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Tag: sodium

Did They REALLY Serve That?

As if the food they serve up at the State Fair isn’t bad enough, at least it is only available for a very short period of time.  However, the restaurant industry has decided to enter into an unholy competition to see who can come up with the most disgusting, artery-clogging, calorie-busting fiasco ever to grace a plate. 

If you’ve never picked up a copy of “Eat This, Not That” you really should browse through the lastest edition.  Honestly, it will help you make better choices when dining out.  Some foods are actually totally unhealthy, but disguised as “good for you” and those you need to watch out for.  But here, for your reading enjoyment, are the top 5 scariest restaurant foods:

See, even the most well-established restaurant chains can’t rest on their laurels, serving the same old standbys that we’ve loved since we were kids. They have to keep us interested and attracted with shiny new bells and whistles. And since no one has invented, say, a new kind of vegetable, they’ve got to go with the next best thing: gimmicky entrees with terrifyingly obsene nutritional content and rapidly expanding serving sizes. It wasn’t enough that pizza makers started putting cheese inside the crust! Kentucky Fried Chicken saw that and ramped up its own destructive powers, by making a sandwich in which the bread is replaced by slabs of fried chicken.  Seriously … do people really that this is is a GOOD idea?  Then a few major league ballparks started serving their burgers on doughnuts instead of buns.  I’m afraid to find out what will come next.

Scary Meal #5
Denny’s Fried Cheese Melt with wavy fries and marinara
1,260 calories
63 g fat (21 g saturated, 1 g trans)
3,010 mg sodium

CALORIE EQUIVALENT: 18 T.G.I. Friday’s Frozen Cheddar & Bacon Potato Skins

Apparently, Denny’s deemed the classic grilled cheese too boring for our novelty seeking taste buds, so they fixed it by driving four deep-fried cheese sticks into the core of the sandwich. So what you end up with are cheese sticks with extra cheese between slabs of buttered bread and a pile of fried potatoes on the side. If Denny’s was serious about improving the grilled cheese, they would have skipped the novelty and brought in big-flavor ingredients like sautéedmushrooms or sliced figs. But, of course, if they did that, they might not be able to sell this entire meal for $4. Here’s to cheap food and expensive health care!

Eat This Instead!
Denny’s BLT with Hash Browns
730 calories
47 g fat (10.5 g saturated)
1,270 mg sodium

Scary Meal #4
IHOP New York Cheesecake Pancakes
1,270 calories

CALORIE EQUIVALENT: 28 McDonald’s Chicken McNuggets

Further blurring the line between dessert and breakfast, IHOP has infused their fluffy flapjacks with gooey hunks of cheesecake. Next thing you know they’ll be serving breakfast with big scoops of ice cream and chocolate syrup. The best breakfast is one with protein and fresh fruit, but if you’re going to go for the carb-heavy indulgence, there’s a better way to do it. Don’t make it a habit, but IHOP’s Chocolate Chip Pancakes will save you 660 calories.  And it sounds better to me, anyway.  But then, I think most of you already know how I feel about chocolate!!

Eat This Instead!
Chocolate Chip Pancakes
610 calories

Scary Meal #3
Friendly’s Grilled Cheese BurgerMelt
1,500 calories
97 g fat (38 g saturated)
2,090 mg sodium

CALORIE EQUIVALENT: 15 Snickers Kudos Granola Bars

Is this a joke? Because it should be. Where a normal hamburger has buns, this one has grilled cheese sandwiches. Yes, that’s two grilled-cheese sandwiches with one hunk of ground beef wedged between them. Other iterations of this sandwich have been dubbed “fatty melts”—for obvious reasons. They have twice as much cheese and bread as a regular cheeseburger.  This is just plain GROSS.

Eat This Instead!
Grilled Cheese
790 calories
37 g fat (12 g saturated
1,280 mg sodium

Scary Meal #2
Uno Chicago Grill Lobster BLT Thin Crust Pizza
1,530 calories
87 g fat (30 g saturated)
3,480 mg sodium

CALORIE EQUIVALENT: 51 Nabisco Ginger Snap Cookies

On its own, lobster is sweet, healthy, and loaded with lean protein. Yet, for some reason, restaurants never seem to know what to do with it. Case in point: Lobster BLT Pizza, an amalgam of foods that don’t quite fit together: One is seafood, one is diner grub, and one is an Italian-American hybrid. We’re all for trying new things, but not when the toll is 75 percent of your day’s calories and 1½ day’s worth of sodium and saturated fat.

Eat This Instead!
Lobster Wrap with side of roasted vegetables  (YUMMY!!!!)
570 calories
30.5 g fat (4 g saturated)
1,660 mg sodium

DRUM ROLL PLEASE ………………………

Scary Meal #1
Applebee’s Provolone-Stuffed Meatballs with Fettuccine
1,550 calories
97 g fat (46 g saturated)
3,910 mg sodium

CALORIE EQUIVALENT: 148 Whoppers Malted Milk Balls

Yes, America has a cheese fetish, but this is just excessive. Cheese-filled meatballs? It’s like a beef-based Gusher, a sort of meaty water balloon of fat. Especially problematic is the fact that said meatballs are served on a bed of fettuccine Alfredo, which is basically flat noodles basting in oil, butter, and—yes—cheese. Cut more than a thousand calories by switching dishes. A smart swap like this one (and the hundreds of others in Eat This, Not That!)  a couple times a week and you can lose 2½ pounds a month without ever dieting! 

Eat This Instead!
Spicy Shrimp Diavolo
500 calories
10 g fat (3.5 g saturated)
1,910 mg sodium

Lucky for me, nothing in the top 5 even remotely sounded tasty to me … but several of the “Eat This Instead!” options did sound good and were reasonable in the total calories, fat and sodium.  This is just the tip of the dining out iceberg, and there are so many more items and options in the book.  From time to time I will share more in my blogs and on our website to help you become smarter, savvier and slimmer diners!  It will be an uphill battle, but if people don’t order this crap, restaurants won’t serve it!  It’s almost like eating your last meal, because any one of these could just place another nail in your coffin.  Sorry to be such a downer, but I’m not the one cooking this stuff, I’m not the selling it, and I’m not the one eating it … Just sayin’….

Posted by Laurie Puckett at Remmel Wellness Center, a full service wellness and chiropractic center located in beautiful St. Petersburg, Florida. 

Be sure to listen to my weekly radio show beginning Monday, September 10th at 2:00 pm Eastern Time at www.LifeImprovementRadio.com for more health and wellness information and to chat with me on the topics I cover.

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1 Comment by Laurie Puckett on August 30, 2010
filed in Heart Health, Weight Loss, Wellness
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When Your Grocery Store Helps You Shop Smarter

The interior of the largest Whole Foods in the...
Image via Wikipedia

I love Publix, but boy do I wish we had Kroger grocery stores down here in Florida.  The grocery chain is piloting a program ranking the nutritional value of foods on their shelves on a scale from 1 to 100, with one being the lowest nutritional value and 100 being the highest.   Admittedly, many of the food manufacturers are less than pleased with the ranking system – probably because they aren’t scoring very high.  But the scores can help the consumer by processing the information found on the label for them.  Read the excerpt from a Wall Street Journal article about this and similar ventures being launched by other grocery retailers. 

“Myra Vanderpool for years regularly bought her local supermarket’s store-brand wheat bread. This spring, she switched brands.

What prompted Ms. Vanderpool’s move was a new nutritional-scoring system being tested at her Kroger Co. grocery store in Lexington, Ky., that ranks thousands of foods on a scale of 1 (low in nutrition) to 100 (really healthy). The results, posted next to items on the grocer’s shelf, were eye-opening: Her regular bread scored a 23, the same as Häagen-Dazs coffee ice cream.

So the 67-year-old substitute teacher started buying one of Nature’s Own wheat breads, which has a score of 81, partly because it contains more fiber and protein than her former brand. Ms. Vanderpool said her husband complains at times that he misses his old bread, but she tells him: “This is healthier for you.”

Kroger’s scoring system is part of a nationwide move by grocery retailers to get pushier about offering nutritional advice. Other chains, such as Hy-Vee Inc. in the Midwest, are hiring dietitians to advise shoppers on how to select healthier food and, in some stores, walk the aisles offering personalized recommendations for a fee. Some grocers, like Safeway Inc., are mining data gleaned from loyalty cards on their customers’ purchasing habits to recommend healthier alternatives to the foods they buy. Wal-Mart Stores Inc., the country’s biggest food retailer, plans to announce details of its own “nutrition program” later this summer, said a spokeswoman, who declined to elaborate.

Supermarkets are hoping to increase their shoppers’ loyalty, and perhaps win back some customers who have turned for at least some of their purchases to specialty stores such as Whole Foods Market Inc. and big-box retailers like Wal-Mart. Sales of natural and organic foods jumped 72% to $31.9 billion in the five years ended 2009, while functional, or fortified, foods rose 44% to $37.3 billion in the same period, according to Nutrition Business Journal. And big food makers have been rolling out more options that are lower in salt and saturated fat and higher in fiber and whole grains.

“It’s not our responsibility to tell shoppers what to eat, what not to eat or how to eat,” said Ric Jurgens, chief executive of supermarket chain Hy-Vee. Still, “we need to provide them with as much information as we can, to help them make good decisions and provide as many options as possible.”

Some food makers object to their products being scored for nutrition. They say shoppers consider a variety of factors when buying food. And they say that relying on a single nutritional score can make it difficult for consumers to understand how the foods they buy fit into a diet. It also can result in surprises, like the wheat bread Ms. Vanderpool bought that scored the same as an ice cream. A spokesman for the nutritional-scoring system, called NuVal, said calcium and vitamin A boosted the ice cream’s score, while added sodium and low-fiber content hurt the bread’s ranking.

Kellogg Co.’s Kashi brand in a statement said it tries to provide minimally processed, organic-certified food free of artificial flavors and other additives. “Many of the current nutrient-profiling systems don’t take these values into account, which results in an incomplete picture,” it said.

Kroger, the second-largest food retailer by revenue after Wal-Mart, recently began testing the NuVal scoring system in some Kentucky stores and is considering using it nationally. The system, developed by health experts from Yale University and other institutions, uses nutrition data on food labels and other public information to calculate how well a product helps meet federal dietary recommendations. High levels of saturated fat, for example, can pull down the score while calcium can help raise it. Foods are ranked from 1 to 100; the higher the number, the greater the nutritional value.

The scores can influence shoppers’ choices. Ron Gill, a 44-year-old insurance salesman in Lexington, Ky., keeps an eye on the NuVal scores posted at his local Kroger store. On a recent shopping trip, in the processed-meat aisle, Mr. Gill passed up his usual Ball Park brand hotdogs, made by Sara Lee Corp., with a score of 7. Instead, he picked up Johnsonville Sausage LLC.’s smoked turkey sausage, which had a score of 10.

“It’s a little difference, going in the right direction,” Mr. Gill said. …

Personally, I think if you are going to chose to eat a food with so little nutritional value that it receives a score of 7 or 10, you might as well eat what you like or buy what is on sale.  But I do like the idea of having all that nutritional information from the label condensed into a single score for me.  It makes shopping that much easier and faster.  If you agree, suggest that your favorite grocery store do something similar.

Excerpts from the Wall Street Journal: http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704229004575371010407610760.html?mod=rss_Health

Posted by Laurie Puckett at Remmel Wellness Center, a full service chiropractic and wellness facility in St. Petersburg, Florida.

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No Comments by Laurie Puckett on August 12, 2010
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The Salt in Your Diet

Table salt and peppercorns.
Image via Wikipedia

Sodium is the latest dietary villain.  First it was fats, then carbs and sugars.  Now it is sodium.  Turn the clock back a half a century or so, when Americans ate very little processed food, and home cooked most of their meals.  Fats, sugars and sodium didn’t pose the same problem then as they do today.  As we allow others (i.e, food manufacturers) to decide what ingredients we consume, public health concerns are causing the federal government to consider policy changes that would effect the ingredients in the processed foods and restaurant foods that you eat.  Here is a little info on sodium that I found in a Wall Street Journal article:

Nearly 90% of adults consume more salt than U.S. dietary guidelines recommend. Now, federal officials are considering making those guidelines even tougher to follow.

Eating too much sodium, a key component of salt, can contribute to high blood pressure, a major risk for most people as they age because it can lead to heart disease and other health problems. But cutting sodium from the diet is difficult, mainly because people often don’t know it’s there. More than three-quarters of the sodium people consume comes from processed and restaurant foods. And much of the sodium we eat is in foods that don’t necessarily taste salty, like packaged bread and chicken dishes.

Salt is the latest front in the battle to get Americans to eat a healthier diet. Previous efforts have focused on cutting down on sugar, to fight obesity, and reducing fat, for a healthier heart. After four decades of unsuccessfully nudging Americans to cut salt in their diets only to see them eat more of it, government officials are intensifying their efforts.

An advisory committee working on new U.S. Dietary Guidelines, due to be released later this year by the federal government, recently recommended that all adults restrict their intake of sodium to no more than 1,500 milligrams a day, equivalent to about two-thirds of a teaspoon of table salt, down from a current limit of 2,300 mgs for some people. For many, that wouldn’t represent a change. The dietary guidelines, which are updated every five years, currently suggest a limit of 1,500 mgs for people with hypertension, anyone over 40 years old and African-Americans, who are at greater risk for high blood pressure—a group that represents about 70% of all adults.

Today, adults consume more than 3,400 mgs of sodium on average, not including salt they use in cooking or sprinkle on food from a shaker, more than twice the amount recommended for most people, according to a recent survey by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Middle-aged men are eating on average about 54% more salt today than in the early 1970s; for women, consumption has jumped 67% in that time.

The best way to reduce salt is to cut back on processed and restaurant foods, eat fresh produce, and reduce portion sizes. Nutritionists recommend eating whole grains instead of bread—a single slice of packaged bread can contain 150 mgs to 200 mgs or more of sodium. Cut back gradually, so your palate adjusts to a less salty taste.

When you do buy processed foods, look for items with less than 300 mg of sodium per serving, or no more than one milligram of sodium per calorie of food, advises the Harvard School of Public Health, which has on its website 25 sodium-reduction strategies developed with the Culinary Institute of America.

Sodium levels can also vary widely among brands, so check labels carefully. Many chefs prefer to cook with kosher or sea salt, but the sodium in these products differs little from table salt, scientists say.   http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704905004575405173133646604.html?mod=rss_Lifestyle

The bottom line:  Eating home cooked meals are healthier for you.  If you are going to purchase prepackaged foods, read the labels for fat, sodium and carb content.  When you know what you are eating, you can make informed choices that ultimately benefit your health.

Posted by Laurie Puckett at Remmel Wellness Center, a full service wellness and chiropractic facility in St. Petersburg, Florida.

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No Comments by Laurie Puckett on August 9, 2010
filed in Heart Health, Wellness
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