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The Ultimate Geek Food

Triune writes, "Scott Adams, creator of Dilbert, has started Scott Adams Foods in order to sell their new burrito-type snack that contains 100% of most, if not all, the daily requirements. The Dilberito!" The ultimate geek food? You'd elect this over ramen noodles? Note to Andover execs - exploit marketing possibilities of the CmdrTaco.

8 of 610 comments (clear)

  1. quality control by Skald · · Score: 4
    I wonder what percentage of Ratbert the FDA will allow in this...

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    "The best we can hope for concerning the people at large is that they be properly armed." - Alexander Hamilton

  2. Hold it..... by Shaheen · · Score: 4

    Wait just a minute... what's this about daily requirements?? Here's the excerpt from the Indian Dilberito page:


    Total Fat 5g 8% 8%
    Saturated Fat 0g 0% 0%
    Cholesterol 0mg 0% 0%
    Sodium 630mg 26% 28%
    Potassium 230mg 9% 10%
    Total Carb 53g 18% 21%
    Dietary Fiber 3g 12% 12%
    Sugars 4g
    Protein 8g


    While the page *does* say that it provides 100% of many vitamins and minerals, the above is clearly not 100%.

    Also, note that Total cereal DOES THE EXACT SAME THING in their marketing. You've seen the ads where they scroll down the Nutrition Facts and everything says 100% - that doesn't count the PROTEIN you need, it's only the vitamins and minerals.

    If something with "100% of your Daily Requirements" were the ultimate geek food, Total would be much more popular than ramen.

    --
    You should never take life too seriously - You'll never get out of it alive.
  3. Re:Yeah, but... by DanJose52 · · Score: 4

    About the Taco Bell delivered food...why they don't do it. I work for Pizza Hut Delivery, which, as some of us know, is the same company as Taco Bell and KFC...and I can explain to you why you won't ever get a Grande Meal brought to your door: construction problems. Around here they have Taco Bell/KFC/Pizza Hut combo restaurants that used to deliver all three foods to people using the pizza drivers, but all this did was create problems with the Taco Bell food because it falls apart and gets messed up relatively easy. Fried chicken and Pizza are incredibly durable, a Chalupa is not. You can order KFC and Hut food delivered and get it intact(trust me, it goes through hell getting there in one of our cars), but tacos just don't fare as well.

    This may be off-topic, this may be a "troll" according to some of the recent moderation, but it is meant as informative or to be left alone...

    Dan

  4. ACK! by jpowers · · Score: 4

    They spray it with vitamins and stuff. Now I'm going to be sick.

    http://cnn.com/FOOD/news/9910/20/functional.food /index.html

    jpowers

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    -jpowers
  5. Scott Adams' Motivation by Erbo · · Score: 5
    If you have a look at Chapter 11 of Adams' The Dilbert Future (pages 213-216), you can find his motivation for inventing the Dilberito. Adams starts off by lamenting how difficult it is to figure out what you should eat that's healthy for you, as opposed to, say, finding the right motor oil for your car's engine. He then goes on to say:

    Someday, you will be able to buy a burrito-like meal that is engineered as scientifically as a can of motor oil. This burrito-like thing will have just the right combination of food to give you 100 percent of what your body needs.

    ...

    If someone doesn't build this burrito thing...then I'll build it myself. Someone is going to make a trillion dollars selling low-cost, nutritious meals to Induhviduals, and it might as well be me.

    So, say what you will about Adams, it seems that, by investing his own money to develop the Dilberito, he's trying to help people eat healthier without having to become "nutrition geeks." The "Dilbert" name and packaging is just a way to market it to people (like sugar-coating on pills, perhaps).

    It's a noble goal, whether or not its actual execution is flawed. (And I've never tasted or even seen a Dilberito, so I can't yet judge for myself, but next time I'm in the local King Soopers, I'll have a look for 'em.) So, before you condemn Adams out of hand, ask yourself how healthy you eat on a regular basis (and I know I for one am flawed in that respect). If Adams can leverage the Dilbert brand to get a few more people to eat healthy for once, isn't it worth it?

    Eric
    --
    "Free your code...and the rest will follow."

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    Be who you are...and be it in style!
  6. ulterior motive by gschmidt · · Score: 5
    it's not only vegetarian, it's vegan. as in, no animal products. thus non-dairy cheeses and gluten (in its seasoned form sold as "fake meat.")

    the funny thing is.. why does scott adams avoid mentioning this? it's nowhere on the website or in any of the press releases. it's like he's trying to sneak veganity past the unwashed masses. I suppose that's what the "nobody knows how to eat healthily" and "make the world a better place" doublespeak is about.

    the other funny thing: my vegan friends tell me that caseinate (one of the main ingredients in the "non-dairy cheese") is milk-derived and not vegan-safe. maybe this is some kind of synthetic casein? maybe he's too vegan for real cheese, but not too vegan for artifical cheese with milk protein?

    as far as people pointing out that it's not really a "complete day's nutrition," it's worth noting that the only things they don't have 100%usra of are the things you normally get much too much of. it is *just hard* to live in america and consume less than 100% of your recommended fat, protein, sodium etc intakes -- this is called dieting, and it's not something coders are known for. you wouldn't eat just a burrito in a whole day -- you'd grab some chips and jolt or something. one of these dilberitos plus a serving or two of unhealthy junk food will give you a great approximation of the rda's.

  7. vegan food is unhealthy by mangu · · Score: 4
    We, humans, evolved as omnivorous animals. This gives us the advantage to survive with many different diets, we don't need a particular kind of food, which is why our species have spread all over the world.

    But this doesn't mean we can simply eliminate one important ingredient from our diet indefinitely without any ill effects. We *need* animal products, for calcium, proteins, and some enzymes. Sure, we can get those from vegetal products too, but our bodies aren't optimized for a vegetarian diet. In the long run, we will have health problems if we don't consume any animal products.

    Animal products do have unhealthy components in them, so we should not abuse them. Balance is the key. If you are serious about not consuming *anything* at all that has deleterious side effects, you should learn to live without oxygen. It's the presence of oxygen in the body that creates the free radicals that are among the more important causes of aging.

    I have a friend who had a strictly vegan diet, "scientifically" balanced, for twenty years. One day, her shoe got stuck in a crack in the pavement and she broke her leg. She was two months in bed, and has needed crutches for walking since then, over six months ago. A healthy carnivore person would get a slightly sore ankle from the same stumble. It's all a matter of not having the right enzymes to digest calcium. If you consume large amounts of calcium from vegetable sources, all you will get from that are gallstones. There are some enzymes the human body needs to digest calcium that can't be found in any vegetable food.

    Moderators, take note:
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  8. Propaganda vs. propaganda, lies vs. lies by TheDullBlade · · Score: 4

    Everyone has "studies" and "facts" supporting their claims, but most of it is just sophistry to support emotional judgements.

    If you want real truth about nutrition, just look at the diets of primitive societies. They didn't cheat on their diets, because they couldn't. There is no confusion over supposed mechanisms, because you are looking at the actual results, without even considering mechanisms.

    Yes, eating lots of meat reduces the calcium in your bones, that must be true. Yeah, that's why european explorers and researchers marveled at the incredible strength in the teeth of the eskimos, who ate a diet consisting almost entirely of meat. One notable anecdote is of a fellow, whose fingers proved unequal to the task, removed a tight nut from a bolt with this teeth. They had their problems, but fragile bones weren't an issue.

    That's why tribal humans often go to great lengths to acquire meagre servings of meat when they have little of it: because it's bad for them and nature's brutal teaching process has slowly shaped their society into the pursuit of poor health. That makes perfect biological sense, doesn't it?

    Actually, a diet of nothing but raw meat contains everything a person needs to be healthy. Every essential nutrient is present in adequate quantities. Mind you, cooking the meat destroys some of these nutrients (like vitamin C), and eating uncooked meat has many dangers, not to mention the cost of meat.

    A little meat goes a long way toward fixing all sorts of dietary deficiencies. That's why it's so highly valued in so many cultures.

    The truth is that most vegans must be extremely careful with their diets, or end up weak and sickly (and many end up that way no matter how careful they are). They need to take supplements, because there are some things (like B12) that are either very hard or impossible to get from plants. People with normal, balanced diets which include reasonable servings of meat need only be careful not to eat too much (quite possibly the dumbest nutritional problem to face the wealthy areas of the world: too much food).

    IMHO, while it's pretty good for most people, in the standard nutrition system taught in schools, grains and dairy products are overemphasized. Milk is a great food... for some people. Others it just makes sick. I haven't seen studies, but I wouldn't be surprised if ancestry was a factor: in some areas of the world, people have been drinking cow's milk as a staple for millennia, while in other areas milk was only recently introduced. At any rate, people can get by without milk. I like to think of it as being similar to wine and beer; alcoholics tend to be rather unsuccessful individuals, and correspondingly a tendency toward alcoholism is much rarer among peoples who have had booze for millennia (smallpox wasn't the only disease europeans brought to the Americas). The point is that some people can drink several servings of alcohol each day, enjoy lower stress, have no long term damage, and show no signs of addiction, while others who try to follow a habit of daily moderate consumption will be destroyed by it. One human isn't biochemically equivalent to another. Grains tend to be processed into nutritionally worthless starch - great for athletes who have trouble keeping up their short-term glycogen stores, but they just make sedentary people fat.

    It's a fuzzy area, due to the rather large variations between humans and the rather narrow samples in typical studies, but when you go dramatically against the conventional wisdom of most cultures going back thousands of years (such as the claim that meat is bad for you), you are almost certainly wrong.

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