all your arteries are belong to us
Sarah is my wife. She is totally awesome and you should go to her website. After you read what she wrote here.
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I was going to write a nice, girly post about the tv show “Dating in the Dark”, but then I stumbled on this article (http://health.yahoo.net/experts/eatthis/scariest-new-restaurant-foods), and that went out the window.
Listen, I know that I’m not the healthiest eater out there. You’re going to have to fight me to get me to switch to whole wheat pasta (though I’ve found some gluten free stuff that’s pretty awesome), and I have a long-standing love affair with cheese pizza. But when I see these articles on the nutritional content of these restaurant foods, it almost makes my head spin.
It wouldn’t be as bad if these indulgences were just that – an indulgence. A once in a blue moon treat. My dad sometimes references the fact that even when he was a teenager, eating out was a very rare thing. He remembers the first McDonalds in the town next to where he lived. I can’t even fathom that, and I bet you can’t either. Because these days, we’re eating out all the time. There’s enough choices in the restaurant world to satisfy everyone, and a McDonalds/Burger King on every third corner. For the restaurants, this cultural dependence on their services is great. But what about for us?
Restaurants want to churn out the cheapest food in the shortest amount of time, and have it taste just good enough that you’ll come back for more. I can’t blame them for this, because every business has to make a profit. But somewhere along the line, restaurants realized that we’ll eat some pretty nutritionally defunct food, so long as it’s cheap. Lately, the trend seems to be the “shock jock” of the food industry (I’m looking your direction, Double Down). At a time when, it’s safe to say, Americans could use a tough shove in the opposite direction, restaurants are churning out the most abominable food creations – and we’ll eat them! Why not just hand over a coupon for a quadruple bypass while you’re at it?
We can’t even complain that restaurants are effectively killing off their target demographic, because where one person dies, there are three more in the booth. Restaurants aren’t going to think twice about serving nutritionally sound, great tasting food unless consumers demand it. In order for that to happen, we need to get over our obsession with quantity over quality. Yes, you can buy a cheeseburger for 99 cents, but do you really think that it’s made of anything you want to eat?
Worse yet, the food is engineered to keep you hooked. Sounds like a wacko conspiracy, right? Check out the book The End of Overeating. The gist of it is that restaurants know that there’s a magic formula of salt, sweet, and fat. When they get these in right proportions, your body can’t tell itself to stop eating, and your pleasure sensors go crazy.
I’m not going to say that we should all repent of our food sins and become vegans (not that there’s anything wrong with that, and we might live longer if we did…). At the very least, you should be aware of what you’re putting into your body. We eat food at least three times a day. It fuels our bodies and can make or break our systems. For something that important, shouldn’t we want to know everything we can about it?
For some awesome reading, I recommend checking out The End of Overeating, The China Study, Skinny Bitch, and Spark. The last one is a book on exercise, but if you’re bent on eating that grilled cheese stuffed with mozzarella sticks, you might want to look into it.