Stigler diet

The Stigler diet is an optimization problem named for George Stigler, a 1982 Nobel laureate in economics, who posed the following problem:For a moderately active man weighing 154 pounds, how much of each of 77 foods should be eaten on a daily basis so that the man’s intake of nine nutrients will be at least equal to the recommended dietary allowances (RDAs) suggested by the 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 calories, protein, calcium, iron, as well as vitamins A, B1, B2, B3, and 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.

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.

The diet question originally asked in what quantities a 154-pound (70 kg) male would have to consume 77 different foods in order to fulfill the recommended intake of 9 different nutrients while keeping expenses at a minimum.

According to Stigler's calculations, the annual cost of his solution was $39.93 in 1939 dollars (equivalent to $875 in 2023, or $2 per day, slightly under the international poverty line as housing, clothing and fuel are also needed to live).

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.