Dried fruit is very high in sugar.
The fructose in sugar (50% of the calories) can in general only be used for one thing: to make fat. The exception is if your liver glycogen is depleted (eg after a hard workout, perhaps a teaspoon of fructose could be used to replenish it - and in fact in this scenario it is the most efficient way to replenish your liver glycogen.
Sugar is also quite addictive and binge-inducing. I have a theory as to why this is I will tell you at the next LW dinner.
The case against jerky is less compelling, but you might want to look at the list of ingredients next time you are near a packet.
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.