Insider covers our experiment

Nice article about our experiment in Insider:

Economist and Professor of Health Management and Policy at the University of New Hampshire Mark J. Bonica and registered dietitian Kerryn L. Story from the University of New Hampshire wanted to test the effects of simulating a food desert lifestyle for 30 days on an existing healthy person — in fact, one of the study's authors volunteered as the subject. 

The two collaborators published a paper discussing their full results in the peer-reviewed Global Journal of Medical Research: L Nutrition and Food Science, and here's what it found.

Read the whole thing here: https://www.insider.com/eating-in-simulated-food-desert-2019-5 

Presenting at the APHA conference

Just back from Chicago last night where I attended the American Public Health Association (APHA) annual meeting and presented my food desert research ( http://intofooddesert.blogspot.com/ ). I recorded the presentation with my iPhone and have mow mixed that with the slides and made a YouTube video of the lecture. It's about 17 minutes.



https://youtu.be/EpKBIFQbc5k

The lecture was well received. I had some good comments from a few nutrition researchers and had some interesting conversations afterward. It was well received.

Chicago was very nice - I wish I had had more time to tour.

I did get to Buddy Guy's Legends blues club one night and saw some real Chicago blues, and had Chicago style deep dish pizza at Giordano's

Glad to be home. Would have had more fun if Kandie had been along. Maybe next time.

Kerryn and I will be submitting the paper soon - wish us luck.

Final Summary Stats & Next Steps

I just published the 4 weeks stats, so these won't be that different, but they will reflect the final results of the experiment. After I talk about those, I'll talk about the additional data forthcoming.

1. Summary Stats

The final average daily expenditure was $8.53/day. This is distorted by the presence of Lobster Day. The median, which is a good measure of central tendency when you know you have outliers, was $7.47, which is very close to the average expenditure of $7.60 when I exclude Lobster Day from the population.

Standard deviation of cost was $5.42 with Lobster day, and $1.85 without it.

Average daily calories consumed was 1,852 with Lobster Day included, and 1,787 without it. The standard deviation was 396 with Lobster Day and 176 without it. The median calories consumed was 1,816, which is about what I was shooting for.

Calories burned through exercise averaged 324 per day with a standard deviation of 236. The median was 341. Lobster Day made little impact on calories burned since it was independent.

Net calories per day averaged 1,527 with Lobster Day and 1,457 with Lobster Day excluded. Standard deviation with Lobster Day was 490; without it was 308. Median was 1,524. 

Weight is one of the health outcomes we are tracking for this experiment. Starting weight was 175.8, ending weight on day 30+1 was 163.5, or a 12.2 pound loss.

I am using day 30+1 as the final weight since the weight was taken first thing in the morning (as usual) and would have reflected the consumption and exercise from day 30. Day 30's weight was 164.6, which would have resulted in a 11.1 pound loss. 

2. Next Steps

As I mentioned in my Day 30 update, I went this morning (Day 30+1) to get post-experiment labs drawn. As soon as those are available, I will post pre- and post-experiment results for comparison.

Over the next week or two I will be entering all of my food consumption data into the USDA's Supertracker program ( https://www.supertracker.usda.gov/foodtracker.aspx ) to assist Kerryn in doing the nutritional analysis. Supertracker is very robust in terms of nutritional data, but it's clunky and generally not user friendly. So I will take the data I entered into Loseit.com over the last month and re-enter it into Supertracker. When that is done, we'll share the nutritional analysis.

Finally, I plan to take my price list from the convenience stores and compare what I paid at the convenience stores to what I would have paid for the same/similar items at a local grocery store to determine how much more I paid to use a convenience store.

When all of that is done, I will also provide some final qualitative observations about the experience.

day 30: That's a wrap!

So there I was, potato chips to the right of me, candy bars to the left of me, cheap beer and wine in front of me, hot dogs slowly rolling under a heat lamp behind me...

Ah, it's good to be done. A visit to the food desert has been interesting, but not fun. I would not want to live like this forever. But there are a great many things I would not want to put up with that I do not have to, and this experience is not the worst of all possible worlds. We'll see how the lab results come out to get the final picture.

Like Day 29, Day 30 started out without much of a plan. I guess I was just tired. Since I was ready to leave the house earlier than usual, I decided to make Power Oatmeal and eat it in the kitchen (I usually just have coffee at the house and bring my breakfast to work to eat at my desk).

Breakfast	Quantity	Cost	Calories
oatmeal	1	$0.33	153
peanut butter	1	$0.27	180
milk	1	$0.31	83
coffee	3	$0.28	8
raisins	1	$0.43	120
		$1.63	544

If there is one meal I could skip easily, it is breakfast. I'm not much of a breakfast food fan (despite my diet this past month), and I know I will want to eat more at night regardless of whether I have eaten a lot or a little during the course of the day. So knowing my own behavior, I try to save my calories for the evening. But it does feel good to come to work with a full belly, and the Power Oatmeal has staying power - you aren't hungry 30 minutes after you eat it.

Lunch was a pair of PB&Js.

Lunch	Quantity	Cost	Calories
bread, wheat	4	$0.52	266
peanut butter	1	$0.27	180
jelly	1	$0.18	56
coffee	3	$0.28	8
		$1.25	510

I brought a pear with me and planned to have it with lunch, but when lunch came, I set it aside planning to eat it later, and the day got away from me and I forgot about it.

By the time I left campus, I had decided wanted to have a nice final meal, and since I was pretty low on spending so far, I decided to stop at the Circle K and pick up one of their salads and a banana.

I actually bought 2 bananas ($0.46 - how can you go wrong?) and decided right then that they would be my final desert dessert.

When I got home, I decided to make one final omelet with all the fixings (at least all the fixings I had been able to acuqire in the desert): onions, peppers, ham, cheddar cheese. I cooked the onions in olive oil to improve the flavor and healthfulness. I ate half of the salad (because the salad was really quite large) with Italian dressing I had purchased for IFDLD (International Food Desert Lobster Day).

It was a nice meal, food desert or not. I would have liked a little Cayenne pepper, but that's just me, and I never found it in the desert.

Dessert was baked banana with honey and cinnamon. If you've never had a baked banana, you really should try it. They're especially good with some marshmallows on top. Honestly, the best way to have them is fried, but Kerryn would probably frown on that, so let's not mention it.


And that was all the food I ate on Day 30 because on Day 30+1 I was going to get my blood drawn, so I had to fast the rest of the night. After my stomach settled, I walked for an hour on the treadmill for exercise.

Day totals:

Cost: $8.07
Calories: 1,706
Exercise: 462 from 13,939 steps
Net calories: 1,244
Weight: 164.6

Day 29: almost there

Day 29 started out with a complete lack of creativity. I woke up with no plan, and no plan gelled on the way down the stairs to the kitchen. So breakfast was PB&J with coffee.

Breakfast	Quantity	Cost	Calories
bread, wheat	4	$0.52	266
peanut butter	1	$0.27	180
jelly	1	$0.18	56
coffee	3	$0.28	7
		$1.25	509

Now the good thing was that as I was standing in front of the refrigerator trying to figure out the rest of the day's plan I realized my previous self of day 28 did actually have a plan for day 29 - only my day 29 self had forgotten. Economists who study behavior often talk about how we treat our future selves as separate from our present selves - and we often engage in something called "hyperbolic discounting" - which is a fancy way of saying we do things like eat twice as much today because tomorrow our future self will get serious about dieting. In other words, our present self treats our future self like a red-headed step child. In this case my past self actually did something smart for my future self and made a nice chick pea salad for my Day 29 self to eat.



This recipe made two servings, so I ate half for lunch:

chick pea salad	Cost	Calories
15 oz can chick peas	$0.99	428
1/2 cucumber	$0.50	10
1/2 green pepper	$0.65	14
5 oz onion	$0.39	32
Corn	$0.65	120
2 tbsp balsamic vinegrette	$0.35	30
	$3.51	634

so lunch was

Lunch	Quantity	Cost	Calories
Chick Pea Salad	0.50	$1.76	317
coffee	3.00	$0.28	7
		$2.04	324

Dinner was macaroni with peas and olive oil, and two hard boiled eggs.

Dinner	Quantity	Cost	Calories
macaroni	2.00	$0.31	210
olive oil	2/3	$0.23	60
peas, canned	1.00	$0.50	120
egg, boiled	2.00	$0.29	155
		$1.34	545

I had a bag of peanuts in the afternoon, and then when I got home from work (late), my father was having a gathering at the house, so I couldn't make dinner right away, so I grabbed a second bag from the kitchen and headed up stairs to wait till I could come back down and make myself dinner. This is the problem with living in someone else's space. Househunting stinks!

So I ate a lot of peanuts (($1.00; 520 cal) on day 29, though not by plan.

Day totals:

Cost: $5.62
Calories: 1,898
Exercise: 0 from 5,326 steps. I have to confess, the exhaustion from house hunting combined with my foot bothering me really just left me in no mood to do anything last night.

Weight: 164.8

Week 4 Summary Stats

Good times, good times! 28 days in the bag. Here's the Week 4 roll up:

Spending through Week 4 took a bit of a bit on day 26, henceforth and forever known as International Food Desert Lobster Day, or IFDLD for short.

Average cost per day with IFDLD included is$8.65. If we exclude the effects of IFDLD, the average daily cost was $7.65.

Once again, IFDLD had a significant impact on calories consumed. With IFDLD in the data, average daily calories through Day 28 were 1,865. Without IFDLD, average calories consumed was 1,785. IFDLD had little effect on exercise. Average daily calories burned was 331 with IFDLD, and 337 without.

Finally, weight appears to have stabilized in the 166 range - at about a 10 pound loss for the experiment.

It will be interesting to see what Kerryn makes of my nutritional intake over the whole experiment, and whether she regards it as sustainable, and what it would take to make it sustainable if not.

Day 28: another day, another $7

I started Day 28 with Power Oatmeal because I knew I had a lot of work to do and I wanted energy and not to be hungry.

Breakfast	Quantity	Cost	Calories
oatmeal	1.00	$0.33	153
peanut butter	1.00	$0.27	180
milk	1.00	$0.31	83
coffee	3.00	$0.28	8
raisins	1.00	$0.43	120
		$1.63	544

I didn't have any bananas, so I used raisins for the fruit component.

Lunch was just left overs - baked pasta - from last night.

Lunch	Quantity	Cost	Calories
macaroni	3.00	$0.47	310
sauce	1.00	$0.34	60
olive oil	0.33	$0.35	40
mozzarella	1.70	$0.89	118
coffee	3.00	$0.28	7
		$2.33	535

In the afternoon I had a bag of honey roasted peanuts ($0.50; 230 cal) as a snack.

I wound up having a very late dinner, two chicken salad sandwiches and some carrots with ranch.

Dinner	Quantity	Cost	Calories
bread	4.00	$0.13	266
miracle whip	1.00	$0.17	40
canned chicken	2.00	$1.29	101
onion	3.00	$0.23	16
carrots	5.00	$0.62	63
ranch dressing	0.50	$0.24	70
		$2.68	556

After dinner I went walking - up and down the street. Sort of a real life treadmill. The street is about 1/2 mile round trip, so I walked up and down it five or six times until I hit 10,000 steps. It was snowing last night, which was kind of nice. We got another 4 or 5 inches.

Day Totals:

Cost: $7.14
Calories: 1,865
Exercise: 388 cal from 13,258 steps
Net calories: 1,316
Weight: 165.8