This Is Why You're Fat

Did you know this??? I was shocked and I'm not being sarcastic for once. From the New York Times -

How sweet it is! The American diet, that is. While the current recommendation is a maximum intake of eight teaspoons of sugars a day, one 12-ounce can of regular soda (or a 20-ounce bottle of VitaminWater) delivers eight or nine teaspoons. That means you are at or over the limit before you’ve eaten a single cookie or container of fruit-flavored yogurt, or even some commercial tomato soups or salad dressings with added sugars. The result is an average daily intake of more than 20 teaspoons of sweet calories.

That first paragraph says basically all you need to know, but you may read the entire article here, though there is something worth noting in that a Dr. Bray who was contacted during the research for the article recommends drinking diet soda instead of the sugarful kind and asserts that aspartame "has none of the once-feared health effects".

By the way, "This is why you're fat" is a lovely snapshot of Americana that you may find here. I'm still hoping they'll post the Classic Sextuple with cheese that I got for Boden at Wendy's, but it just might not be sickeningly glutenous enough to make it onto such a discriminating website.

Dieting is Dumb

Earlier today I noticed a banner ad about "Oprah's New Acai Berry Diet!" or something like that. Are acai berries even something? Yeah, yeah, yeah. I'll go look it up. Stupid Internet. Here you go, I found it at some site that I don't feel like referencing -

"Nature's Energy Fruit: Acai Berry as seen on Oprah's Show! You've likely never even heard of Acai Berry but Oprah has just featured it on her show and it is one of the 10 superfoods promoted by Dr Perricone. Studies have shown that this little berry is one of the most nutritious and powerful foods in the world! Açaí (ah-sigh-ee) berries are the high-energy berry of a special Amazon palm tree. Harvested in the rainforests of Brazil, açaí berry tastes like a vibrant and yummy blend of berries and chocolate. Açaí berry is packed full of antioxidants, amino acids and essential fatty acids. Although açaí berry may not yet be available in your local supermarket, you can find it in several health food and gourmet stores."

At least I know how to pronounce it now. I read it as "a-kai". Boy would my face have been red if I happened to run into the big O at an Art Basel party or something.

The whole reason I am writing this is not to promote acai berries, but rather to point out how utterly ridiculous it is for women to follow Oprah's nutrition advice. Does it merit an explanation? Why would you take advice from someone whose weight fluctuates so dramatically? She obviously has no handle on how to take care of her body. It's a good thing she's so rich, because it must be really expensive to keep buying clothes every month to keep up with the different sizes she requires.

I guess it's kind of like how I'm getting so super jacked that my t-shirts get tighter and tighter, except that I don't buy larger sizes. So I guess it's not the same thing after all.

As I write this I am coming to the realization that it is likely that women like the fact that someone else who has so much trouble is trying to show them the way, and they therefore think that Oprah feels their pain, so that somehow makes her a better person to advise them. But that's like taking financial advice from Dick Fuld or getting help with your drug addiction from Robert Downey, Jr.

I'm assuming that there's a website that has photos of Oprah at all different weights, and I can also assume that she will have hilarious, varying hair styles (cough, wigs), kind of like you can look up all the different faces of Michael Jackson or Mickey Rourke (I put Rourke in there since this paragraph had taken a potentially dangerous turn towards a "race" thing).

It's taking too long, but I'm pretty sure that site exists or will exist in the near future.

My original reason for this post is not Oprah, rather it is an article in the New York Times about how Americans are the most informed people on the planet when it comes to nutrition and yet somehow manage to be the heaviest. Part of that phenomenon can be attributed to the "health halo". In New York City, Benevolent Dictator Michael Bloomberg long ago got the ban on trans fats through and now people think everything is healthier.

Here's some interesting information as well as some classic French condescension. You have to love that. If you read it with a silly French accent it's really funny. I now have to make sure I have the correct alternation of double and single quotation marks lest my brother Brendan berate me for bad grammar. I hope he appreciates that alliteration.

"'People who eat at McDonald’s know their sins,' Dr. Chandon said, 'but people at Subway think that a 1,000-calorie sandwich has only 500 calories.' His advice is not for people to avoid Subway or low-fat snacks, but to take health halos into account.

"'People need to look up calorie information, and this information needs to be clearly available on the menu or on the front of packages,' Dr. Chandon said. 'If no information is available, people should say to themselves: "This restaurant or this brand claims to be healthy in general. Let’s see if I can come up with two reasons why this claim would not apply to this particular food." When we asked people to follow this "consider the opposite" strategy, it completely eliminated health halos.'

"More generally, Dr. Chandon advises American consumers, food companies and public officials to spend less time obsessing about 'good' versus 'bad' food.

"'Being French, I don’t have any problem with people enjoying lots of foods,' he said. 'Europeans obsess less about nutrition but know what a reasonable portion size is and when they have had too much food, so they’re not as biased by food and diet fads and are healthier. Too many Americans believe that to lose weight, what you eat matters more than how much you eat. It’s the country where people are the best informed about food and enjoy it the least.'"

Man you keep eating those - you’re going to turn into a chicken...

There's an article in the last SparkPeople newsletter about the healthy choices you can make when dining at a fast food restaurant.

As I opened the email, I thought to myself "it's just going to be the grilled chicken menu items".

Uh, that's all it was. A list of grilled chicken sandwiches (hold the mayo!) and salads. If you don't get it from what you just read, feel free to spend more time learning this here.

Food Deserts (Revisited)

LA has instituted a moratorium on new fast food restaurants. Read the Associated Press article here.

"The moratorium, which can be extended up to a year, only affects standalone restaurants, not eateries located in malls or strip shopping centers. It defines fast-food restaurants as those that do not offer table service and provide a limited menu of pre-prepared or quickly heated food in disposable wrapping."

"The definition exempts "fast-food casual" restaurants such as El Pollo Loco, Subway and Pastagina, which do not have drive-through windows or heat lamps and prepare fresh food to order."


Consider the obesity problem solved! Psst, I've been telling people for years that this kind of thing was coming. California has now banned the use of trans fats statewide, by the way.

Worst...Food...Ever

If you eat healthy most of the time, then you are allowed to go out and have an awful(ly delicious) meal once in a while at a place like Chili's or The Cheesecake Factory. But don't do it often if you want to be thin and healthy. The meals at such restaurants have high fat and calorie content, as well as unhealthy levels of sodium. That's why the food tastes so good.

So, Men's Health has a new list of specific foods to avoid at popular American eateries. It's called The 20 Worst Foods in America. It helps to keep in mind, before ordering the Outback Steakhouse Aussie Cheese Fries with Ranch Dressing, that they contain 2,900 calories and 182 grams of fat. Ha ha! 182 grams of fat??? Do you realize how much that is? A Whopper with Cheese has 64 grams, so the Aussie Cheese Fries have practically three times that amount. And 2,900 calories is way more than a whole day's worth of calories that you should consume. How about this for a thought? You'd have to run a marathon to burn off that number.

Now, the best part about this list is that Men's Health mentions a healthier alternative. It's part of their "Eat This, Not This" series.

Gastroeconomic Expansion

This is a very interesting past article in the Washington Post -

"Why America Has to Be Fat"

If you take the time to read it, you'll find some startling statistics. You'll also learn that because of how well our economy provides for so many, we now consume more calories than we expend. As the author puts it, "we use[sic] to be paid to exercise at work, now we pay to exercise after work".

So, since we don't exercise at work and we have lots of cheap, high-calorie food around, I guess we have to pay to exercise during our free time. That's just the way it is. There's no miracle gimmick that will let us out of that reality.

Calorie Counting

New York City's Board of Health is pushing for restaurants with 15 or more locations to display the caloric content of menu items. The reason is that most people have no idea how many calories are in many of the things they regularly eat.

Restaurants associations, of course, don't want people to eat less. They don't want people to be dissuaded from eating rich, salty, mmm rich and salty, where was I? Oh yeah, restaurants and their associations would rather people be kept in the dark and continue to eat regularly meals that they should have only once in a while. I've mentioned Cheesecake Factory as a prime offender, where single menu items often contain an entire day's worth of calories and even more fat, and whose management refuses to list nutritional information for the food it serves.

"'Most people underestimate calorie content by a lot,' said Dr. Thomas R. Frieden, the city’s health commissioner, adding that he considered the rules a potent weapon in the crusade against rising obesity rates. 'Even dietitians get a lot of it wrong.'"

The Fast Food Diet?

Like it or not, fast food is part of American life. One way I have eaten healthier at fast food restaurants is to seldom order a value meal (one that includes a soda and french fries), though many now allow a substitution of a bottle of water for soda, and fruit instead of fries. Anyway, you'll save money, especially if you stick to the $1 menu that most of these places now have. It does take discipline. I won't deny that.

Stephen Sinatra, M.D. has written a book called The Fast Food Diet, and in it he steers readers toward the healthiest options available at such eateries. Fried foods are a no-no, obviously. Stick to options like junior burgers (do you really need a quarter pound?), grilled chicken sandwiches, chili, any fruit option they might have, baked potatoes (Wendy's has those), and to opt for low-fat and low-calorie dressings (vinaigrette rather than ranch).

"People love fast food because it tastes good and is reasonably priced, and no matter what professionals say, they are going to continue to eat there," says Sinatra. "So why not help them make healthier food choices? … If we empower people to make wiser food choices, it is a step in the right direction toward improved health and weight loss."

You can read an article here on WebMD about the book.

I'm Lovin' It

I'm lovin' the news that I read on Drudge today regarding McDonald's. Read here about a town in England where McDonald's has shut its doors due to lack of business.

"Children no longer needed to go there because they were being fed properly."

I like McDonald's, and I hope the one near my office stays open, but I only eat there once or twice a month, so it would not be such a big deal.