Stigler diet

The Stigler diet is an

National Research Council

in 1943, with the cost of the diet being minimal?

The nutrient RDAs required to be met in Stigler's experiment were

C. The result was an annual budget allocated to foods such as evaporated milk

, cabbage, dried navy beans, and beef liver at a cost of approximately $0.11 a day in 1939 U.S. dollars.

While the name "Stigler Diet" was applied after the experiment by outsiders, according to Stigler, "No one recommends these diets for anyone, let alone everyone." The Stigler diet has been much ridiculed for its lack of variety and palatability; however, his methodology has received praise and is considered to be some of the earliest work in linear programming.

Linear programming problem

The Stigler diet question is a

international poverty line as housing, clothing and fuel are also needed to live).^[1]

The specific combination of foods and quantities is as follows:

Stigler's 1939 Diet
Food	Annual Quantities	Annual Cost
Wheat Flour	370 lb (170 kg)	$13.33
Evaporated Milk	57 cans	$3.84
Cabbage	111 lb (50 kg)	$4.11
Spinach	23 lb (10 kg)	$1.85
Dried Navy Beans	285 lb (129 kg)	$16.80
Total Annual Cost		$39.93

The 9 nutrients that Stigler's diet took into consideration and their respective recommended daily amounts were:

Table of nutrients considered in Stigler's diet
Nutrient	Daily Recommended Intake
Calories	3,000 Calories
Protein	70 grams
Calcium	.8 grams
Iron	12 milligrams
Vitamin A	5,000 IU
Thiamine (Vitamin B₁)	1.8 milligrams
Riboflavin (Vitamin B₂)	2.7 milligrams
Niacin	18 milligrams
Ascorbic Acid (Vitamin C)	75 milligrams

Seven years after Stigler made his initial estimates, the development of George Dantzig's Simplex algorithm made it possible to solve the problem without relying on heuristic methods. The exact value was determined to be $39.69 (using the original 1939 data). Dantzig's algorithm describes a method of traversing the vertices of a polytope of N+1 dimensions in order to find the optimal solution to a specific situation.

In 2014, Google chef Anthony Marco devised a recipe using a similar list of ingredients (with calf liver in place of evaporated milk), called "Foie Linéaire à la Stigler"; one Google employee described it as "delicious".^[2]

References

^ "CPI Inflation Calculator". data.bls.gov. Retrieved 2016-07-15.
^ "Sudoku, Linear Optimization, and the Ten Cent Diet", Jon Orwant, 30 September 2014

External links

The Cost of Subsistence by George Stigler (fulltext)
"The Diet Problem" by George Dantzig

[1] "CPI Inflation Calculator". data.bls.gov. Retrieved 2016-07-15.

[2] "Sudoku, Linear Optimization, and the Ten Cent Diet", Jon Orwant, 30 September 2014

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