 According to the internet, if you ate only ramen, you'd save thousands of dollars a year on food. How is this possible? In order to avoid starvation, the average adult male needs to consume about 2,000 calories a day, and the average female needs to consume about 1,600. You can get this many calories from five packets of ramen, which will cost you about 75 cents. On the other hand, if you ate broccoli, you'd need to eat 12 pounds of broccoli to get enough calories to live, and this will cost you around $20. So if you're watching your food budget, you can't afford to eat broccoli. That's great if you don't like broccoli, but is this the whole story? During the 20th century, food scientists, doctors, and nutritionists discovered that in addition to calories, you also need protein, which are usually found in things like meat, eggs, and soybeans. There's also a number of vitamins that children require to grow properly, and adults require to maintain their health. These are usually found in things like fresh fruits and vegetables. Because many of these vitamins are water-soluble, they tend to get washed away in heavily processed foods. So fresh peas, green beans, and broccoli are high in vitamin C, but as much as 80% of this vitamin C will be lost during the canning process, and even freezing will reduce their vitamin C content by as much as 50%. So what about that ramen diet? Ramen has no vitamin C, so if you ate only ramen, you'd soon develop scurvy, a condition characterized by bleeding gums, excessive bruising, weakness, and fatigue. Ramen has no vitamin A. Lack of vitamin A can lead to blindness and reduced ability to fight off infections. Ramen has no vitamin D. A lack of vitamin D can lead to rickets, a condition where bones are brittle, and children who develop rickets will be stunted or suffer other skeletal deformities. There are other factors. You need iron, or your work and school performance will suffer from fatigue and reduced mental acuity. Your iron needs can be met by consuming 11 packets of ramen a day. Even if you could afford to buy this much ramen, there are other problems. Those 11 packets will contain more than 4,000 calories. If you only need 2,000 calories to survive, your body will store those extra calories as fat. You might not be malnourished, but you will be obese. And obesity leads to other health problems like hypertension, kidney damage, and heart disease. As a general rule, any diet consisting of a single food will either lead to medical conditions associated with obesity or medical conditions associated with malnutrition. A food buyer faces what mathematicians call a constrained optimization problem. To illustrate this, suppose your food choices were limited to ramen and eggs. Then every point in the plane corresponds to some combination of packets of ramen and eggs, which translates into some cost for food. For example, the 0.53 corresponds to eating 5 packets of ramen and 3 eggs every day. What we want to find is a combination of ramen packets and eggs that will meet our nutritional needs at the lowest possible cost. To solve this problem, we can find our constraints. You can think of these constraints as fences. They mark the limits of the feasible region. One constraint is caloric intake. Since you need at least 2,000 calories a day to avoid starvation, the total caloric intake for ramen and eggs must be greater than 2,000. We can graph a line showing where the combination of ramen packets and eggs gives us 2,000 calories, and if we think about this as a boundary of our feasible region, we have to be above this boundary. If you're below the boundary, you're starving. Ramen has no vitamin D, which means that eating only ramen will cause you to develop rickets. Your bones will weaken, or if you're still growing, your growth will be stunted or you'll develop skeletal deformities. Fortunately, eggs contain vitamin D. One egg supplies about 11% of your daily requirements, so you'll need to eat at least 9 eggs to avoid rickets. This means we have to be above the line where we are eating 9 eggs. One problem with ramen is that it has a high sodium content. Six packages of ramen a day mean you'd be taking in more than 4 times the amount recommended by medical professionals. Let's be generous and assume you could have this much without developing hypertension, kidney failure, or other problems. This constraint gives us another fence. As long as we're to the left of this fence, our sodium consumption is low enough to not lead to problems if we're to the right of this fence we're eating far too much sodium. Eggs, on the other hand, quite have quite a bit of cholesterol, and we might want to limit our cholesterol consumption, say we don't want to eat more than 20 eggs a day. This means we should be below the line where we're eating 20 eggs. Let's just use these constraints. This gives us a feasible region. In other words, it corresponds to a diet under which we will neither starve, be malnourished, or develop life-threatening medical conditions. Now let's consider the costs. At our local grocery, a package of ramen costs around 15 cents, and an egg will cost you around 20 cents. Suppose we pick a point at random inside the feasible region. Again, this corresponds to a diet of ramen and eggs that avoids starvation and malnourishment. In this case, it's five servings of ramen and a dozen eggs. This will cost us $3.15. If we move down but stay within the feasible region, we've reduced the number of eggs. We only need five servings of ramen and nine eggs. Since we need fewer eggs, we can lower our food costs. Here the food cost has been reduced to $2.55, and we can continue to search the feasible region, and we find out that the least cost solution will occur at this vertex, corresponding to eating three packages of ramen a day and nine eggs. This is going to cost us $2.25 a day. We're still consuming more than twice as much sodium as recommended by medical professionals, so we're still at risk from high blood pressure, kidney failure, and related diseases. And this analysis didn't take into account our vitamin C requirement. Neither ramen nor eggs have significant amounts of vitamin C, so in this diet, you will develop scurvy. To avoid scurvy, you'll need to add other things to your diet. A similar but more sophisticated analysis leads to the conclusion that to avoid both malnutrition and obesity that an average family of four needs to spend about $600 a month on food. But what happens if you can't afford this much? The maximum SNAP benefit for a family of four is $649 per month, but this amount is reduced by 30% of your net earnings for the month. This means that if you can afford rent, your SNAP benefit will be less than $300 a month. This means the working poor often have to choose between paying rent and eating healthy. A $3 bag of potato chips contains all the calories you need to survive for a day. While potatoes contain enough vitamin C so you'll avoid scurvy, you won't get enough protein, leading to fatigue, illness, and other problems. 12 pounds of broccoli would get you enough calories, vitamin C, and protein, but it would cost 5 to 10 times as much, so you have to choose. Potato chips with a side of malnutrition or a main course of starvation with a side of broccoli. Since starvation is more obvious than malnutrition, when people on a limited budget shop for food, they tend to choose high calorie, inexpensive foods. People on limited food budgets don't buy junk food because they don't care about their health or are wasteful. They buy junk food because it's the only way they can avoid starvation. This means that in the industrialized world, obesity is an almost inevitable result of poverty. But why should we care if a bunch of poor people are fat? In 2010, Mission Readiness, a coalition of retired generals, admirals, NCOs, and civilian military leaders warned of the dangers of the growing obesity epidemic. Fully one-third of America's youth are unable to serve in the military for reasons of obesity. In combination with educational deficits, criminal records, and other disqualifiers such as asthma or drug abuse, 75% of Americans of military age are unable to join. Good eating habits are established in childhood, and the National School Lunch Program, established in 1946 after America's victory in World War II, directed Congress as a measure of national security to provide funds to maintain, operate, and expand school lunch programs. But during the presidency of Ronald Reagan, budgetary cuts forced the National School Lunch Program to relax requirements so that condiments counted towards meeting nutritional requirements. Relish counts as a vegetable as does pizza. Such cavalier dismissal of scientifically validated nutritional standards is a direct threat to our national security. If we hope to produce the next generation of men and women to defend our country, it is necessary that supplemental nutrition programs like the National School Lunch Program not only be maintained but expanded. Side effects of knowledge include greater understanding of the world around you and an increased demand of evidence from elected officials. Difficulty swallowing lies has been reported by some users as well as reduced tolerance for flawed arguments, personal attacks, anecdotal evidence, and false equivalences. Other users report becoming addicted to learning. A small percentage of users also exhibit behavior changes such as fact-checking, rejection of internet memes, and political activism. Educational videos slow but do not stop the spread of misinformation, propaganda, and alternative facts. If confronted with a serious case of these things, seek immediate help from non-profit institutions of higher education or train knowledge professionals such as scientists, researchers, or investigative journalists.