Refined carbs alone make me sleepy, then hungry about an hour after I eat them. Insulin spiking and all that. Protein with vegetables keeps me going for many hours with no hungry feeling later. It is probably the caffeine and sugar in the Coke that temproarily makes you not feel hungry, not the carbonation. You will have the same insulin effects later.
How fast can you eat 3 pounds of brussels sprouts and five pounds of apples and three bags of salad mix?
quote:
Not fast enough to have eaten them before they go bad.
Brussels sprouts and apples (and carrots, beets, cauliflower, cabbage, parsnips, winter squash, sweet potatoes, etc) easily can last in your refrigerator for a week, unless you have the shittiest grocery store in the world. And anyway, that pretty much makes my point for me. You can't eat them fast enough
because you could afford to buy pounds and pounds, so you would buy a bit less of them, bringing your food bill down even further. Remember, you said:
quote:
but a two pound bag of those is like one meal for the both of us.
Oh, and about your saying that Coke is "refreshing" and water isn't. Water is, biologically, the most refreshing thing mammals can drink. You may not like the taste of the water available to you, but how something tastes has nothing to do with how it refreshes you, or quenches your thirst. The high fructose corn syrup in Coke actually leads to you feeling more thirsty, where water will not have that effect.
I think I've shown that if one shops carefully, one can buy a LOT of highly nutritious food for around the same amount of money as processed junk, if not less. If utter convenience and having zero prep time is all-important to you, more important to you than good nutrition and disease prevention and all that, then I can certainly see how spending the extra money on boxed processed foods would be an attractive option.
My point still stands, though, that those poor people who are buying calorie-dense food in order to maximize the calorie per dollar they spend are clearly eating far, far more calories than they need to, as evidenced by the connection between poverty and obesity in this country.
My point also stands that people from all sorts of economic categories buy lesser quality food than they could. Your description of your own buying habits are evidence of that, as I assume someone who knows as much about wine as you do probably isn't having to choose between buying apples or paying the rent. You could buy beans, brown rice, and sturdy root cellar vegetables that keep for weeks, but you value convenience over nutrition, I guess. Yes, you may not think it is worth the expenditure in gas to "drive across town" to the Co-Op with the better quality fruit and vegetables, but perhaps you would make back the couple of bucks in gas by not having to throw away as much food, becasue it is fresher.
Yes, people buy to feel full. Beans, whole grains, and fiber-rich vegetables and fruits
make you feel full. They do much better at that than ice cream and Coke.
Most people buy junk becasue
they like junk and because they don't want to be bothered to cook, even for a half hour. There's no other reason. In a country where the people watch and
average of four and a half hours of TV per day, there's really no excuse for saying "I don't have time to cook nutritious food".
Edited by nator, : No reason given.
Edited by nator, : No reason given.
Edited by nator, : No reason given.
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