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Recently, I climbed a mountain with my friends. I was
surprised to find out that my efforts (in terms of
gravitational potential energy) were worth about a mars
bar.
It’s very easy to underestimate the amount of exercise
needed to “work off” some item of food, and the food
marketing industry
work hard to obfuscate the energy
content of their products.
If comestibles were labelled with a measure of the
exercise it would genuinely take to burn off “the
calories”-
like 3 mountains or 1.5 marathons, perhaps we
consumers
could calibrate better?
QR Code size limits
http://www.qrcodesh...de-character-limit/
Bigly [4and20, Sep 20 2019]
Four hours to walk off pizza
https://www.bbc.co....ews/health-50711652
[Frankx, Dec 11 2019]
"Studties show..."
https://www.minnpos...hoices-study-finds/
Life imitates halfbakery, again... [neutrinos_shadow, Mar 02 2020]
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Annotation:
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// I climbed a mountain with my friends. // |
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You have friends ? Wow, who knew, huh ? |
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Most halfbakers don't have any dirtspace friends. |
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We'd keep that quiet - you're going to get a lot of envy. |
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As to the idea, a label that says "The food energy in this ChocoNutCream Bar is equivalent to climbing the stairs to the top of <well-known tall building> X times" is actually very good, so for the very reasons of obfuscation you point out it will never happen. |
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//friends// - figure of speech. Some humans who
were patient enough to wait for me, for their own
unknown reason. |
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I don't want to appear intrusive but, given the history you summarised on the "Gold Medal" idea, how do you climb mountains? |
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... slowly. Hence the need for patient humans! |
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Ha! - yes, indeed (although they could have been enjoying the chance to take it easy...) |
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<Pointless rambling anecdote> |
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Two trekkers in Nepal take the mickey out of a little old Buddhist monk sitting with his begging bowl in the market place. |
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In the evening, after monumental exertions, they finally reach the top of a high, snow-clad peak ... |
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... and find the same monk sitting on a rock, with his begging bowl. |
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They are astonished. "How did you get here before us ?" they demand. |
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"Well, how did you get here ?" asks the monk. |
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One of the climbers points back down the mountain and says "We climed up there". |
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The monk's eyes open wide; he stares at them in horror and says "You don't mean to tell me you WALKED ?" |
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</Pointless rambling anecdote> |
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//Minutes. All exercise and food items should be
labelled in minutes// - surely it would be simpler, or
more complicated, to instead measure all time in
kWh or MJ? This has a nice relativism about it, so if
someone says "Yes, I'm just leaving now - I'll be there
in half a MegaJoule" then the actual time elapsed
before they arrive depends on how energy-intensive
their travel to the destination is. |
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The problem with that is that travelling 1 kilometre by bicycle (highly efficient ) will give a very different energy cost to travelling the same distance by steam railway locomotive (very, very inefficient, yet a superb way to travel). |
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[bigsleep] is right but let's keep it simple. |
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Still label in donut hours as per the initial idea. |
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But include a reminder of how many donut hours a resting
body needs each day. |
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Then people will know when they
need
to start walking. |
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Obviously people are different so it's going to have to be an
average, I like slim girls & don't care if men get a little
anorexic or thinner than might be healthy (other men
anyway, & I can
calculate my own so
that's
OK) so can we use the adult female human average on the
labeling? |
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This was partly inspired by the food labelling debate in
the UK. |
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The UK Food Standards Agency developed a "traffic light"
food labelling scheme. It is supported by the British
Medical Association, British Dietetic Association and
British Heart Foundation, independent consumer and
health groups, and generally by the public. It gives a very
simple, easy to understand indication of fats, saturates,
salt, sugar and calorie content. |
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Kellogg's, Danone, Coca-Cola, Nestle, Tesco and others
have spent millions lobbying not to use the traffic light
system, but the GDA (Guideline Daily Amount) labelling
instead. |
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Their argument is that "consumers won't buy the products
with red labels" |
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The food industry won the battle. |
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So Hooray for informed consumer choice! |
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Hooray indeed; it's well-known that traffic lights are very poor in nutritional value, contain no measurable vitamins or soluble fibre, and should be consumed only in the most moderate quantities. |
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I was planning to post an idea about embedding ingredients lists in QR codes for every package, so apps can scan and play with the figures any way they like. QR ingredients lists is still a great idea, although at least one food company has already started doing it. |
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Fair point about offline use, although "a QR code having only Numeric data can have up to 7,089 characters" |
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That should be enough even for The Lord of the Rings; thousands of characters, but only a couple of dozen important ones. |
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//It’s very easy to underestimate the amount of exercise
needed to “work off” some item of food,// |
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The weight-loss effects of exercise don't equate to the
energy used directly, though. |
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What sort of conversion losses were assumed in the original
calculation? |
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If I get up a mountain under my own steam, the snack food must
cover not only the extollment of 1000 milli-mes of mass up a
certain vertical distance, but also a good deal of horizontal leg
movement, heart-pumping, backpack-bouncing, scree-
displacement, expectoration, side-wind battling, brain-glucose
top-up, cursing and waste heat. That might be worth a second
mars bar. |
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// If I get up a mountain under my own steam // ... you have done the sensible thing and chosen a mountain equipped with that most perfect of mountaineering accessories, a heritage cog railway. |
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Shovelling coal into the firebox is quite hard work, mind. |
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"If comestibles were labelled" this belongs on the "Lipstick"
idea, me thinks. |
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Sciency-types have been reading the halfbakery again... see
linky. |
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The thermodynamic model is useless for losing
weight. |
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We evolved to eat particular types of foods during
a particular time window during the day. Get that
right
and you'll be in
good shape. The agricultural revolution and the
food industry has made us fat. To be fair, the
agricultural revolution has also given us civilization
and freedom from mass starvation so it's a double
edge sword, but we're still not designed to eat
grains and 3 meals a day. We haven't evolved much
in a few tens of thousands of years. |
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And although you can survive on a plant based
diet, we're designed to kill things and eat them.
My proof of that is the fact that dogs have been a
co-evolutionary partner with us. They would never
have joined the party to be part of a bean
harvesting expedition. We went out to kill dinner,
they said "Hey, I know what you guys are doing,
hunting as a pack! I'm coming along! I can out run,
out hear and out smell you but you have those
throwing sticks! Let's partner up!". |
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We're omnivores but we've got binocular vision,
pack
hunting skills and weapons ability. We're hunter
killers,
but food was always a hard task to come by and
our ancestors didn't have 3 meals a day with
snacking in between. One meal or two
meals a day is plenty. |
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[+] for the idea by the way. |
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//binocular vision, pack hunting skills and weapons ability// |
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... or, in some cases, squinty vision, pack-opening skills and
recipe-following ability. |
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Dogs are OK with that combination, too, I find. |
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It saves them the trouble of evolving an opposable thumb. |
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Copy cats. (There 8th...I left it wide open for you. Do what
you will.) |
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<Starts on design to allow kittens to be effectively transported through a cut-sheet feeder/> |
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