life expectancy

team47b

Heard on Radio 4 this morning in a discussion about Doctor's pensions (poor hard up doctors) that people who earn more live longer by a few years than people who earn less.

Healthier choices? Less what? More comfort? Better bikes? Why do you think this is the case?

daviesee

More money to make more healthy choices.

Ironically, the unemployed have less money but more time to prepare healthy food and exercise but generally choose to do neither.

Health comes from self motivation, DNA aside.

rick_chasey

Fresh food is surprisingly expensive compared to the processed alternative.

MrChuck

I'd expect there's a pretty strong correlation between education and life expectancy, as well as education and income. So it's not necessarily just about how much you earn giving you more options, although obviously that helps. But if you're in a position to be earning that much you're also more likely to be taking care of yourself perhaps?

garryc

Yeah Mr Chuck's got it right.

You don't live longer because you have more money, both of these are the effects of a better education etc.

rolf_f

The real factors will be intelligence and life expectancy. Income is just a function of intelligence.

If you did, for example, a survey of weight and intelligence you will find the overweight skewed towards the low IQ end. The intelligent can see that to retain a high standard of life past middle age requires effort; ie long term benefits rather than short term. The stupid just eat pies.

rick_chasey

Rolf F wrote:

The real factors will be intelligence and life expectancy. Income is just a function of intelligence.

If you did, for example, a survey of weight and intelligence you will find the overweight skewed towards the low IQ end. The intelligent can see that to retain a high standard of life past middle age requires effort; ie long term benefits rather than short term. The stupid just eat pies.

Err?

Pep

Rick Chasey wrote:

Fresh food is surprisingly expensive compared to the processed alternative.

This is what people are always told and end up to believe.
Just it's not true.

True, fresh fruit and veg are overpriced, but crap costs more.

1Kg of carrot = 80p
1Kg of banana = 80p
how much crap you buy for 80p? very little. Crap is expensive.

tap water: 1l = 0.1p
coke: 0.3l = ?? (dunno, haven't bought any for the last 25yr, but can't believe costs less than a 0.03p)

rolf_f

Rick Chasey wrote:

Rolf F wrote:

The real factors will be intelligence and life expectancy. Income is just a function of intelligence.

If you did, for example, a survey of weight and intelligence you will find the overweight skewed towards the low IQ end. The intelligent can see that to retain a high standard of life past middle age requires effort; ie long term benefits rather than short term. The stupid just eat pies.

Err?

Err? What?

rick_chasey

Pep wrote:

Rick Chasey wrote:

Fresh food is surprisingly expensive compared to the processed alternative.

This is what people are always told and end up to believe.
Just it's not true.

True, fresh fruit and veg are overpriced, but crap costs more.

1Kg of carrot = 80p
1Kg of banana = 80p
how much crap you buy for 80p? very little. Crap is expensive.

tap water: 1l = 0.1p
coke: 0.3l = ?? (dunno, haven't bought any for the last 25yr, but can't believe costs less than a 0.03p)

A kilo of carrots and a kilo of bananas is not a meal, nor is water comparable with coca cola.

A typical meal for me and my girlfriend for example.

Let's take a simple thai curry.

I need.

Two chilis - probably 40-50p.

Two garlics - probably 10-20p

bunch of spring onions - 80p

Corriander - 80p

Ginger - 40p

Lemon grass - £1

lime leaf - £1.50

coconut milk - £1

Chicken breasts: £3.20.

sesame oil: probably 10ps worth.

Limes. 40p each. so call it 80p

Soy sauce, probably about 10ps worth.

Rice - 10p?

So that's a basic thai curry, no kimslaw, no prawn crackers.

Let's say you want some fruit juice too - freshly pressed apple juice.

If we have 500ml each it's £2.20.

?

Let's add that all up.

Roughly £9 ish.

You can get a pretty serious M&S ready meal for two for that money, and you've saved yourself a lot of effort, let alone a tesco value thai curry.

You can't compare a kilo of bananas and carrots with a ready made meal. You need to compare it with a comparable meal.

When I say make mexican, it gets even more expensive.

I need two avacados, onions, chili, corriander, limes. For the salsa, it's the same again but with tomatoes.

Then I need the chicken - lets go cheap with thighs. Then I need peppers, I need cumin, I need wraps, I need rice, I need beans, cheese.

They all cost money and it all adds up.

Plus, if I'm on the bread line, I'm probably working pretty long hours to make ends meet. I probably don't have time to shop around to get all that stuff, and I'm probably too tired after work to get home and cook this stuff - when I can get a 1.5kg cumberland pie from Asda to feed four for a fiver.

jibberjim

Simple aerobic fitness at all ages have a good correlation with intelligence and ability, also to attractiveness (you don't get fat etc.) and all of those things have a good correlation with income. And of course aerobic fitness has a huge correlation with life expectancy too. It's got little to do with health choices in what you eat, other than again, aerobic fitness encourages you to exercise more so eating crap has less impact.

rick_chasey

Compare coca cola to say, freshly pressed fruit juice and coca cola suddenly looks a lot cheaper.

I picked up 12 cans of coca cola for £4 the other day.

garryc

Tesco Pure Orange Juice 1 litre = £1.20

Add some water (lets say the same amount as coke) to make a squash. You could easily make 6 litres.

Of course you could always buy the orange juice from the Everyday Value range and you could make up your 6litres for £1.68

Your shopping list for the Thai curry is a bit daft, if I was on a budget I wouldn't be buying things like Lemon Grass for £1 you could buy 2 kilos of potatoes for that. Sure if I had the money I would go to Waitrose and buy lots of fancy ingredients, but if you want to eat cheaply and healthily then buying fresh food and using common sense is the way to go.

rick_chasey

garryc wrote:

Tesco Pure Orange Juice 1 litre = £1.20

Add some water (lets say the same amount as coke) to make a squash. You could easily make 6 litres.

Of course you could always buy the orange juice from the Everyday Value range and you could make up your 6litres for £1.68

Your shopping list for the Thai curry is a bit daft, if I was on a budget I wouldn't be buying things like Lemon Grass for £1 you could buy 2 kilos of potatoes for that. Sure if I had the money I would go to Waitrose and buy lots of fancy ingredients, but if you want to eat cheaply and healthily then buying fresh food and using common sense is the way to go.

Ja but you've got to have the taste too.

No-one's going to eat like a rabbit.

If it's a throw up between paying fractionally less for something that tastes shit and something that tastes nice, you know which most people will choose.

You need things like fresh herbs, spices, etc to make things palatable - and they're not cheap!

Monkeypump

Could we re-name this the "Sweeping Generalisations, Personal Opinion and Absolutely No Evidence" thread?

bompington

Rick Chasey wrote:

Let's add that all up.

Roughly £9 ish.

The family Bompington (2 adults, 3 kids) eat very little processed food (unless you count tinned tomatoes, which form a large part of our diet, see below).
Our food bill comes to a bit over £100 / week, works out pretty close to £3 / person / day.

we would probably only make something like the curry described, i.e. fresh herbs and all, about once a week, but we also have meat costing over £6 for the family at least a couple of times a week.

The obvious point is that there is a wide spectrum between curry with fresh spices (bought specially for the one meal) and value chicken nuggets, there are a lot of cheap and healthy things out there.

First example in my head is our regular standby, tomato pasta:
3 tins of value tomatoes - £1
bag of value pasta - 30p (about 3/4 of a bag per meal)
2 onions - 40p
few cloves of garlic - 10p
few basil leaves - 5p
bit of cheap parmesan substitute - 20p

Total: £2 meal for 5. Until the Scottish minimum alcohol pricing law, you could get a bottle of plonk and still have change from a fiver.

rick_chasey

Jeez, low on the protein!

rick_chasey

More generally, it's a shame people aren't taught how to cook properly at school.

With hindsight I can see a lot of value in everyone doing home economics.

We did 'food tech' at school, but that consisted of getting shouted at by the teacher for our parents not providing the right ingredients and making cake, which some pikey on the bus would inevitably make you drop for sh!ts and giggles.

CambsNewbie

bompington wrote:

Rick Chasey wrote:

Let's add that all up.

Roughly £9 ish.

The family Bompington (2 adults, 3 kids) eat very little processed food (unless you count tinned tomatoes, which form a large part of our diet, see below).
Our food bill comes to a bit over £100 / week, works out pretty close to £3 / person / day.

we would probably only make something like the curry described, i.e. fresh herbs and all, about once a week, but we also have meat costing over £6 for the family at least a couple of times a week.

The obvious point is that there is a wide spectrum between curry with fresh spices (bought specially for the one meal) and value chicken nuggets, there are a lot of cheap and healthy things out there.

First example in my head is our regular standby, tomato pasta:
3 tins of value tomatoes - £1
bag of value pasta - 30p (about 3/4 of a bag per meal)
2 onions - 40p
few cloves of garlic - 10p
few basil leaves - 5p
bit of cheap parmesan substitute - 20p

Total: £2 meal for 5. Until the Scottish minimum alcohol pricing law, you could get a bottle of plonk and still have change from a fiver.

Where is the protein in that meal?

Don't get me wrong, that tomato pasta in my opinion is still better than nuggets and chips but no protein.

daviesee

Rick Chasey wrote:

.......
A typical meal for me and my girlfriend for example.
........

In those examples there will be enough food for several servings so the meal for 2 cannot compete.
Anyone with nous wanting to eat healthily on a budget will make large pots of meals and freeze them in portion sizes.
Healthy, economical, tasty and apart from the initial cook, convenient.

With refererence your post above - a parent should teach you to be independent for leaving the nest. This includes cooking.

rick_chasey

daviesee wrote:

With refererence your post above - a parent should teach you to be independent for leaving the nest. This includes cooking.

They're obviously not though, so the state should step in.

Also, speaking of food at school, they should sort out school dinners.

I'll sound like Jamie but eating well means you perform better. Simple as. In my school, which I reckon was pretty typical, you could work out who was poor and who wasn't by seeing who stood in the queue for school dinners (to get pizza and chips) and those who had packed lunches.

Surely that'd be another way to get people to learn to eat stuff a little more adventurous?

bompington

You don't need that much protein on a daily basis (about 60g for a normal adult, so less for Rick ;-))
I had to look it up to calculate my tomato pasta is about 16g per portion. Add in a cheese, ham or chicken sandwich for lunch, a bowl of cereal with milk for breakfast and you're pretty much there.

But as I mentioned, we do eat meat regularly too - the point of the tomato pasta, and the reason I'm bringing it up in this thread, is that it is reasonably healthy and nutritious, actually tastes pretty good if you do it right - and it's CHEAP, which means you have more of your budget left to have some significantly more expensive meals too.

CambsNewbie

I think we need a huge rethink of what we teach our kids at school.

Time and time again 'shock' surveys come out where kids don't know butter comes from milk, bread and pasta come from flour which comes from wheat and even that pork comes from pigs!

Nutrition needs to be taught from an early age. How everything we eat is made from fat, carbs and protein and what quantities our body needs of these, right through to the chemical reactions these produce in our body etc.

I really think if we don't do something radical soon then obesity and all it's related medical problems will bankrupt the NHS, leaving a NHS for emergency treatment only and everything else will have to be covered by private insurance.

rolf_f

Monkeypump wrote:

Could we re-name this the "Sweeping Generalisations, Personal Opinion and Absolutely No Evidence" thread?

This is an internet forum so what would you expect?! Besides - are you seriously implying that there is something wrong with sweeping generalisations? I'm sure every statement could be qualified with eg Amy Winehouse was very well off but died young and my old grandad hadn't a brass farthing to his name but lived to 145 but it would get pretty tedious and not add anything to the discussion!

Anyway, isn't the weather unseasonably crap today? Except that in a temperate climate you'd expect this sort of variation so there's nothing unseasonable about it at all. And of course, I'm only talking about the weather in Yorkshire. The weather may be different elsewhere.

rick_chasey

Agreed.

Kids get told every day how 'smoking is bad' - it's even part of the exam curriculum.

Can't see why eating properly isn't.

MrChuck

CambsNewbie wrote:

bread and pasta come from flour which comes from meat

You've got a point, but maybe you shouldn't be doing the teaching

CambsNewbie

MrChuck wrote:

CambsNewbie wrote:

bread and pasta come from flour which comes from meat

You've got a point, but maybe you shouldn't be doing the teaching

Damn, spotted and quoted before I could edit!!

MrChuck

CambsNewbie wrote:

MrChuck wrote:

CambsNewbie wrote:

bread and pasta come from flour which comes from meat

You've got a point, but maybe you shouldn't be doing the teaching

Damn, spotted and quoted before I could edit!!

Clearly just a typo but I couldn't pass it up

daviesee

Rick Chasey wrote:

Agreed.

Kids get told every day how 'smoking is bad' - it's even part of the exam curriculum.

Can't see why eating properly isn't.

True, and it used to be.

Depending on the State for everything will lead to a very dissappointing life though.
Everything begins in the home. Trouble is that generations have been in neglect and now we have parents that can't master the basics themselves, far less teach their children. Sad

CambsNewbie

I read somewhere that some schools are having to teach kids how to use a knife and fork! What chance have we got getting them to learn how to eat balanced nutritious meals at home?

CrackFox

bompington wrote:

- the point of the tomato pasta, and the reason I'm bringing it up in this thread, is that it is reasonably healthy and nutritious, actually tastes pretty good if you do it right

A good tomato sauce takes quite a bit of time to develop a rich flavour and the right consistency. A quicker - and more protein-rich option - is pasta with some prawns, cannellini beans and lemon/pesto. Seriously tasty and very quick to prepare.