from the would-that-be-a-BigMacViceBundle-with-lentils? dept.
From Vanderbilt University:
Variety may trump virtue when it comes to the struggle to eat healthy, says a Vanderbilt marketing professor who studies consumer self-control and endorses "vice-virtue bundles" combining nutritious and not-so-nutritious foods.
"We suggest a simple ... solution that can help consumers who would otherwise choose vice over virtue to simultaneously increase consumption of healthy foods (virtues) and decrease consumption of unhealthy foods (vices) while still fulfilling taste goals -- 'vice-virtue bundles,'" Kelly L. Haws, associate professor of management at Vanderbilt's Owen Graduate School of Management, said.
The idea is to not give up entirely foods that provide pleasure but aren't nutritious. Instead, the focus should be on lowering the portion of the "vice" foods and correspondingly raising the portion of a healthy food to replace it.
In a series of experiments, Haws and her colleagues found that people have a "taste-health balance point" -- a proportion of vice and virtuous foods that make up one serving which they find satisfactory. For most, the perfect vice-virtue bundle is made up of a small (1/4) to medium (1/2) portion of vice. So if a vice-virtue bundle was made up of fries and slices of apple, it might take a small or very small serving of fries to satiate the need for the vice food.
The full paper is available as a PDF.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by keplr on Wednesday August 13 2014, @03:30AM
The less money you have, the more likely you are to be overweight. Healthy food is usually more costly in one or more of these ways: cost in dollars, more difficult to prepare (time and sunk cost of supplies), more out of the way relative to where poor people live, requiring more skill to prepare well.
It's been my suspicion for a while that obesity is somehow tied to economic inequality. The health gap likely tracks in some way with the income gap. Then there are the self-serving ag-industry written laws that artificially distort the prices of the least healthy foods. HFCS is the cheapest way to add calories and near-addictive sweetness to just about anything. It's cheap because we subsidize corn. Other staples aren't much better. I love dark, fresh baked, bread, but it's mostly just empty calories in a form not much better than just eating pure sugar.
Meat and dairy of all kinds is probably 1/10 as expensive as it should be to reflect the true environmental, energy, health, and ethical cost it carries. Americans however are practically addicted to cheap beef and cheese, even if it's laden with ever higher amounts of antibiotics, growth hormones, and filler--including saw dust. It's a psychological addiction, too. Suggest that beef prices are too low and need to be raised so that people actually purchase it in amounts commensurate with its cost and you'll be attacked like you just spit on Old Glory. Through careful and deliberate planning, the consumption of red meat has been linked with patriotism and masculinity. It's what's for dinner, after all.
Subsidize vegetables, legumes, and maybe even fruit instead. These little bundles of chocolate and broccoli, or whatever, aren't going to help if they're still more expensive than a fast-food double cheeseburger; conveniently located on every block. You don't even have to leave your car.
I don't respond to ACs.
(Score: 1) by VLM on Wednesday August 13 2014, @12:19PM
"These little bundles of chocolate and broccoli, or whatever, aren't going to help if they're still more expensive than a fast-food double cheeseburger"
There's a weird mythology that healthy food is expensive food.
OK fine, lets put some numbers down.
Culvers Double Deluxe Cheeseburger basket (fries and soda) $7.99 Lets call that "eight bucks". Thats a rather filling meal for one dude. And yes the restaurant is about a mile from my house and it is about 500 feet closer than the nearest food store.
Now lets see how badly I'll starve if I go an extra 500 feet to the food store and buy "real food"
How much produce can I buy at the local Woodmans food store. I have the weekly flyer open in front of me. How about we buy two heads of cauliflower for $3, FIVE pounds of potatoes for $1.40, a pound of zucchini for 70 cents, a pound of cabbage for thirty cents, a pineapple is a buck, a pound of green beans for eighty cents, and a celery is eighty cents. If I did my mental arithmetic correctly that's the same eight bucks. I have no freaking idea how one human being under 800 pounds can eat that much vegetables in one sitting. Also thats 2000 calories just of potatoes alone, that must be like 4000 calories total. If I tried to optimize for total caloric intake I could buy quite a few pounds indeed of grapes.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by gidds on Wednesday August 13 2014, @01:22PM
Yes, but how long will it take to prepare that cauliflower, potatoes, courgettes, cabbage, pineapple, beans, and celery into a satisfying meal? How much experience does it take to even know what sort of satisfying meal might be made from such ingredients (especially when you may not have other 'standards' in the larder or fridge)?
As keplr said: "Healthy food is usually more costly in one or more of these ways: cost in dollars, more difficult to prepare (time and sunk cost of supplies), more out of the way relative to where poor people live, requiring more skill to prepare well." (my emphasis)
If you're struggling to hold down two low-paid jobs and feed your family, you don't often have time for that sort of preparation — nor to gain the skill. And if you're tired and hungry, I can quite understand taking the easy option. (I do myself, sometimes.)
Also, I wonder whether another factor is the increasing number of people living alone. Cooking for one is less rewarding and (relatively) more hassle than for more people, so there's less incentive for it as well as greater opportunity for eating or buying prepared food outside the home.
[sig redacted]
(Score: 2) by VLM on Wednesday August 13 2014, @02:00PM
Google claims the average american spends 5 hours watching TV per day. Five minutes of vegetable chopping, while watching TV, isn't going to destroy their lifestyle.
We can play this game all day. Instead of spending 10 minutes waiting in the drive thru to get a double cheeseburger for $8, which is totally cramping their "must see" TV viewing schedule, we'll stick with 30 seconds tearing open a refrigerated prepared $4 "salad bag" and slopping the contents of the multiple internal bags onto a plate, dump out the lettuce, then dump the "extras" on the lettuce then squirt the salad dressing bag on top. Or if you want to talk snack foods we'll grab a carrot, apple or other fruit, grapes, or berries out of the fridge, rinse it off, and gnaw on it.
WRT the level of skill being beyond "those dumb poor people" (which sounds totally neocon republican to me) I'll provide my recipe for grapes. A poor person removes them from the bag (the bag tastes bad) rinse them under water (like washing ones hands, but while holding something) then the poor person tugs the green or purplish ball off the bush like stem and eats the globes. Try not to choke. Don't eat the stems they taste like wood. Because they are wood. If it looks or smells rotten or weird, don't eat that individual grape. This is getting a bit comical given how much simpler my recipe is compared to the staggering complexity of preparing a frozen pizza or a hot pocket. Also there is little danger of being burned when eating grapes, unlike cooking a pizza, unless you're totally doing something wrong (like using a blowtorch to burn the stems off the grapes or trying to grill the grapes for flavor or something..... hmmm.... mesquite smoked grapes... naaw)
The problem with rationalizing frozen pizza and hot pockets and pop tarts as the best possible cuisine under fixed conditions is no matter how many hands are waved and generalizations are invoked, the real world numbers never work out.
We can also play another game. I'll follow your rules. There exists "a" cut of beef called the tenderloin. I like making bbq kabobs out of it, at least once a summer. Anyway its about $25/pound. Varies from $15 for the stuff thats a waste of money (like for an extra couple percent more you'd have something 10x higher quality) up to weird imported Japanese stuff at $50 and up thats probably not worth the extra cost. But, yeah, about $25/pound. The average poor person can't afford three meals a day, seven days a week, of nothing but $25/pound beef tenderloin. Besides most of them don't know how to cook it and tenderloin leather or tenderloin jerky isn't all that much better than equally poorly cooked round or hooves and snouts or whatever so its a bit of a waste. Finally the whole ritual of preparation and firing up the grill etc takes maybe an hour total and all poor americans, even the 60% or so of the population who have no job at all, and the 25% or so of households where no one in the entire household has a job, do not have the spare time between judge judy episodes in their busy days to "cook" because cooking is only for rich people, I mean look at the 3rd world, none of those guys cook they all go to McDonalds for every meal. Because beef tenderloin costs $25/pound and takes awhile to cook, no poor people in America ever eat meat and all poor Americans are strict salad eating vegetarians. McDonalds healthy choice salads, I presume, because making a salad is super complicated and way more expensive than buying a premade salad. I have now proven this authoritatively.
(Score: 2) by fliptop on Wednesday August 13 2014, @10:45PM
Let's see, using the cauliflower, pineapple and celery, I'll prepare sweet-n-sour pork, adding in some peppers, onions, garlic and spices. The cauliflower will be made into "rice." Add a little worcestershire, the juice from the pineapple, some almond flour, and soy sauce to the wok. Maybe throw in some chicken stock. Total time to prepare, 40 minutes. Cleanup time, 10 minutes. So less than an hour total.
Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.
(Score: 2) by zsau on Thursday August 14 2014, @01:32AM
You don't have sweet-n-sour pork, peppers, onions, garlic, spices, almond flour, Worcestershire sauce, soy sauce, a wok or chicken stock. Your legs are tired from standing up all day and walking to the bus stop besides busy roads with loud and smelly traffic. Not to mention the freeway behind your house, giving you and your kids various health problems (but you don't actually know that, because you don't have time to get to the doctors between your two minimum-wage jobs). You probably don't have 50 minutes to do something as stressful as cooking, especially when you're worried about having enough money to pay the rent, much less the gas/electricity bill.
(Score: 2) by fliptop on Thursday August 14 2014, @02:34PM
Actually, I do. There's pork in my freezer and I always have the other ingredients mentioned. I've owned a wok since I moved out of my Dad's house.
So I'll sit down in between stirs.
Not exactly sure what this has to do w/ the discussion. If my kids are not eating well then they have other health problems that I can address by feeding them good food.
If I eat fast food to "save time" then I'll need to allocate 50 minutes somewhere so I can work out and burn the fat my body just squirreled away from the meal.
You make it sound so hopeless. If I'm in such bad financial shape that I must work two minimum wage jobs just to make ends meet, why the hell would I even think about having kids?
Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.
(Score: 3, Funny) by aristarchus on Wednesday August 13 2014, @06:39AM
Yeah, professor, of Marketing! Studying endorsements! Of Bundles! Ooddles of Bundles! Where do they get these people, and what are they doing in an self-respecting University? Oh, OK, I see my mistake. Marketing: studying consumer self-control in order to break it, and break it bad! Make those Walmart customers come back begging the question for more! (Opps, I seem to have crossed rants, sorry/)
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday August 13 2014, @12:02PM
You mean, like serving vegetables with the meat? As has been done since ... well, I'm not sure since when, but I'm sure the Romans already did it.
(Score: 2) by VLM on Wednesday August 13 2014, @12:42PM
They were big into grains and avoided the natural explosively fattening effects that stuff causes in all mammals by implementing periodic famines and keeping most of the population in poverty. All a grain based diet requires to maintain fitness and health is (self) imposed starvation.
Yes yes as a way to fatten livestock or make the rich richer or feed large armies (because militarism is good, right?) grain is just awesome. I'm only talking about how badly it sucks as a food for humans not its cultural effects or whatever.
(Score: 1) by theronb on Wednesday August 13 2014, @12:59PM
"Just a spoonful of sugar helps the medicine go down..."