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Comment by kevindeasis | Hacker News Reader

Diet and health are absolutely a big problem. One of my big problems is not access, but the amount of work needed to have a well-balanced meal. Most of the time I would eat unhealthy just because it is more convenient.

How about everyone else, and do you guys have tips?

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For someone who prizes convenience over maximizing health, just take a multivitamin. Assuming you're a healthy weight, you'll get 70% of the health benefit of all these cooking instructions everyone is so eager to provide, but with 0.1% of the effort.

What would be the catch though? I'm also guessing that I won't reach 100% of all the health benefit even if I triple my multivitamin intake?

You won't get fiber and probably will have too much sugar and high glycemic index foods if you eat junk + a vitamin. But you can easily get all your vitamins and minerals with a pill.

I'm afraid that the best medical evidence disagrees with this; systematic meta-analyses of several large randomised controlled trials show that multivitamins have no effect in the prevention of major diseases (cardiovascular disease, cancer) or death; and that indiscriminate multivitamin supplementation may even cause some harms. http://annals.org/article.aspx?articleid=1789253

You can read more about the evidence around multivitamins, and the evidence of potential harms, here: https://www.sciencebasedmedicine.org/more-evidence-that-rout...

I'm well aware of this. This is advice for someone who knowingly keeps a nutrient-poor diet. (We're talking about an article on scurvy.) Doctors do advise vitamins in those cases.

Thankfully, I live in a country where all fruits are cheap and abundant, and multivitamins are expensive.

It can be a lot easier if you focus on longer periods, eating healthy over 2 days is much less effort than trying to pick ideal meals you could have unlimited quantities of.

Try unusual things regularly. If you find yourself really enjoying the taste of something odd, it's probably because your missing out on a nutrient it has.

EX: If you eat animals don't just eat fat and meat, liver pate for example can be a really good dip.

As delicious as it is, you really shouldn't have liver regularly because it has very high amounts of Vitamin A, which is toxic. Liver from certain animals, like Polar Bears, has enough Vitamin A to kill you in a single meal.

Seriously? I better stop eating Polar Bear right away!

Carnivorous livers such as polar bears' have dangerous levels. Omnivore/herbivore livers aren't very dangerous at all, you'd have to eat many many kilograms in a single setting to approach acute toxicity. Or eat like a pound a week for perhaps months to years.

There are pretty simple meals that are healthy, nutritious, and delicious. Eg baked chicken and roasted cauliflower. For that matter, don't hate on most vegetables just because your parents got them canned or cooked them terribly.

eg this tastes amazing, and you're looking at like 2 - 3 minutes of prep time, and makes enough for a couple days. Ditch the thyme if it's a hassle, and you don't have to cut the cauliflower that finely. http://www.foodnetwork.com/recipes/food-network-kitchens/roa...

Baked chicken (buy it skin-on -- it's both cheaper and it retains moisture) is similarly easy to cook. Dump random spices on it, roast. Here's a recipe http://www.gimmesomeoven.com/baked-chicken-breast/

Most people I find who don't like chicken breast dislike it because someone -- probably parents -- cooked the shit out of it and it was dry as a bone. That's not how chicken breast should taste. If your chicken breast is dry you're overcooking it. Pay the $1 or $2 premium for locally raised, never frozen chicken breasts at your local butcher. You'll taste the difference. Feel free to ask them how to cook it; generally they'll be happy to give you advice.

Sweet potatoes taste great with nothing else and require you to score them and put them in your oven.

Roasted brussel sprouts are similar: prep time 2-3 minutes. Taste great. http://www.foodnetwork.com/recipes/ina-garten/roasted-brusse...

For that matter, get a crock pot. There's dozens of variations of a recipe like this: buy tough meat cut (and hence cheap!), roughly chop some vegetables, put in water in crock pot, let crock pot cook it for 8 hours. Come home to amazing hot food. I'm not exaggerating when I say 10 minutes of prep time, and it's enough food for 2 people to eat 2 large meals each.

I forgot one my favorites -- roast beets. Buy beets, shave the outsides with a carrot peeler, then slice approx 6-7mm thick. Roast on cookie tray with olive oil, salt, pepper. They get soft and sweet. The 3rd picture down shows about the right thickness.

http://www.thekitchn.com/how-to-roast-beets-in-the-oven-cook...

Again, 3 minutes of prep time for 2 or 3 roast beets. Both red and yellow beets are amazing. Just don't freak out the next morning when you pee.

And now that I think of it, these recipes work great for asparagus. It's a little trickier though: if overcooked, it gets mushy.

The one expensive thing you should buy is a good heavy knife. Buy good olive oil too; California Olive Ranch olive oil is widely available in CA and reasonably priced

http://lifehacker.com/the-most-and-least-fake-extra-virgin-o...

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/10/19/dining/californias-olive-o...

While I'm raving about roast vegetables in general, roast fennel is one of the best things you've probably never eaten. Really, give it a try.

http://www.simplyrecipes.com/recipes/roasted_fennel/

Roasting veggies in general: http://www.marthastewart.com/270268/how-to-with-allie-roasti...

This might still be on the complex side, but I've been doing this diet on and off for about 2 months. I created a webapp to do the simple math of counting calories and other macros, but a simple spreadsheet would also work.

Breakfast: Coffee

Lunch: Turkey and avocado sandwich (1 Avocado, 4 slices bread, lettuce, cucumber, 4 slices of sliced smoked turkey).

Afternoon snack: 1 banana and 43g pure almond butter.

Dinner: Varying meals made in batches to make up ~2000 calories per day. This week (qty per day) was turkey chili: 1 can red kidney beans, 8oz ground turkey, spices, and a few corn tortillas.

I started out with much more complex recipes, but simplified the diet to minimize preparation time. Also the lettuce, cucumber and bananas I get from work.

is this like every day? Isn't that really depressing to eat the same thing all the time?

I guess if you had like 4 or 5 things to rotate it's a lot easier to deal with, but every day a turkey+avocado sandwich...

I will probably get bored of it, but the sandwich is also a sweet spot in terms of preparation time vs healthiness. It also depends how much you like avocado. One avocado over two sandwiches is a lot, and I select avocados carefully for optimal ripeness.

Seeing "breakfast: coffee" had me almost laugh out a swig of beer to the monitor.

Reading the rest and the responses, I realize this isn't a joke, necessarily. Still bloody hilarious, for some reason.

Works though.

I eat an evening meal around 6 or 7pm then have coffee for 'breakfast' then have an actual breakfast meal at lunchtime. Lost a few kg and feeling much better.

That part was meant to be funny, though it's also true.

An apple and a cheese sandwich? That's decently nutritious, and easier and cheaper than going to McDonald's.

Communal cooking and eating. Cooking for four is usually only slightly more work than cooking for one.

Beans and rice or potatoes with milk are both nutritionally complete diets. I've never lived off of rice and beans but I got an awful lot of my calories in university from mashed potatoes with milk and butter.

Frying mixed frozen vegetables in butter and dumping spices on top is very fast, ten minutes cooking max, and tastes pretty good.

tl;dr: spend 3 hours a week doing food prep such that you can throw together many quality meals with minimal fuss over the next week.

Food prep: buy your veggies, Broccoli, Asparagus, meat, potatoes et al on Saturday.

Boil, bake and prepare the food on Sunday so that on Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, an easy breakfast, lunch or dinner is made by tossing two eggs (or other protein source: roasted turkey or whatever you prepared on Sunday), roasted potatoes, spinach, Broccoli and the like and you're good. At least one good meal per day.

I do this for our family of three and we eat at least two high quality meals per day.

Food prep takes practise. Eventually its like clockwork and you can crack out a lot of food in 3 hours.

Well, if it is just clockwork and habituation. I guess the main problem is that I haven't turned it into a habit yet. Let me find my book by Ivan Pavlov.

Anyways, thanks for the advice!

No problem and good luck with whatever you do. Once you get going with this, and it starts to work for you, it becomes part of your process and an asset in your life.

(btw - St. Albert ftw!)

Small world huh! I'll see you around Hacker News!

I just try to eat a footlong Subway sandwich with all the veggies every few meals.

It doesn't taste great, but it doesn't cost much (in terms of both time and money), and I assume it should be pretty decent in terms of nutritional variety, if nothing else. And it allows me to just eat whatever I'm in the mood for for all my other meals without having to plan out my nutrition intake super meticulously.

I might replace Subway sandwiches with a Soylent-type meal-replacement product in a decade or two, when hopefully most of the issues are worked out and risks made evident.

Making oatmeal in the microwave is cheap, healthy, fast, and requires just one bowl.

1/2 cup oats + 1 cup water + pinch of salt + ~2 minutes on high. Optionally, add sugar, butter, milk, and/or fruit.

You need a big bowl if you want enough calories to make it worth the effort. 1/2 cup oats is only about 40g, so you'd need 13 servings to meet the standard 2000kcal daily requirement (which is too low for anybody who exercises regularly).

I think 100g is a more realistic serving size, and that will spill and make a big mess if you try cooking it in a normal breakfast cereal bowl. I have a bowl about twice that size and I still cover the bowl with plastic wrap to avoid spilling any.

Cooking, storing for long periods of time and (I think) drying all degrade Vitamin C, so don't forget the fresh fruit topping if you're planning on living off of oatmeal!

Two possibilities come off the top of my head.

Vitamin supplements.

Start packing yourself lunch.

Um, Soylent? :-)

I have no idea why this was downvoted. The whole point of Soylent is to be the only food you need, if it's deficient in any way it should be shouted from the rooftops for the unwary.

Maybe in this case it should be calmly noted, since magnesium supplements are cheap and a lot of people not drinking Soylent would benefit from a magnesium supplement.

I noticed something interesting about Soylent recently when I looked at the list of ingredients: it contains badly absorbed forms of several vitamins and minerals.

Vitamin D2 instead of D3

magnesium oxide instead of one of the several well absorbed forms like magnesium citrate

calcium carbonate instead of calcium citrate

zinc sulfate instead of zinc picolinate, zinc gluconate, or zinc citrate

chromium chloride instead of chromium picolinate

selenium as sodium selenite instead of selenomethionine

In particular, magnesium oxide has very low bioavailability, and I would suspect that if Soylent is your only source of magnesium, you could potentially become deficient to some degree.

There are other ingredients that are not optimal, but those are perhaps less serious.

Such a great analysis, and truly depressing that such a hyped-up "meal replacement drink" maker hasn't done the bare basics of due diligence to ensure they aren't harming their customers. Typical.

Whatever you do, don't make any negative comments in one of our regularly occurring Soylent threads. You'll be voted down into oblivion.

Sadly typical to see people make these accusations without even doing a Google search. Answers to least two of these are in the FAQ:

https://faq.soylent.com/hc/en-us/articles/203962069-Vitamin-...

https://faq.soylent.com/hc/en-us/articles/204547005-Magnesiu...

I'm not enough of a nutritionist to say whether that's really sufficient, but they do consult with nutritionists, so it seems likely they've at least thought about all this stuff. Proving there's something wrong with Soylent is going to take more research than anyone's likely to casually do for an Internet discussion.

Did you read the reason why vitamin D2 was chosen? Simply because it didn't contain animal products, not because it was any better.

Similar for the Magnesium, it was chosen for a neutral taste rather than based on bio-availability. Even though Magnesium Oxide is barely processed by the human body at all.

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/2407766

In general, I think it's okay to make design tradeoffs like that, because higher levels of vitamins beyond what you really need aren't necessarily better. But you could certainly ask them about it.

I'm not going to get into it because this stuff gets complicated really fast [1] and two non-scientists debating it on the Internet gets silly.

[1] https://ods.od.nih.gov/factsheets/Magnesium-HealthProfession...

How can you put magnesium in as MgO and ever expect it to be available?

MgO: good for making furniture for a 1400°C furnace, not so good as a source of magnesium.

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/2407766

It also works well as a laxative.

see if you like cooking. it makes eating a hobby you do every day with the side effect of nutrition. it can be frustrating at first but as with most things the key is patience and consistency.

I just eat meat and potatoes and then snack on fruit. It's pretty easy.

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