ok that makes sense veta. if i wanted to achieve 2000 calories a day the cheapest way possible, it would probably be either ramen or rice. the poor chinese man's meal for his family (which ive mentioned fieros egg thread) is to steam your rice, then cook a couple eggs over easy, then mix them in with the rice. decent source of calories and protein.

and actually mcdonalds is decently cheap, when you consider the sheer number of calories that youre getting for your dollar.

but i think this has more to do with laziness. 1) people dont take time to cook food any more, that is, it's not necessarily more expensive to cook from ingredients, but it takes time. and 2) people are too lazy to monitor their portion size, and eat whatever is in front of them.

I'm not going to argue semantics either. Saying "healthier food" is more expensive than "regular food" is both vague and ridiculous. A burger at a "good restaurant" isn't more healthy than a burger at McDonald's.

People can eat the RIGHT kind of food for reasonable prices. People can eat unhealthy food for less, more, or the same amount of money. The price of unhealthy food is no different than "healthy enough" food. This is getting trollish, I agree, but you took the conversation there. Eating healthy food is a personal decision based on choosing the right food and spending the amount of time neccessary to prepare it. Eating unhealthy food is usually lazy, not cheap.

hmmm, we see eye-to-eye on this one monte.

Well monte when I say eating more unhealthy the foods that come to mind are things like junk food, potato chips, fruit roll ups, basically really shitty food that tastes very good but ultimately fails to provide many essential nutrients. A good example of this notion at work are the obese people in the deep south, like Mississippi. They certainly have healthy options available to them (oatmeal, chicken, broccoli) but they choose their equal costing or cheaper alternatives simply because of their ignorance and/or preference. Ultimately you are right, the problem is definitely two-fold in that we need public programs to educate people on how live healthier lives, and at the same time we need to incentivize people through the healthcare system. Unfortunately a lot of these programs are being targeted for cuts in the coming years and that seems like it will only exacerbate these issues.

Also the whole organic thing sort of proves my point, my family is into the whole organic thing and I definitely think the food my parents buy tastes better and is probably better for me. E.g. a grass fed steak is indeed better for you than the cheaper corn fed alternative. By the way why the fuck do we feed cattle corn that seems so perversive and unnatural?

Anyway I'd say that yeah, if you wanted to eat very unsatisfying food you could probably get away with just eating innocuous cheap foods like chicken and vegetables and some people certainly do. I, for example, do not drink soda or eat junk food or even pizza but I a poor college student so the foods I do get by on our generally cheap and cheaper than the foods I'd like to be eating (seafood, steaks, etc). If anyone's curious the kinds of foods I eat on a a regular basis are chicken, oatmeal, eggs, protein shakes, broccoli, potatoes, and cottage cheese. I try to buy fruits when I can but they're pretty expensive so I resort to stealing them from our dining hall here.

Responding to Thraxle: eating healthy food that is satisfying and tastes good is more expensive than eating unhealthy food that is satisfying and tastes good. Taste is obviously subjective but you get my point.

And the reason that stores like Whole Foods can get away with selling all their foods for a dramatically higher price is because they are considered by experts and scientists to be healthier. That is to say organic foods are better for you. Now I'm not here to argue whether or not that cheap fish or cheap steak you bought is going to have serious repercussion on your health when you get older, I'm just saying it's very obvious that the healthier alternative for ordinary food are always MORE expensive not less expensive.

Look I'm sure we can all agree on the overarching principle here which is that being healthy is generally a more expensive proposition. There is a very well documented relationship between obesity and household income, if you wish I can pull up the studies.

Now why this is you ask? Well we've been dancing around it this whole time, it's been attributed to ignorance about the benefits of healthier food and the higher cost in healthier foods.

Foods that are deemed beneficial to your health are generally more expensive than foods that are deemed poor for your health and foods that are deemed innocuous to your health.

For instance candy is very cheap, but caviar is very expensive. And chicken is somewhere inbetween. Yes there are unhealthy foods that are more expensive then healthy foods, does the disprove what I'm getting at? No, it doesn't because ultimately the guy who is going to blow $100 on a crazy deep fried pizza taco isn't going to be healthy anyway. And the guy that spends $100 on the cheapest foods calorically by value (ramen, candy, chips, etc) probably isn't going to be very healthy either.

So in conclusion, yes a lot of people can afford cheap foods that are not damaging to one's healthy, at the same time a lot of people cannot afford foods that are beneficial to their health. And all at the same time people have foods that are very harmful to their healthy that taste very good and are high in caloric value that are also very damaging to their health.

I don't mind going over this again with you thraxle.

i thought this was about frisbee

did i skim over this 2 fast

We can go over it again and again for as long as you like. As usual, you feel it's the rest of the country's responsibility to educate/financially assist the poor. I'd rather you make the simple correlation to the obvious:

Poor people are generally stupid and/or lazy.
Fat people tend to be poor.
Fat people are generally stupid and/or lazy.

Simple logic.

aside from the vitamin benefit caviar can be ridiculously high in cholesterol and sodium.

But high in antioxidants das, and it's fancy as shit.

Monte for some reason I missed two of your replies while I was writing my reply so I missed where you agreed with me and I just said a bunch of redundant stuff you agreed with, my bad.

As for Rob, here let me quote you:
"The above article faults a lot of things, but one thing it faults is the number of preventable deaths caused by concious choices made by Americans. Smoking, drugs, alcohol, obesity, etc., etc... "

Since you didn't object there about the notion that these things are preventable I am going to assume you agree they are preventable. So if it is the government's job to protect us it would follow that they would protect us from everything, ranging from drugs and violence to national threats and poor health. So then it would make sense that the government has some sort of vested interest in keeping the population healthy, besides the fact that a healthy population in it of itself is a good thing.

Now that I've outlined that for you it seems like it would make sense for the government to invest in raising public awareness about living a healthy lifestyle, as well as subsidizing healthy foods and devising means to incentivize good health, as monte mentioned earlier wherein an insurance policy gave a discount for those in good health.

Another example is my U.K. example where doctors receive a bonus for improvements in the health of their patients.

Now I will try to be brief here because I know you don't want to read a wall of text (or maybe you just don't read them?) anyway our country has a VERY inefficient health care system. We spend the most per capita for the 37th best system, giving worse care than countries like Costa Rica and the island nation of Dominica.

You say that the reason we have so many obese and unhealthy people today is that because these people are stupid and lazy, I want to ask, do you think we have worse health care than these countries because our citizens are lszier and stupider on a whole than theirs? If not, then what do you attribute our worse health to? And if it's not stupidity, then is it ignorance? And if it's ignorance then shouldn't we educate these people through public programs, after all ignorance breeds ignorance? If it's laziness and not stupidity or ignorance that is the problem then should we find out why our prosperous nation is so much lazier than these fair less prosperous countries?

Look you can see what I'm getting at, I probably don't need to spell it out for you. You can point at whatever you want but the evidence will still say what it says, and it says that our health care system is extremely inefficient for the amount of health care we are receiving as a whole. You'd be surprised what you learn if you just open your eyes Rob.