"The Stigler Diet" -- just something to think about

[winterberry]

From Garrison Keilor's Writer's Almanac:

"There's a diet named after Nobel laureate economist George Stigler. The Stigler Diet is actually a mathematical model for the cost of subsistence eating — a linear programming problem on how to get the most nutritional bang for your buck. Specifically, Stigler's math problem was this: Say you have a man who weighs 154 pounds. Out of 77 foods commonly available, how much of each one should be eaten daily so that the man gets the right amount of nine essential nutrients — at the cheapest cost? The nutrients Stigler took into consideration: calories, protein, iron, and some vitamins.
The solution to the optimization problem: In one year, that man should consume 370 pounds of wheat flour, 57 cans of evaporated milk, 285 pounds of dried navy beans, 23 pounds of spinach, and 111 pounds of cabbage. In 1939, dollars, this would cost about 11 cents a day. Today, it'd be close to $1.75 per day. Stigler was subjected to a barrage of ridicule for suggesting this dull and bland diet, and he tried to remind people that it was just a mathematical model. He issued a statement: 'No one recommends these diets for anyone, let alone everyone.' "

It does make me think I could live on a lot less than I do....

[loosechickens]

definitely recognizing the difference between what would be nutritionally necessary for a healthy diet and its distance from what we would "like to eat" as a nutritional diet, is important. We never know when we might have to reduce our costs for food to the lowest level, and it's good to know that it can be done.

I've often thought that if I had rolled oats, soybeans, whole wheat flour, brown rice, oil, and a small plot here in this twelve month growing seaon where I could grow greens, and some other veggies, I could see that we had excellent nutrition and even a varied diet, for a very low cost.

Your guy's diet would be boring, but not that more monotonous than most people in the world have always had.........many eat the same few foods every day of their lives........I found it very interesting.

[Perplexa]

I wonder how much garlic, onions, ginger, lemons, and dried chili peppers would add to the $1.75 per day? I couldn't handle the diet then.

[loosechickens]

Of course, I had to end up at The Google........I'd never heard of this guy......some interesting stuff here, and not just about diet, but about as an early example of "linear programming", which cost me ANOTHER half hour on The Google........

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stigler_diet

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linear_programming

[winterberry]

Oh, my. Linear programming is over my head. I've been thinking along the same lines as Perplexa. What would I do with 370 pounds of wheat flour? Maybe make matzo? My husband says matzo is made with just flour and water. Anyway, a few things like salt and yeast would help a lot. And definitely garlic and onions. Your minimal diet is more appealing, too, loosechickens. Maybe you could plant a lot of cabbage ....

[Anne Lee]

(cross posted from another forum)

My curiosity was piqued! So I searched on Google Scholar and found if not the original article by Stigler then one published shortly thereafter (cited below).

Since I'm working on my master's I have access to Jstor (yay!) and was able to read the article in its entirety.

From the list of 77 common foods provided by the Bureau of Labor Statistics (1), Stigler found that 15 met his initial nutrient/price requirements.

At this point, he wrote:

Quote:
... reducing the procedure is experimental because there does not appear to be any direct method of finding the minimum of a linear function subject to linear conditions. By making linear combinations of various commodities it is possible to construct a composite commodity which is superior in all respects to some survivor, and by this process the list of eligible commodities can be reduced at least to 9.


The list of 15 is below with the 9 in bold. If this were a paper, I would label it Table 1.

Wheat Flour
Evaporated Milk
Cheddar Cheese
Liver (beef)
Cabbage
Spinach
Sweet potatoes
Dried lima beans
Dried navy beans
Oleomargarine
Green Beans
Potatoes
Dried Peaches
Dried Prunes
Onions

Interestingly enough, he noted

Quote:
The BLS list is a short one, and it excludes almost all fresh fruits, nuts, many cheap vegetables rich in nutrients, and fresh fish. It is beyond question that with a fuller list the minimum cost of meeting the National Research Council's allowances could be reduced, possibly by a substantial amount.


The reason for this is that many of these items were seasonal and therefore cheap in season and not usually available out of season (i.e. only available when inexpensive). Contrast that to today - I am going to eat tomatoes from Mexico for lunch.

Actually, this list is fairly doable. (I'm not saying I'd want to, only that I could) I wonder what the foods would be if the same nutrient/price criteria would were applied today.

(1)Footnote 13 - The commodities are described in Retail Prices of Food, 1923-36, Bureau of Labor Statistics, Bulletin 635, October 1937. The price quotations are averages of 51 large cities in 1939 and 56 cities in 1944; they were taken from the Monthly Labor Review, October 1939 and December 1944.
=============================
The Cost of Subsistence
George J. Stigler
Journal of Farm Economics
Vol. 27, No. 2 (May, 1945), pp. 303-314
(article consists of 12 pages)
Published by: Oxford University Press on behalf of the Agricultural & Applied Economics Association
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/1231810

[kib]

It would be really interesting to see how health would be affected by this diet - there is so much more to good health than just getting the basic numbers right. Personally ... lol. This diet is pretty high up on the "would make me feel like crap" scale! I don't do refined flour or wheat flour at all, have a lot of info about wheat and gluten allergy and the ills of refined carbs. Cheap evaporated milk and cheap cheddar cheese is made with the worst milk, it's processed half to death, and for the lactose intolerant it's out. Beef liver is sort of the same as milk - it could be a free range steer not subjected to an artificial diet and hormones and eternal antibiotics, but that's not the cheap kind, and there are more accumulated toxins in liver than any other part of the cow. I'd limit potatoes, prunes and peaches as excessively high carb for daily indulgence in the absence of much to balance them except more carbs in the form of flour. I see no big issues with the veggies or beans other than the same old: for best price, these are not organically grown. Finally, I'd rather eat dirt than oleomargarine, I'm convinced it's one of the worst substances known to mankind masquerading as "food".

It's possible that in 1926 most of these foods would have had a lot less tampering and be made of real food, and that without the constant onslaught of super-refined carbs we eat today, our bodies could handle this level of high-glycemic index foods, but I'm not betting on it. While this diet would definitely keep people alive and not significantly malnourished, health is a bit more than just that, no?

ETA: I have to agree, I don't eat it at all, but what the hell would anyone do with a pound of flour a day, given no leavening, eggs or sugar?

[tyrian]

There's an Excel spreadsheet that finds the cheapest diet that fulfills a set of nutritional requirements here. It was inspired by the work of George Stigler.

You can add or remove foods, and play about with the nutritional constraints. If anyone needs help using it, then please ask.

Although any "least-cost but nutritionally sufficient" diet tends to be bland, and it's not something I'd like to follow (ice-cream tastes too good!).

George Dantzig (a famous computer scientist) attempted to follow the Stigler Diet, but gave up after consuming Bovril Boullion cubes for breakfast! You can read about his experience in "The Diet Problem," Interfaces 20:4 1990 (I have a PDF in case anyone wants to read this paper)

[catherine]

This topic has made me wonder:

Is the food that we NEED based on biology, emotion, experience, sensory pleasure or all of the above?? I remember reading an article about a millionaire who lived in a boarding house and ate canned stuff every day. He wound up with millions, but he could have had some wonderful culinary experiences in his life, which he declined. Why?

Then, the next step is to ask the question: if we gave people on food stamps only the food mandated by the Stigler Diet, would that be kind or cruel? Why?

In what I've seen in my lifetime, it seems very difficult to follow a diet that is ONLY nutritious, and which disregards the pleasure of eating. Why?

Just a few questions. (my personal filter: I'm not a "foodie" and I don't like spending extra on "costly calories"--but when I see how hard it is for other people to abandon comfort foods, or foods that just taste GREAT but are not good for us, it all just makes me wonder).