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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: 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.