What the fuck is wrong with this country, part 68.

[elfs]

Seattle is considering requiring all restaurants to include a "nutrition facts"-like label next to every meal on the menu. As I was driving into work this morning, I heard local talkshow host Dave Ross (710 KIRO) discussing a newspaper article in the PI recently about how restaurants are fighting back. One of the stunts the restaurants pulled recently was to hire a man for 30 days to eat out morning, noon, and night in Seattle, to get all of his nutrition from restaurants, to demonstrate that one could do that, remain healthy, and even lose weight.

"And then," says Ross, "At the bottom of the article is a quote from his dietician. Welllll! I said, if you can afford a dietician of course you're going to lose weight! But for you and me and Joe Average, and I don't have a dietician, believe me, it's a whole lot harder! We don't have any idea!"

I don't normally get angry at talk show hosts. I know they get paid to act stupid (or, in Limbaugh's case, to be stupid). But this one absolutely infuriated me. Jesus fucking Wonder Woman (yeah, let that image percolate through your brain, it'll relieve the tedium), after forty years of "eat less, move more" and all of the other nutrition information we've been given, do people really need to hire a dietician tell them, "Don't eat at McDonald's every freaking day?" and "Don't supersize that," and "Don't stick the entire damn Denny's Ham & Cheese omelette down your gullet" and "For Gods' sake, the Starbucks Frappucino is a milkshake and you should treat it like a dessert and have it maybe once a week‽"

You do too have "an idea." You've got a simple one. Eat less, exercise more. Ignore it at your peril.

Comments

[pteryxx.livejournal.com]

I'd also point out that Joe Average does NOT in fact have a clue about the nutritional content of food. They see 'salad' and think it's healthy, but don't realize there's fat and sodium loaded into the little packets of dressing and the breading on the chicken strips. There's a reason the big chains heavily advertise food with names like 'Premium Chicken Breast Strips' - to capitalize on the masses' misconceptions about nutrition. I've personally taught classes of college students that didn't know their cans of pop had more sugar than their candy bars until I pointed it out - and THAT is already on the labels. You and I know the Starbucks drinks are milkshakes, but where did we find that out? I read a food expose online. Not exactly something the 30-ads-per-day crowd is going to stray across, nor actively search for.

That said, forcing every single restaurant to provide stats for every single dish is just ridiculous. The megachains probably know that info already, but small local restaurants would be crippled, and they are most likely to have the best food. How about we only require nutritional stats from companies that spend more than $100K a year on television advertising? They could run them as sidebars like prescription meds. ; )

[elfs.livejournal.com]

You and I know the Starbucks drinks are milkshakes, but where did we find that out?

I watched them make it. Y'know, right there, on the back counter of the store, where they put in the ice and the milk and the... "What is that stuff?" Omaha proposes that it's my writely obsession with detail: "What is that? How do you make it? What's in it?"