My boss, on my first job, whenever presented with any "study" of this nature would mumble:<p><i>"If you feed a rat a boxcar of anything, it'll get cancer"</i>.<p>Too damn right.
Junk food may be "the cheapest option," but if you insist on eating a meal that actually provide the nutrients that the body needs, you'd have to spend a lot more money eating junk food than just cooking yourself.<p>Saying you just don't have enough time to cook for yourself is almost never true.<p>Just one meal example: Pressure cook for 6 minutes (plus ~5 getting up to pressure) a large volume of potatoes, carrots, onions, some ginger and chili pepper for flavor. Drop in some canned tomato and canned fish, and you can easily end up paying less than $1 for a totally balanced delicious meal, and you have produced in one swoop enough food to feed an adult for two full days.
Ramen Noodles (when eaten all the time instead of a variety of fruits and vegetables) may lead to chronic illness.<p>The title is slightly misleading in that regard. It should be common knowledge now that too much of any one thing will kill you.
That anyone would be shocked that packaged crap like Ramen has health risks is sad. This is not food. Of course it's going to kill you.<p>I always hope that when startups say "eating ramen" that they mean it symbolically, in that they are being frugal. Eating crap like this is just dumb.
We should not call these rubbish instant noodles ramen.<p>What the Japanese call ramen is something very different. Fresh noodles, rich soup filled with vegetables, pork, bamboo shoots, ginger... Still, you wouldn't want to live on just one thing, that would be dumb.
I've never posted any comments here before but I feel compelled to do so for this link. It is lamenting the fact that people who eat ramen frequently aren't buying fruits and vegetables instead. I've basically lived on ramen for the better part of a year and the truth is that if I could eat healthier I would without a moments hesitation. But a ramen packet costs 15¢ each. So I can be reasonably full for around 30¢ a day. What kind of fruit can I buy for 30¢? A single apple? One banana? The author of this article needs to get off his high horse and try to live off the diet he's saying is such a bad choice.
The article's title is misleading. The study doesn't actually pinpoint ramen noodles as a cause of chronic illness, but rather nutritional deficits, which of course could result from eating nothing but ramen.<p><i>"Those who relied on instant noodles and other cheap food with little nutritional content were at greater risk of chronic diseases including cancer, diabetes and heart disease, the researchers found."</i><p>The article title could just as easily have been Spaghetti May Lead... or McDonalds May Lead... Of course, it should be Poor Nutrition May Lead..., but then no one would care.
Correlation != causation. Despite the title submitted here, what the article actually says is that people are trying to subsist almost entirely on ramen, foregoing other nutrition that they need like fruits and veggies.<p>I eat ramen every once in a while, when I'm too busy or too tired to fix any better kind of meal for myself, but that doesn't put me at any kind of risk because I don't do it every day for every meal. If you live entirely on ANY one kind of food (ramen, hot pockets, tuna sandwiches, etc), you're going to have health problems because you're simply not getting the different kinds of nutrition your body needs.
white flour, poor quality fat, sodium, and a massive wallop of MSG. practically no protein.<p>my partner was busy last night, so I fed the family. I cooked whole-wheat cous-cous, mixed it with fried peppers and onions, and steamed a package of frozen "Italian Vegetables" (cauliflower, broccoli, carrots and more.) I put this into bowls, half of each of the kind of stuff, and flavored with a dash of salt, pepper and earth balance natural margarine.<p>i didn't want a lot of protein in that meal because we cooked a chicken last night and i've been eating mass quantities of whey protein powder.
"healthy but less-filling fruits and vegetables"<p>This is not true. Fruits and vegetables have more fiber which makes you feel full. Ramen noodles and other fast food products can be hunger-promoting.
Completely anecdotal (not data) point: guy I know from one forum, young guy in his 20s, lived on ramen noodles for 18 months to 2 years. Got colon cancer, which usually hits people who are older.<p>(I am trying to learn enough good recipes to eat well at home instead of eating out, have bought a few decent cookbooks and surprisingly, have found it enjoyable though time consuming to cook from scratch.)
<prepackaged food> may lead to chronic illness. Seems sane. The problem is that ramen isn't JUST crappy salty over-processed 100% artificially flavored desiccated food. In Japan, ramen is a real food.