Food, glorious food
Oct. 30th, 2025 01:52 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
baroque_mongooseThere is this thing called the National Food Survey, which I may have mentioned in passing in the post about water bottles. It seems that once you take part, you get an e-mail every so often asking you to fill in a form to tell them what you ate and drank the previous day. I can see the logic of this, because nobody wants to fill in a form just before they go to bed (which I would have to do, given that I need to take pills at that point and I obviously do so with a drink); also, if you don't know when you're going to be asked to fill in the form, you can't tweak what you eat for the sake of the survey. There is this thing called food guilt, which I happen to think is one of the most toxic things you can swallow in the normal course of events, and so there are bound to be people out there who won't have their usual chocolate biscuit (or whatever) if they know it's going to be recorded on a survey. I have a lot of difficulty with this attitude. Obviously you don't want to go over the top with energy-dense foods, especially if you're not very mobile; but the idea of actually attaching guilt to them is crazy. I used to work with someone like that. I eventually lost it, and said to her, "Listen. Lying is a sin. Stealing is a sin. Cheating on your husband is a sin. Chocolate is not a sin - it's a food!"
Filling in the survey is surprisingly awkward, for a number of reasons. First of all, most of what I eat is home made; I'd have thought that was probably true for most people, though of course not all. The form is not very good for that, perhaps inevitably; so you have to click on "add missing food" and then explain more or less what was in it. Since they also want to know about dietary supplements, and they've never heard of Akkermansia (a daily probiotic which seems to help my cranky digestion somewhat) and also fall over when I try to tell them I'm taking a combined calcium/magnesium/zinc supplement at the moment, again it's a question of "add missing food". I should think at least half of what I eat and drink falls under "missing food".
Then there's the amount I drink. I find I need about 1.3 litres a day, altogether, not counting any water from food (because I'm not sure how much that amounts to; it'll be fairly significant), and a bit more in the summer. People's hydration requirements vary a good deal, and I'm not at all surprised that I come out on the low side, being both older and not very mobile. If I don't drink enough it's the same as for anyone else, but if I drink too much it just goes straight out through Sibyl and my poor little kidneys don't even get a look in, which, obviously, one wants to avoid; so I have to stay between pretty strict limits. But the thing is, I live on my own, so I tend to drink most drinks straight from the carton; I know how many swallows I have, and I know what it amounts to per day because I know how many cartons of orange juice and chocolate oat milk I get through every week (plus the soup, which is in a mug, and I know the capacity of that). But breaking that down into exactly how much I have with each meal is really difficult. (I say "with", but in practice it's half an hour before; however, to avoid complicating matters further I just include it with the meal in the survey.)
There are a few other niggles. Chocolate ginger, for example, is not measured in units called "mints". I usually have four pieces after tea; they're about the size of large raisins. (I get that from Buy Wholefoods Online and it is really nice; you can get it in large bags, which is a very cheap way of getting one's chocolate ginger fix.) And I don't know how it would handle the constant sippers of water - probably not very well. I think they really ought to have an alternative section in which, if you had trouble estimating how much liquid you drank at once and possibly also when you drank it, you could just fill in a total amount for the day. That would make it a lot easier. Oh, and once you've submitted the form there's no way to go back and correct any mistakes; I realised I made a mistake with the amount of couscous I had with my curry the other day, but unfortunately that'll just have to stand.
Oh well. I do what I can and hopefully it helps.
Filling in the survey is surprisingly awkward, for a number of reasons. First of all, most of what I eat is home made; I'd have thought that was probably true for most people, though of course not all. The form is not very good for that, perhaps inevitably; so you have to click on "add missing food" and then explain more or less what was in it. Since they also want to know about dietary supplements, and they've never heard of Akkermansia (a daily probiotic which seems to help my cranky digestion somewhat) and also fall over when I try to tell them I'm taking a combined calcium/magnesium/zinc supplement at the moment, again it's a question of "add missing food". I should think at least half of what I eat and drink falls under "missing food".
Then there's the amount I drink. I find I need about 1.3 litres a day, altogether, not counting any water from food (because I'm not sure how much that amounts to; it'll be fairly significant), and a bit more in the summer. People's hydration requirements vary a good deal, and I'm not at all surprised that I come out on the low side, being both older and not very mobile. If I don't drink enough it's the same as for anyone else, but if I drink too much it just goes straight out through Sibyl and my poor little kidneys don't even get a look in, which, obviously, one wants to avoid; so I have to stay between pretty strict limits. But the thing is, I live on my own, so I tend to drink most drinks straight from the carton; I know how many swallows I have, and I know what it amounts to per day because I know how many cartons of orange juice and chocolate oat milk I get through every week (plus the soup, which is in a mug, and I know the capacity of that). But breaking that down into exactly how much I have with each meal is really difficult. (I say "with", but in practice it's half an hour before; however, to avoid complicating matters further I just include it with the meal in the survey.)
There are a few other niggles. Chocolate ginger, for example, is not measured in units called "mints". I usually have four pieces after tea; they're about the size of large raisins. (I get that from Buy Wholefoods Online and it is really nice; you can get it in large bags, which is a very cheap way of getting one's chocolate ginger fix.) And I don't know how it would handle the constant sippers of water - probably not very well. I think they really ought to have an alternative section in which, if you had trouble estimating how much liquid you drank at once and possibly also when you drank it, you could just fill in a total amount for the day. That would make it a lot easier. Oh, and once you've submitted the form there's no way to go back and correct any mistakes; I realised I made a mistake with the amount of couscous I had with my curry the other day, but unfortunately that'll just have to stand.
Oh well. I do what I can and hopefully it helps.
