Friday, February 21, 2014

Numbers Game

 I read an interesting article recently, and thought I would recap a few numbers and their associated fun facts.

Enjoy!


Number Fact
58 Grams of fat in the typical restaurant meal, which is 89 percent of what you should eat in an entire day.
1128 Calories contained in a typical restaurant meal, averaged across breakfast, lunch and dinner - 56 percent of the recommended daily calorie intake for women.
95 Percent of the recommended amount of daily sodium allowance found in an average restaurant meal. 
200 Dollars spent annually, per capita—man, woman and child—on prescription drugs to fight diabetes, high blood pressure and cholesterol. 
333 Calories in the average burger in the late 1980s. Today's popular burgers include Ruby Tuesday (where every burger, including the turkey burger, tops 1,200 calories & the Bacon Cheese Pretzel Burger has 1,759 calories) and and Chili’s Southern Smokehouse Burger (1,600 calories).
70 Percent of Americans’ caloric intake derived from processed foods - that means anything that's not a basic whole fruit, vegetable or grain.
47.2 Percent of increased risk of being overweight associated with drinking more than two cans of soda per day. In fact, the Beverage Guidance Panel suggests that if we all limited our consumption of soda to 250 calories a day, our average weight would go down more than 22 pounds—even without altering a single thing we ate.
100 Acres of pizza served each day in America. 
1 Bread’s ranking among food that contributes the most calories to the American diet (and mostly the white, processed grain variety). The number-two source of calories in our diet? Cakes and cookies.
53 Grams of sugar in one glass of IHOP cranberry juice, which is the equivalent of two whole snickers bars! 
260 Percent increase in the number of obese adults between the 1960s and today. 
19.4 Pounds of pasta the average American man eats in a year. The average Italian man eats about 57.3, or about three times as much. However, the average American man weighs 191 and the average Italian man, 160. Why?  An example: the Cheesecake Factory's pasta Carbonara with Chicken dish has more calories than most of us should eat in a day (2,290), and has the saturated fat equivalent of 1.5 sticks of butter—or half a dozen bratwursts.
22 Grams of sugar per serving in Campbell's Slow Kettle Style Tomato and Sweet Basil Bisque - as much sugar as a Nestle 100 Grand bar, as much saturated fat as 5 servings of Cheetos, and as much sodium as 2 cups of Chex Mix. (If you eat the full bowl, multiply the above by 2).

2 comments:

  1. This is just plain scary. I've been making the effort to eat less processed foods in general, and to cook as much as possible so I know what's in my food. But this has lit a fire under my tush to really, really avoid dining out and to banish those packaged foods! I was especially horrified at the sugar content in the Campbell's soup. GOOD LORD.

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    Replies
    1. I know. The other stat that is shocking is the 70% number. We get 70% of our calories, on average, from processed foods - and if you read the 1 comment, you find out it's mostly bread ... and COOKIES/CAKE!! *Sigh*

      It's really sad when you look at how much sugar and salt is in processed foods (not even considering the rest of the additives). I started canning my own tomatoes two years ago because of it - pasta sauce and basic tomato dishes are so easy to make, and really taste great with just a few herbs added. No need for all that extra junk!!

      Have you read the book "Sugar, Salt, Fat"? You'd really ... "enjoy" ... it, I think. Pretty eye opening RE: what's in processed foods and why.

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