You don’t say

Having seen my students in action, I can believe this (Chosun):

According to a report released Tuesday by the Korea Health Industry Development Institute under the Ministry of Health & Welfare, men aged 30 to 49 get most of their calories in the summertime from rice, followed by soju, ramen, pork and fresh bacon.

The study was conducted on 983 households and 2,454 individuals nationwide, from June 27, 2005 to July 15.

According to the study, women in the same age group got most of their calories from rice, followed by ramen, pork, coffee and noodles.

It is actually not so bad when you look at the fine print:

For men, the average intake per day in 2005 was 2400 calories. Men in their 30s and 40s attained 814 calories or 33.9 percent of their daily intake from rice. A further 128.7 calories or 5.3 percent was attained by soju, 84.7 calories or 3.5 percent by ramen, 77.2 calories or 3.2 percent from pork and 61.5 calories or 2.5 percent from fresh bacon.

Women attained a similar amount of calories as men from rice, ramen, and pork, but instead of soju they attained an average of 38.7 calories per day from coffee. The average coffee mix has 55 calories.

This brings to mind a passage from Bejamin Franklin’s autobiography in which he found himself working in a London print shop. He noted that most of the workers there maintained their strength through drinking several pints of beer a day.

It is an interesting enough passage for its own, long quote:

We had an alehouse boy who attended always in the house to supply the workmen. My companion at the press drank every day a pint before breakfast, a pint at breakfast with his bread and cheese, a pint between breakfast and dinner, a pint at dinner, a pint in the afternoon about six o’clock, and another when he had done his day’s work. I thought it a detestable custom; but it was necessary, he suppos’d, to drink strong beer, that he might be strong to labor. I endeavored to convince him that the bodily strength afforded by beer could only be in proportion to the grain or flour of the barley dissolved in the water of which it was made; that there was more flour in a pennyworth of bread; and therefore, if he would eat that with a pint of water, it would give him more strength than a quart of beer. He drank on, however, and had four or five shillings to pay out of his wages every Saturday night for that muddling liquor; an expense I was free from. And thus these poor devils keep themselves always under.

Now, ol’ Ben was not against beer per se. He just hated seeing people waste there money.