Wednesday, July 9, 2008

Good Food Gone Bad

Number 7
I sometimes wonder if I have been put on a “list” of people who’ve had heart attacks. I am referring to the kind of list that direct mailers use like people who own cats or people who subscribe to The New Republic. In the last few months I have noticed that I seem to be getting more mail from firms or organizations that deal with health, or more specifically, heart health.

A few weeks ago I received just such a mailing from the
Nutrition Action Healthletter. This particular mailing caught my eye with a headline that read “We Name Names!”

Now I wasn’t sure whose name they were naming and why but I suspected it had something to do with bad food choices. My suspicion was correct.

Why is it that all bad food is so freaking good?

That was certainly the case with this list. There wasn’t one item on the ten item bad food list that didn’t sound delicious.

Okay, maybe I could pass on the
Pepperidge Farm Roasted White Meat Chicken Pot Pie. I’ve never been a big pot pie guy anyway. That was number one on the list.

On the other hand, number four was
Dove Ice Cream. With half a cup serving containing 300 calories and an average of 11 grams of saturated fat, the Nutrition Action Healthletter says it “will fill your heart all right…but not with love.”

And who only eats half a cup of ice cream anyway?

How about a
Chipolte Chicken Burrito?

How bad can chicken beans and rice be?

How about a whopping 950 calories and 2,900 mg of sodium, and that’s only if you are trying to be good by passing on the sour cream and cheese. With those two ingredients added it tops out at 1,180 calories and 19 grams of saturated fat. The newsletter succinctly sums it up with, “Yikes!”

The newsletter isn’t all about what you can’t eat though. It does offer another list of “Ten Super Foods” for our consideration. The problem is that most of them don’t sound very super to me unless you happen to have a thing for sweet potatoes (number one) and kale (number 10).

So here’s the deal my fellow cardiac challenged readers. You can save yourself the ten bucks it costs for a subscription to this newsletter by just remembering this simple tenet; if it sounds delicious it’s probably bad.

1 comment:

Unknown said...

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