Dollar Tree Diet- Day One

Breakfast was good. I prefer something light in the morning to get me going, and preferably something sweet. I took some of the mango chunks, a banana, and a cup of milk to make my smoothie. It was awesome, and kept me filled until around 10:30am. You could spend $5- $8 on a smoothie just like this at a fresh smoothie shop. I spent about $1.50… if that.

Then there was lunch, which I kinda just snacked on all day. The thing about whole grain brown rice and beans is that they are filled with fiber and therefore very filling. Needless to say, I did not get hungry. However, there is a downside; and that is: I may have miscalculated just how many freakin' beans I would have every.... single.... day. The picture doesn't do it justice, but this was a massive bowl of beans. I soaked them for about 10 hours overnight before I cooked them for an hour and a half in the morning to prepare them.

There were so many beans, that I was able to snack on these until about 7:00 pm. I am more accustom to a large amount of fiber daily than most people, but I can see how this many beans could really mess you up if you were to jump from 5 grams of fiber per day (the average for the American adult eating a highly processed diet) to nearly 150 grams.

In my defense, when I was shopping, I was worried about making the math work so that I got adequate calories and an adequate macronutrient distribution. Since there were few good meat choices, beans it was. 

Lastly, for dinner I had stir fry made of peppers, onions, and broccoli; and a little later I scrambled two medium eggs with all my leftover stir fry, beans, and rice. It was not glamorous, but it got the job done. Altogether I probably came in at around 1800 calories for the day. 

How to Eat Healthily for Under $30- The Dollar Tree Diet

I’ve been toying with the idea of creating a Dollar Tree diet for a long time now. The idea would be to have a set budget for the week and use that budget to accomplish 3 things:

1. Purchase only non-processed foods.

2. Eat for an entire week while maintaining the correct proportion of carbohydrates, fats, and protein.

3. Consume adequate calories and fiber.

The purpose of my pursuit is to prove that you can eat healthy while on a budget. I set the weekly budget for myself at $30.

Here are my preliminary numbers:

I quickly realized that I was proportionally low on fat intake. I also realized I would need bananas and milk for my daily fruit smoothies. To supplement this I added the following items to my daily consumption.

Now that I had the totals I could figure out the percentage of each macronutrient; but I had a problem. Even though I copied the information directly from the packaging, the math was not adding up. There are 4 calories per carbohydrate and protein gram, and 9 calories per fat gram. When I converted the total grams into calories, I ended up with a daily total of 2,452; which is much higher than the advertised 1,939 calories. This is due to rounding. When a company posts the number of grams on the packaging, they round each gram to a “per serving” ratio to make the information easy to analyze at a glance. This works for the layman looking at only one serving, but when analyzing an entire week’s worth of food, the discrepancy becomes glaringly evident. Therefore I was left to ballpark the percentages.

I was very pleased with my quick run to the dollar tree. Even though I only spent $25, the net result was a reasonable distribution of macronutrients. Furthermore, I was able to maintain a calorie count at or near 2,000, and the chosen foods where primarily fruits and vegetables.

I plan to begin my diet tomorrow and eat only the things listed in the charts above for one week. I will keep you posted.

Next Time You Have a Sniffly Nose, Think Twice Before Reaching for that Vitamin C

Is vitamin C really the cure for your common cold? According to an article posted in Web MD: “Vitamin C was first touted for the common cold in the 1970s;” and yet despite this “…experts have found little to no benefit for vitamin C preventing or treating the common cold." Please don't interpret these findings as “vitamin C = bad.” Perhaps a more logical conclusion would be: vitamin C, in pill form, is simply ineffective. Vitamin C performs numerous functions in the body and it’s one of the only vitamins which is also an antioxidant. So how can you get these benefits? I just told you that the vitamin C pill is generally ineffective, but vitamin C itself is good. Luckily, the answer is quite simple: vitamin C is effective if eaten through your food; and no, I'm not talking about your breakfast cereal or any other processed food or beverage.

In a peer reviewed journal, The Lancet, it was published that vitamin C “…significantly reduces the severity and total intensity of colds in girls, but does not benefit cold symptoms in boys at a daily dose of 500 mg.” The article abstract gave no indication of sample size. You’ll also notice that this study was published in 1973, when research in vitamin C for the common cold was just beginning to emerge as a mainstream idea. More recently, in 2001, another peer reviewed journal, Pediatrics for Parents, published an Australian study which “concluded that megadoses of vitamin C have no effect on the severity or duration of the symptoms of the common cold.” This study was conducted on 400 college students. Confusing, right? This is why my ongoing mantra is: research on isolated and fractionated vitamins is mixed at best.

So what can we know for sure? Wouldn’t you like to take the guesswork out of the confusing world of supplementation? With any supplement, you should subject it to the following 2 part test which I first heard when listening to Dr. Sears, a prominent Pediatrician:

1. Does it get into the bloodstream?

2. Once it gets into the bloodstream, does it do good things for the body?

If it passes this two part test, then take it. Unfortunately, what we have found is that “the average adult who suffers with a cold for 12 days a year would still suffer for 11 days a year if that person took a high dose of vitamin C every day during that year” (WebMD). Those results don’t sound very significant to me. Furthermore, by the time your symptoms were to become visible, it would be too late for the Vitamin C pill to have any affect whatsoever.

Fortunately, there is a solution, and it’s to get the vast majority of your nutrients, including vitamin C, through whole raw food. In this way, not only will you be getting vitamin C, but you will also get the benefit of tens of thousands of phytonutrients, all of which are important to the proper functioning of the human physiology.

Bibliography:

Vitamin C for the Common Cold. Web MD. Retrieved from http://www.m.webmd.com/cold-and-flu/cold-guide/vitamin-c-for-common-cold?page=2.

Vitamin C and the common cold. (2001). Pediatrics for Parents, 19(10), 3. Retrieved from http://search.proquest.com/docview/200508760?accountid=12085

C.W.M Wilson, H.S Loh, COMMON COLD AND VITAMIN C, The Lancet, Volume 301, Issue 7804, 24 March 1973, Pages 638-641, ISSN 0140-6736, http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/S0140-6736(73)92202-2. Retrieved from http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0140673673922022