wiki has a small blurb on phytic acid (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phytic_acid) that highlights its propensity to bind to minerals and render them useless. there's some rumblings in paleo circles about the role phytic acid plays in tooth decay - they got their info from the weston a price foundation - but i don't think anything concrete has been discovered. it's not going to kill you by any stretch but soaking and slowly roasting your nuts is pretty easy to do and makes them better nutritionally.
agree there is a taste trade-off with some cuts of beef, but to be honest i haven't had grain-fed beef in quite a long time so i couldn't really get specific with you. depends on where you sit on the health/enjoyment spectrum when it comes to food. not clear that my position is better than yours
i might just be quicker to get annoyed by meditation woo-woo, who knows. the centre i went to made us chant that we were the lowest of the low. not a fan of that
fair enough about the bike, my bike commute takes about 50 minutes which is probably approaching the limit of what you'd want to do as a beginner (which i am as well, literally every other cyclist overtakes me)
sorry about the late reply, new to LW so i haven't yet done a good job of integrating it into my browsing habits
Soaking and slowly roasting nuts takes more than the time to just open the packet and eat.. so it probably won't happen. I could force myself to do it - but I don't see enough value in doing it to do it... (only something that was likely to kill me would make that change) because I have other fish to fry. Thanks for the explanation though - it is interesting to know :)
From my perspective - convenience is a big factor in the food I eat. I like good-tasting food... I really like easy food. That includes easy-to-find (it's much easier to just go to the local ...
What can I purchase with $100 that will be the best thing I can buy to make my life better?
I've decided to budget some regular money to improving my life each month. I'd like to start with low hanging fruit for obvious reasons - but when I sat down to think of improvements, I found myself thinking of the same old things I'd already been planning to do anyway... and I'd like out of that rut.
Constraints/more info:
Background:
This is a question I recently posed to my local Less Wrong group and we came up with a few good ideas, so I thought I'd share the discussion with the wider community and see what we can come up with. I'll add the list we came up with later on in the comments...
It'd be great to have a repository of low-hanging fruit for things that can be solved with (relatively affordable) amounts of money. I'd personally like to go through the list - look at candidates that sound like they'd be really useful to me and then make a prioritised list of what to work on first.