restaurant is representative of a person's overall diet in the U.S.? Completely ignoring any other options that offer healthy food? Completely ignoring cooking at home? Completely ignoring the plethora of farmer's markets, grocery stores with amazing fresh produce and lean meats, the growing popularity of the Whole Foods and similar stores throughout the country?

Oh, I see, you don't like to think about these things, because it goes against the "AMERICA IS HORRIBLE" narrative that is so popular on the internet.

Your responses have been remarkably calm and balanced. Thanks for keeping things civil with multiple people poking and prodding you.

"Not all Americans eat McDonald's burgers and fries and other crappy processed food for every meal. We are just like anyone else. "

I'm sorry, but the food here in the US is ABSURD. Aside from burgers and fries, there are few places that one can get an _affordable_ healthy meal. Two things jump out at me here: the portions and sodium.

In order to remain somewhat healthy, you have to cook or actively go out of your way and purchase food that turns out to cost more. "It's a mixture." does not accurately describe the US - I do believe it's off-balance here; more folks do consume such food.

I'm originally from Hong Kong, which gives me a slightly different perpective than most, but everything that I eat out in the east: tastes amazing, can be extremely affordable, doesn't make me feel bloated or 'full' when I'm done and is absolutely incredible.

So you eat all that twice a day, plus breakfast, plus sometimes seconds of the main? As a Canadian that looks like WAY too much food. Here it would be more common to eat one serving of what you call the main course (where veggies may be replaced by the salad), plus maybe an appetizer/fruit/bread. Desserts usually only special occasions or when you go out to a restaurant.

I wouldn't say that France has a reputation for eating healthy (and no wonder, sheesh), more a reputation for "gourmet" food. Personally I found that the site gave a fairly sane meal plan for a sane calorie range. Whether the site generated it for you or not, surely you realized 3500 kcal is not a sustainable amount for a sedentary person to eat?

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