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Originally Posted by blucher
I like that idea. I see what people in line with me buy and seeing me fund two big bags of noodles, pastry, bread and candy going into a morbidly obese person bothers me. The fly in this ointment is that carbo addictions are often coping devices that while useless otherwise do comfort the eater psychologically.
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I?ve been doing disaster preparedness research off-and-on ever since I saw the TV propaganda move
The Day After during the 1984 presidential election campaign. Of course having enough food in storage to get you through an emergency is a prime component of disaster planning. You can find storage calculators online that will let you input how many people you need to store food for and get back how much food of each kind you need to store.
But none of the online calculators are very accurate because they don?t really take age, gender, health and whether or not a woman is pregnant or nursing into consideration. The government?s RDA for each nutrient is simply the least amount needed by the segment of the population that has the greatest need for the nutrient. Pregnant women need more calcium than anyone else does, so the RDA for calcium is based on how much pregnant women need. If everybody eats and RDA diet, then most of us would end up eating too much. The online food calculators do pretty much the same thing.
I just found a food guide from the USDA that gives detailed RDA data based on age, gender, et cetera. I?m thinking about designing a computer program to calculate food storage needs based on a statistically normal household, i.e., divide the U.S. population by the number of households the country has and then distribute gender and age within that household so it represents an idealized set of demographics. Then I can calculate the food needed for this normal household and then get a rough estimate of what the food would cost. Then this data could be used to calculate how much we?d have to spend on food stamps so the recipients would get their RDA and only their RDA. Everybody would get what they need and very little would be wasted.
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