Plummeting to the Bottom

I’ve done a number of posts so far about the excesses of junk food – and institutional food in general – and I want to be clear that I’m not going after the industry as such. I believe very strongly in personal responsibility, and thus I feel that if you are eating a nice 2,700 calorie entre and then washing it down with a 990 calorie milkshake and a side of 1,730 calorie waffle fries, that’s your business. Unless you happen to be 7 or more feet tall, work as a professional athlete, have the metabolism of a hyperactive weasel on speed, or all of the above, I believe that you should also accept responsibility for the obesity that will likely result from eating six to eight times the recommended calorie intake each day. But what about the people who have no choice in what they ingest, either because their meals are selected for them, because they have no income to purchase healthy options, or because they’re too young to know what a calorie is in the first place?

A recent study from thee Rudd Center for Food Policy and Obesity at Yale, as cited by the U.S. News & World Report website examined kid’s meals from some of our better-known national junk food chains, and come up with some remarkable results. You can read the attached article (or its parent study) if you want to, but let me call your attention to the worst product offering cited: the cheeseburger kid’s meal available at Dairy Queen, with 973 calories. Obviously, no one goes to Dairy Queen to obtain health food, but 973 calories is a reasonably large meal even for me (it’s a third of my recommended daily intake), and I’m 6’2” and 250 pounds – no one’s choice for a small person. It seems a bit much to be giving a pre-teen, let alone a pre-schooler…

If that sounds like an isolated case, consider the Sonic chicken strips kid’s meal, at 708 calories, or a Taco Bell bean burrito meal at 760. In fact, Taco Bell did not offer any kid’s meals that the Yale team was willing to acknowledge as “healthy” for the purposes of the study; most of the other national chains at least had low-fat and low-calorie options that, if not exactly healthy, were at least probably no worse than any other form of lunch. It’s probably also worth noting that the offerings the study criticizes the most are also the ones that actual kids are most likely to eat – certainly, it’s harder to sell kids on macaroni and cheese with apple slices and milk than on a cheeseburger with fries and a soda, especially if you’ve gone to a junk food stand to obtain them…

Now, no one is saying that everything kids eat has to be healthy, or that there’s anything wrong with the occasion junk food meal. In that classic phrase, I’ve been eating the stuff all of my life, and I’m not dead yet. But at the same time I can’t help thinking that 973 calories (and the attendant amounts of fat and sodium) is a lot to put up with in exchange for the relatively small amount of food described. Even as a small child you could probably have talked me into a Happy Meal (at only 385 to 650 calories), and I suspect that modern kids aren’t that different – especially if they get the toy they really wanted in the package. I’m just suggesting that if eating habits are really learned in childhood (and all of the current research suggests they are) it might be possible to start teaching children to get the most from their calories and fats at the same time we start teaching them to get the most for their money and time, and give them the chance to opt out of both the massive health problems associated with obesity and the massive social problems of being a health food snob while there’s still time…

Because if we don’t, the next generation is going to be plummeting to the Bottom right along with us…

New Food Warnings

For anyone out there who thought the Friendly’s burger using grilled-cheese sandwiches for buns was the worst regular product we were going to see – well, you didn’t really think that was going to last, did you? Now, I’m not counting intentional gross-outs like the 6 pound, 11 pound, 25 pound and 50 pound burgers available at Denny’s Beer Barrel Pub in Pennsylvania (and its occasional competitors); while these are commercially available food offerings, fair and square, they are only available from one rather specialized provider and were created specifically for the purpose of being a challenge to eat, whereas the Friendly’s and Hardees offerings referenced in an earlier post are mass-produced products available in thousands of locations. And then there’s the two new products that have just popped up…


According to several articles like this one in the New York Daily News and this one from the Daily Mail online , there are two new contenders in the ultra-burger market: Burger King’s Pizza Burger, and Carl’s Jr.’s/Hardee’s Foot Long Cheeseburger. The Footlong is really just three smaller cheeseburgers laid out on a foot-long, submarine sandwich bun, and with total calories of only 850 is only a bit worse for you than several other entre cheeseburgers already on the market. It’s the Pizza Burger – which is shaped and sliced to look like a pizza, but is actually just a heavily accessorized burger – with its 2,560 calories that really tips the scale into the absurd. Unless you plan to share this thing with a few of your friends, you’ll be ingesting more calories than the average person needs in a day, and that’s before we add on fries, a milkshake and dessert…


Now, as previously noted, no one is forcing customers to consume this virtual “dinner of doom” at one sitting, and if you share it out it’s really no more dangerous than anything else on the menu. What’s really disturbing about these developments is the way this trend is proliferating across the industry. Time was, unless you wanted to drive out to Denny’s (or whatever your state’s local equivalent might be), the only way to get that many calories on a bun was to purchase several ordinary cheeseburgers and stack them. Now it’s possible to order a single entre with enough calories to feed a large person for a day at any one of several fast-food chains, and the trend is showing no signs of dying down. For now, it takes hours (or days) to prepare an 11-pound or 25-pount burger (the Pub requires advance notice), but what happens once the fast-food giants start applying flash-cooking and mass-production techniques to such products?


I kid, of course, but there really is a serious point behind these rantings. If the concept of eating 2,500 calories (the equivalent of 10 plain beef patties by themselves) for lunch, or even worse, 4,000 calories including side dishes and drinks, becomes commonplace, why would anyone even worry about the 850 calorie foot-long burger? Or, more to the point, perhaps, why would anyone worry about a harmless dish of stuffed meatballs, or a simple deep-fried onion – both of which are almost as bad for you? I myself am not a slender person; I have in fact had a weight control problem since I was 10 years old, and I freely admit I enjoy a nice meal as much as the next person (unless the next person is a Vegan who eats nothing but law clippings and tofu). But if our nation is reaching the point where eating grotesque amounts of food has become not merely commonplace, but routinely possible on every street corner, then we’re not so much racing to the bottom as plummeting straight through the floors…

It Gets Worse...

One of the early posts on this blog was about the new Friendly's mega-calorie entrees, and why these products, though certainly not the worst things that could possibly happen to your body, are nevertheless not something you should indulge in without either an unusually active metabolism or a latent death wish. Still and all, they're really no worse for you than eating two entree cheeseburgers, to take the obvious example, and certainly many people do this everyday with no immediate ill effects. The fact is, that if you are eating your lunch in any venue where you can place your order by yelling into an intercom system and then picking up your food without getting out of your car, you probably weren't expecting health food (or even healthy food) in the first place. When the items in question appear on a sit-down restaurant's menu, and especially one advertising good (if not particularly healthy) food, that's another matter...

Consider, if you will, the case of the Applebee’s Provolone-Stuffed Meatballs with Fettuccine, as profiled on the newest article from Yahoo, Men's Health, and the authors of "Eat This, Not That." There's no denying that these little nuggets of death are tasty; they're large meatballs stuffed with cheese and served on a bed of noodles soaked in butter, cream and more cheese. Unfortunately, they've got even more calories and fat than the Friendly's offering mentioned in my original post, and nearly twice the sodium. It's an entree that makes most fast-food cheeseburgers look positively healthy in comparison, and is actually worse for you than a product consisting of a hamburger patty stuck between two grilled-cheese sandwiches. But what makes this really amazing is that Applebee's has been positioning itself as a mid-price family restaurant, or bar and grill, depending on which store and which neighborhood we're talking about, whereas Friendly's (and most fast-food operations) have never made any pretense at being anything other than junk...

Now, this is not to suggest that all fine-dining restaurant serve only food which is actually good for you; or event that such venues would be able to stay in business if they did. Most such establishments, unless they are specialized health-food or vegetarian operations, are going to have steaks, cream-based sauces, lavish desserts, and elaborate alcoholic options available, all of which are (cumulatively) worse for your health than a simple stuffed-meatball dish. Nor do I intend to suggest that we should all live out our lives eating nothing but broiled fish and steamed vegetables; I personally like a nice "meatball 'o death" from time to time, and if you're healthy enough to eat this kind of food and survive, I don't see any reason why you shouldn't. I am suggesting that any company which is attempting to base its brand around a moderate to upscale position with a focus on good food and healthy eating while actually offering products more harmful to the customer's health than anything you'd find in a junk food stand is, if not actually racing to the bottom, at least sauntering that direction at an reasonable clip...