By Dean L. Jones
Over 60% of Americans are considered to be overweight or obese, making the United States of America the most obese country in the world. I remember when over indulgence was pretty much considered someone asking how much sugar you wanted in your coffee, or the cups of sugar used to sweeten Kool Aid, which was rarely measured, as one just poured until it looked sweet enough.
Now our bodies are taking the lumps from excessive eating, such as a company like KFC sells a 6-piece Original Recipe Chicken meal made up of 2,530 calories for two people. The daily recommended calorie intake is based on a 2,000-calorie diet, so, if two people equally shared this meal it would be 1,265 calories per person, unfortunately, too many people are individually consuming the whole offering of potato and gravy, chips, coleslaw, and 24-ounces of endless fountain beverages.
Red Lobster offers the ‘create your own meal combination’ that can total 2,710 calories. The shrimp batters routinely add sugar to make it mouth-watering, but there is more when you add the celebratory liquor to wash down the biscuit and fries with Red Lobster’s trademarked 890-calorie, 24-ounce margarita. It would probably not be so bad if we only indulged into a meal like this maybe no more than once a year, but too many are taking advantage of this type of gorge on more of a weekly basis.
Night clubs were once the big avoidance to reduce the exposure to cigarette smoking, alcohol drinking and late hours. That was considered living the fast life; well today’s popular restaurants are serving up 2,000-calorie breakfasts, lunches, dinners, and desserts that are working on producing a similar fast life that comes with detrimental lumps of obesity, diabetes, and other diet-related diseases.
Take IHOP’s Chorizo Fiesta Omelet with spicy chorizo sausage, roasted peppers, onions, pepper jack cheese, topped with a citrus chili sauce, sour cream and a grilled Serrano pepper is a 1,300-calorie meal. Except, this is only a part of the restaurant’s offering, as it also comes with three buttermilk pancakes (or hash browns, or toast, or fruit), which means if you choose pancakes there will be at least four tablespoons of syrup, building this breakfast close to 1,990-calories, or the daily amount of calories for a moderately active female 50+ years of age.
A large Pineapple Upside Down Master Blast from the Sonic fast food restaurant is a 32-ounce cup of vanilla ice cream, pineapple, heavily salted caramel, pie crust pieces, and topped with several inches of whipped cream is 2,020-calories. This food treat atrocity has roughly 29-teaspoons of processed sugar, making it 20-teaspoons more that a man should consume per day, as recommended by the American Heart Association. On the whole, stay away from devious food offerings that lump you over the head, thereby living SugarAlert!
www.SugarAlert.com
Dean Jones is an Ethics Advocate, Southland Partnership Corporation (a public benefit organization), contributing his view on certain aspects of foodstuff.
