Have you tried using Cronometer or a similar nutrition-tracking service to quickly find these relationships? I’ve found Cronometer in particular to be useful because it displays each nutrient in terms of a percent of the recommended daily value for one’s body weight. For example, I can see that a piece of salmon equals over 100% of the recommended amount of omega-3 fatty acids for the day, while a handful of sunflower seeds only equals 20% of one’s daily value of vitamin E. Therefore, I know that a single piece of fish is probably enough, but that I should probably eat a larger portion of sunflower seeds than I would otherwise.
I suppose a percentage system like this one is just the reciprocal of saying something like “10 eggs contain the recommended daily amount of vitamin D.”
Thank you for the link! Glad to see someone uses the intuitive method. My complaint was about why this isn’t the standard approach. Like, recently I was reading a textbook on nutrition (the actual school textbook for cooks; I was curious what they learn), where the information was provided in the form of “X is found in A, B, C, D, also in E” without any indication how often are you supposed to eat any of these.
(If I said this outside of Less Wrong, I would expect the response to be: “more is better, of course, unless it is too much, of course; everything in moderation”, which sounds like an answer, but is not much.)
And with corona and the articles on vitamin D, I opened the Wikipedia, saw “cod liver” as the top result, thought it was no problem they sell it in the shop and it’s not expensive and it tastes okay, I just need to know how much, then I ran the numbers… and then I realized “shit, 99% of people will not do this, even if they get curious and read the Wikipedia page”. :(
Have you tried using Cronometer or a similar nutrition-tracking service to quickly find these relationships? I’ve found Cronometer in particular to be useful because it displays each nutrient in terms of a percent of the recommended daily value for one’s body weight. For example, I can see that a piece of salmon equals over 100% of the recommended amount of omega-3 fatty acids for the day, while a handful of sunflower seeds only equals 20% of one’s daily value of vitamin E. Therefore, I know that a single piece of fish is probably enough, but that I should probably eat a larger portion of sunflower seeds than I would otherwise.
I suppose a percentage system like this one is just the reciprocal of saying something like “10 eggs contain the recommended daily amount of vitamin D.”
Thank you for the link! Glad to see someone uses the intuitive method. My complaint was about why this isn’t the standard approach. Like, recently I was reading a textbook on nutrition (the actual school textbook for cooks; I was curious what they learn), where the information was provided in the form of “X is found in A, B, C, D, also in E” without any indication how often are you supposed to eat any of these.
(If I said this outside of Less Wrong, I would expect the response to be: “more is better, of course, unless it is too much, of course; everything in moderation”, which sounds like an answer, but is not much.)
And with corona and the articles on vitamin D, I opened the Wikipedia, saw “cod liver” as the top result, thought it was no problem they sell it in the shop and it’s not expensive and it tastes okay, I just need to know how much, then I ran the numbers… and then I realized “shit, 99% of people will not do this, even if they get curious and read the Wikipedia page”. :(