A tale of two take-outs; how not to eat fast food.

It's possible to eat low-carb and still have fast-food meals, but you really have to watch what you eat. Here's one example.

Boston Market, a fast-food chain owned by McDonalds, features rotisserie-grilled chicken and a couple of other meat dishes plus a selection of sides. They have some very low-carb items available - as well as many that aren't. Their chicken is so close to zero carbs as makes no difference, while their meatloaf evidently has considerable added starch. So I did a breakdown of the carb content of two meals using their own website's numbers for the content. (I've subtracted the fiber from the raw carb amounts since fiber can be ignored when watching carbs.)

Meal one: Half a rotisserie chicken with green beans and steamed vegetables, no cornbread.
Chicken: 2 grams carb
Green beans: 4 grams carb
Steamed vegetables: 5 grams carb
Total: 11 grams carb, 760 calories, 38.5 grams fat, 88 grams of protein.

Meal two: Large portion of meatloaf, mashed potatoes with beef gravy, sweet corn, no cornbread.
Meatloaf: 29 grams carb
Mashed potatoes with gravy: 36 grams carb
Sweet corn: 35 grams carb
Total: 100 grams carb, 1195 calories, 61.5 grams fat, 54 grams of protein.

Adding the cornbread (which is included with the meal automatically unless you tell them to leave it off) would boost the carb level on either of these by another 29 unneeded grams. I've left it out of both to be fair.

The meatloaf dinner has nine times the carbs of the chicken dinner in this example - in part because of the choice of side dishes. (It also has more than half again the calories, largely thanks to those very same carbs - and at 760 calories, that chicken dinner has plenty of calories already!) Okay, so what happens if you use the beans and steamed vegetables with the meatloaf? You've still got more than triple the carb that's in the chicken dinner; that's because the meatloaf is loaded with starchy fillers. And if you go the other way, and have the mashed potatoes and corn with the chicken, you get 73 grams of carbs in the meal. Any way you look at it, everything in that meatloaf dinner is bad news, and these aren't even the worst possible selections; get the meatloaf with sweet potato casserole and cinnamon apples, and throw in the cornbread, and you'll have 176 grams of carbs - enough to keep your insulin level elevated for many hours; maybe all night. That's why choosing the right food is essential.

What you eat is more important than how much.

When eating out, if you avoid the stuff that has the starches and sugars, you really can still go low-carb in many places. However, if you choose the wrong components to go with your low-carb main dish, you can lose the advantage rapidly. Having a salad? Ditch the croutons and the thickened-with-starch dressing; use oil and vinegar instead. Stare those breadsticks back under the napkin. Ask for something else instead of grits or hash browns or toast with breakfast. Disdain the beguiling bran muffin or whole-grain bagel with its 50 grams of non-fiber carbs (many are that high or higher). It won't be long before you won't miss the sweet, and you certainly won't miss the pounds that you'll shed as a result.

Out with the pyramid, in with the plate, still get a lot wrong.

So now instead of the upside-down-and-backwards recommendations of the old Food Pyramid, we get The Plate. What's changed? Not enough. Taking on the Powerpoint-style list that delivers about all that most people will read, here's my breakdown:

Balancing Calories (according to The Plate)
● "Enjoy your food, but eat less."

● "Avoid oversized portions."

Here we go again, perpetuating the old myth that obesity is entirely a matter of gluttony in some degree. That's been thoroughly discredited at this point, but the myth persists because too many powerful people can't afford to admit they've been wrong after having fervently espoused this position for their entire careers. The reality is that there is no need for the vast majority of people to pay one bit of attention to how much they eat IF they eat the right stuff - which won't be achieved by following the USDA guidelines.  What you eat is far more important than how much.

Foods to Increase  (according to The Plate)
● "Make half your plate fruits and vegetables."

This only works if you choose the right vegetables - and ignore the part about fruit altogether. A plate that's half-full of mashed potatoes and cooked apples (particularly when they're slathered with corn syrup or brown sugar) is a terrible thing to include in a meal, but these guidelines could be interpreted to mean that it would be a healthy choice - which it is emphatically not. Starchy vegetables should be passed over in favor of ones that aren't, and fruit should be minimized. Sorry, but that does indeed mean that the baked potato should be at most an occasional indulgence, NOT a staple with multiple meals per week. If you're going to have some fruit, eat no more than a small portion, no more than once a day and choose fruit with a relatively low sugar load, like strawberries. Although what you eat is far more important than how much, the quantity can become very important indeed when you're eating things that contain significant sugars and starches - and all fruits contain sugars.

● "Make at least half your grains whole grains."

Dead wrong; it implies that grains belong on your plate, which they don't - whole or otherwise.  While dishes like tabouleh and brown rice are somewhat less problematic than five-grain whole wheat bread (as just one example of an item erroneously considered "healthy"), anything containing grain is essentially just a reservoir of starch that directly and swiftly converts to glucose in digestion.  You might just as well eat sugar.  If it said "Make sure that no more than one spoonful of what's on your plate is made from grain of any kind", that would be more appropriate.  Better still, completely eliminate grains from your diet in all forms.  What you eat is far more important than how much.

● "Switch to fat-free or low-fat (1%) milk."

Bad advice.  If you're going to drink milk at all, there is no reason to avoid the 3.5% butterfat whole variety. Milk still contains significant sugars, however, so it's best left alone - and low-fat milk has ALL of the sugar of whole milk, so if anything, it's worse for you than the regular kind, partially because the low-fat label may make you think that it's OK to drink more of it. Fats in your diet are not the problem. Sugars and starches are the things that you need to avoid; those are what shuts down the ability to use fat as fuel, and they cause more problems than just obesity, diabetes and heart disease.  For someone who has already achieved a low-carb lifestyle otherwise, an occasional small indulgence in this area may be tolerated, but the more that you reduce sugars and starches, the better off you'll be. What you eat is far more important than how much.

Foods to Reduce (according to The Plate)
● "Compare sodium in foods like soup, bread, and frozen meals ― and choose the foods with lower numbers."

Sodium levels have been shown to be pretty much unrelated to sodium intake, both in the research published before and since since the new Plate came out.  Here's better advice than what's with the Plate: Anything that has more than 10 grams of carbohydrates for the whole meal should be left at the store. Bread, in particular, is something to avoid entirely. Yes, that is hard for most people to accept, but it's arguably one of the single most productive lifestyle changes that you can make. Bread is very heavy in carbohydrate content, and the fact that it is made from flour means that it has effects upon blood sugar levels that are nearly identical to those produced by eating an equivalent weight of sugar. Significant carbohydrate consumption of any kind tends to cause water retention, which is where sodium elimination goes haywire; let the body get back to working right, by ditching the carbs, and you can pretty much ignore sodium. What you eat is far more important than how much.

●"Drink water instead of sugary drinks."

This one they got pretty much right. Of course, they didn't tell you that sodas aren't the only sugary drinks; read the label on that bottle of cranberry juice cocktail or orange juice, and the level of sugars will surprise you (or at least, it should). Even worse are the various boutique favorites sold as "smoothies" and the like, which begin with sugar-laden fruit and then expand upon it with agave nectar, or honey, or cane juice.  Please do not be mislead by the folks who say "but it's NATURAL!"; your system can't tell whether sugar came from an apple, a pomegranate, tree sap, an insect's nectar collection, or a refinery; sugars, regardless of their source, are Not Good For You. Even worse, many bottled commercial "juice" contains high fructose corn syrup and/or added sugar disguised as "other fruit juice concentrates". To make matters worse, HFCS itself is sometimes just listed as sugar now, so unless the label says "cane sugar" or "beet sugar" or "sucrose" explicitly, you might be getting HFCS when you aren't expecting it. And although some juice suppliers have started going back to actual sucrose in response to public pressure about HFCS, that's really not much of an improvement. While it's true that high fructose corn syrup with more than 50% fructose is metabolically even worse than sugar (in complicated ways), it's like saying that getting run over by a truck is worse than getting mangled in a car wreck. The real goal is to avoid the damage altogether, and that's not done by choosing the slightly lesser evil.  Simply avoid both, and you're better off by far.




What you eat really is far more important than how much.