The Stigler diet is an optimization problem named for George Stigler, a 1982 Nobel Laureate in economics, who posed the following problem: 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. 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 inlinear programming.
The Stigler diet question is a linear programming problem. Lacking any sophisticated method of solving such a problem, Stigler was forced to utilize heuristicmethods in order to find a solution. The diet question originally asked in which quantities a 154-pound male would have to consume 77 different foods in order to fulfill the recommended intake of 9 different nutrients while keeping expense at a minimum. Through "trial and error, mathematical insight and agility," Stigler was able to eliminate 62 of the foods from the original 77. From the reduced list, Stigler calculated the required amounts of each of the remaining 15 foods to arrive at a cost-minimizing solution to his question. According to Stigler's calculations, the annual cost of his solution was $39.93 in 1939 dollars. The specific combination of foods and quantities is as follows:
The 9 nutrients that Stigler's diet took into consideration and their respective recommended daily amounts were:
Nutrient
Daily Recommended Intake
Calories
3,000 Calories
Protein
70 grams
Calcium
.8 grams
Iron
12 milligrams
Vitamin A
5,000 IU
Thiamine
1.8 milligrams
Riboflavin
2.7 milligrams
Niacin
18 milligrams
Ascorbic Acid
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. 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, the Google chef Anthony Marco devised a recipe using a similar list of ingredients, called "Foie Linéaire à la Stigler"; one Google employee described it as "delicious".
