Things that bring pleasure and meaning to my life, and some nerdy stuff on nutrition

Here are some things that bring pleasure and meaning to my life:

• My partner, Conrad, my family and friends, and constantly trying to make their lives better not worse
• Engaging in activities that, in different circumstances, would be conducive to baby-making
• Fighting as hard as I can to advance the causes of freedom and equality
• The realisation that I don't know nearly enough yet, and that a ton of knowledge and new experiences are around the corner
• Frequent mischief, ideally with limited and controlled side-effects
• Watching youtube videos of shy talented people making their families proud
• Listening to the same embarrassing P!nk or Katy Perry song on repeat for an hour at the gym
• The pleasure that is found at the bottom of wine bottles, ice cream cartons and sixteen course tasting menus (with wine pairings)

I mention this because only the last of these will be difficult to achieve during minimum wage January.  There will be no sixteen course tasting menus, no Starbucks, very little wine (but perhaps a box of Franzia if I'm lucky).  I will be eating for sustenance not pleasure.

Maybe.

Using the power of science, technology and friends I can determine optimal strategies for meeting my basic nutritional needs at minimal cost. And in an ideal world there will be residual funds for coconut cream pies and vodka martinis.

I worked a few contacts to get a Safeway database of basic food costs and nutritional information.  I will be playing with it over the next few days, but here are a few initial results.

Maximizing calories per dollar

Ranking foods by total calories per dollar the top 5 are:

1. White Rice: 1893 kcal/$

2. Margarine: 1805 kcal/$

3. Oatmeal: 1800 kcal/$

4. Pasta: 1534 kcal/$

5. Pinto Beans: 1419 kcal/$

Bottom five:

1. Blueberries: 17 kcal/$

2. Asparagus:  22 kcal/$

3. Tomatoes: 24 kcal/$

4. Raspberries: 27 kcal/$

5. Beef Jerky: 36 kcal/$

The cheapest possible 2500 kcal per day diet in my Safeway database is therefore entirely composed of white rice. It costs $1.32 per day and provides 562g carbohydrate, 47g protein and virtually no fat or vitamins. Not a balanced, practical or healthy option.  The most expensive 2500 diet involves a lot of blueberries and costs $144 a day.

If I were building an optimization engine to determine an optimal diet I would first set up a mathematical function that captures the utility that I derive from each food. This would include nutritional parameters -- a desire to get a balanced amount of protein, carbs, fat and fibre -- as well as the enjoyment received from the taste of each food.  I would then determine the combination of all possible foods that maximizes this "utility function" at a given price.  It would be complicated.

However, I can actually make it much more simple. I am not required to solve the global optimization problem since I don't care about the diets of the comfortable and wealthy.  And around poverty-line levels of wealth, the problem essentially reduces to maximizing protein and vitamin consumption subject to a cost and calorie constraint.  Soon I will be solving these problems for different daily budgets, but in the meantime here are some cheap protein sources:

Most grams of protein per $:

1. Pinto Beans: 83 g/$

2. Lentils: 73 g/$

3. Chicken Leg:  62g/$

4. Roast Ham: 60g/$

5. Oatmeal: 60 g/$

You may have noticed that some of the cheapest protein sources also contain a significant amount of fat and carbohydrate. Indeed, pinto beans derive only 25% of their calories from protein.  So instead I have created a "quality protein score", QP = (grams of protein - grams of carbohydrate - 9/4 * grams of fat).  The 9/4 scalar on the fat mass reflects the greater calories per gram of fat.  The top foods by QP per dollar are:

Cheapest high quality protein sources (QP/$):

1. Turkey Breast: 23 QP/$.  (26 g protein/$)

2. Chicken Breast: 23 QP/$.  (26 g/$)

3. Tilapia: 20 QP/$.  (23 g/$)

4. Egg Beaters: 16/$. (19 g/$)

5. Frozen Cod: 15 QP/$ (17 g/$)

Anyway, enough nerdy stuff for tonight. I guess I'm going to be eating a lot of rice, beans and whatever turns out to be the cheapest source of vitamins.  As always, let me know if you have any advice.

Good night all!