What do you use for binder?? I had given up making meatballs as they fall apart without bread as a binder. These days I've given up and just eat the meatballs with bread....sigh.

I read an article last night about a guy (writer) who decided to do a different take on Morgan Spurlock's "Super Size Me" experiment.

https://www.eater.com/24152247/swee...-healthy-eating

As the link indicates, he was going to do a healthy version of it, eating nothing but salads.

A few caveats -

Sweetgreen wasn't open for breakfast:

(I question how cereal is in any way salad-like, but that's what he was calling his breakfast bowls with cereal)

The salads at Sweetgreen are expensive: (about $16 each) so he settled on doing 15 days (still cost nearly $500)

They didn't have a varied enough menu for him to do a full 2 weeks of different salads, so he had to customize his salads to avoid repeating meals.



The salads often had a base of quinoa or rice though, so perhaps the rice and quinoa are why he was considering cereal to be a "salad-like" breakfast.

I was really thinking that this Sweetgreen place must be vegan - and you could certainly get vegan salads there if you wanted, but there were a surprising number of salads that had meat added to them.

With the sheer amount of grain added to so many of their salads, there were usually twice as many g of carbs as protein though.

In the end he was salad-ed out after only 15 days, and couldn't wait to get back to eating... McD's.

And this was one of his conclusions:



It sounded like it would have been possible to eat a relatively healthy meal there - order the salad without any grains, order meats for the salad that didn't have sweet sauces on them, with full-fat salad dressings that weren't icky-sweet.

I just thought that as an aside to the ridiculous article about eating vegan at McD's, it was interesting that despite knowing how mediocre McD's food is, and how bad it is nutritionally, this guy went for eating at the healthiest fast food place he could find... and couldn't hack it, had to go back to McD's as soon as his experiment was completed.

In this week's Unsettled Science from Nina Teicholz:
I'm with Nina, eat the patties!

Quote from Nina:

I haven't dug around on the internet enough to find out if this next bit is true - but according to the Salad-Size Me guy, apparently Spurlock later admitted that there was a lot more going on than just eating McD's 3 times a day while he was filming Super-size Me:



So did the alcoholism have anything to do with gaining so much weight? Getting so much sicker so quickly? Throwing up? All this during a period of only 30 days - he was supposed to have gained 25 lbs in 30 days with all his health stats getting worse and worse.

If you go by the revered calories in/calories out mantra, based on the standard "2,000 calorie (your needs may vary)" diet, he would have had to consume a total of 5,000 calories every single day in order to eat enough to gain that much weight. That meant consuming an extra 3000 calories daily: Three meals a day, each one at least 1,666 calories.

That would be pretty difficult to do with the breakfast menu , unless you ordered multiple McMuffins, plus hash browns, and a large coke to reach that calorie count at breakfast. (The Big Breakfast with Hotcakes comes closest with 1340 calories - would still need a drink over 300 calories to reach the goal of 1,666 calories for that meal) But supposedly Spurlock ate a different meal at each of the 3 meals every single day, so he would have been ordering 3 or 4 different things each day for breakfast most days. A little easier to do with the burger and fries menu for lunch and dinner, because the bigger burgers start at about 400 calories, and the large fries have almost 500 cals, plus you could add a large coke at nearly 300 cals, for a total of about 1200 cals. That still leaves another 400+ calories he would have needed to reach the 1666 calorie goal for that ONE meal though.

In the film, his health problems were all blamed on the amount of meat, fat, and overall calories he was consuming. But how much of that calorie count (as well as his deteriorating health) could be attributed to his alcohol consumption?

_______


Even if it turns out that Spurlock wasn't muddying the results of his experiment with several hundred (maybe 1,000... 2,000... or more?) calories of alcohol each day, it's clear from Naughton's experiment (which really only cut down somewhat on the total carbs consumed) it's very possible to eat McD's and LOSE weight.

I have very clear memories of some lady on some LC board (might have been ALC, might have been a defunct LC board - it's been a very long time ago) who ate LC at McD's almost every day, because with her job she didn't have another option for something to grab quickly for lunch. She would order a couple of regular burgers, a diet drink, no fries or pies, and then just toss the buns. She lost weight easily. I'm sure calories made a difference, since 2 regular McD's burgers minus the buns amounts to less than 300 calories. That's about the same number of calories in one of those tiny (and very unsatisfying) frozen diet meals, and yet she was quite satisfied on those 2 bunless burgers, with enough energy to do her very physical job all day.

I'd guess so:
IMO, though, it would depend on what his drinking habits actually were. If it was fairly steady, same amount day after day, before/during/after the movie; I'd consider it not much more of a confounder than, say, taking any other medication - pain killers, psychiatric meds, statins, etc. If he was more of a binge drinker and it was all over the map... well, who knows?

It reminds me of one of Dr Jason Fung's patients, too. T2D, but he also had MS and was in a wheelchair. He couldn't easily get to a grocery store. He ate tons of fast food from near his apartment building. Once they straightened out his choices, he was successful. I haven't read any of Fung's books, but I heard his colleague Megan Ramos talk about him at a conference.

It would also depend a great deal on whether or not he had any level of liver dysfunction to begin with - because even a minor liver dysfunction (borderline high normal) could certainly develop while eating a very high carb diet, especially one high in HFCS - which he would have consumed a ton of by drinking 3 X-large sugary sodas daily. (or even 3 large sodas - supposedly he only supersized his meal if it was suggested by the cashier, and only happened 9 times during the 30 days)

It's entirely possible that switching from eating normal amounts of "normal" foods to the ridiculous amount of carby food he was consuming at McD's was enough to push it over the edge into true liver dysfunction.

The whole thing of supersizing his meals though - super sized meals did not have extra meat added to them - they had extra carbs added to them - a veritable TON of extra carbs: X-large serving of fries, X-large sugary (HFCS) soda.

As Tom Naughton pointed out:



I think he must be referring to the fact that Spurlock only had a supersized meal 9 times during those 30 days - just based on the current calorie counts for various meals and menu items, he would have had a very difficult time consuming 5,000 calories daily.

Subsequent events has cast doubt on Spurlock's entire body of work, he has lied so much.

I could do a film about eating noting but McD's hamburger patties. Would I make a lot of money? I can't claim to lose any weight, since I'm AT a place where my doctor worries about me being underweight. (Appetite problems as my cortisol is STILL adjusting and this might be a lifelong caution I must manage...)

Or has my "gold ring" (carousel reference) already passed me by since I'm getting better? Because the McDonald's angle would make it clickbait, since so much money has been sunk into THAT keyword.

I miss Tom Naughton. Good guy, and he reset the Spurlock propaganda in the context of semi low carb. I don't begrudge "fast food" establishments, as they're useful for many who know what to eat. I can't remember the last time I purchased food at one of these places, however. Long ago they used to be a "go to" to refuel (Burger King) while traveling on the highways. Today, I can drive forever without needing to stop for food, it's just a benefit from fat burning and likely much more healthy.

I drifted away from fast food in the mid 1970s.

In the mid 1980s, I was working on a project with 5 or 6 guys, and it was getting really late. A guy went out for "Burger King". Being that I can't digest onions, I had him get me two plain cheeseburgers.

By then, it was probably about 10 years since I ate at a fast food joint. When I got my burgers, I realized neither the bun, beef, nor cheese had any flavor. Well, it filled my stomach and I haven't stopped at a fast food place since.

On the road, I bring mixed nuts and/or 'emergency food' keto bars. If decide to stop at a restaurant, I look for a small, mom & pop, non-chain restaurant, judge the cars in the parking lot before going in, and then the aroma when I walk in the door.

I've had very good luck with that.

Back on topic...

Not only can I not see why a vegan would want to eat at McDonald's, I really can't understand why anyone would. Life is too short to eat mediocre food.

Besides for being mediocre, it's full of ingredients that are not good for your health, but instead are good for corporate profits.

That makes me think about a bit towards the end of the Salad-Size me article, because what he says can apply to almost any chain restaurant vs any restaurant that sources their foods locally:



That's the attraction of fast food places in general - consistency. Most of them are mediocre, but when you walk inside or pull up to that drive thru, you have a pretty good idea what it's going to taste like - bland but filling.


And as you also pointed out, independent restaurants run the gamut from yuck to wonderful - because just like was pointed out in that article, if they have good sources, it'll be good. If not... bleh.

Here in Pa Dutch country, the independent restaurants are all pretty much the same though - sugars and starches fused to everything on the menu, with 6 different potato sides and just as many corn sides, with rarely a green vegetable in sight. Most everything swimming in sugary starches or starchy sugars.

This food category seems to be the Lowest Common Denominator that commercial foods turn to. DH used to work in DC and enjoyed all kinds of great Chinese restaurants. The tiny ones here have all the food Corporatized in exactly the same way you describe.

But we don't have much in the way of franchises, either, so the local restaurants do use local ingredients, and have an actual chef. Our favorite place doesn't even have a deep fryer, and the food is all the better for it!

Little off topic, but... timely to this convo.

Morgan Spurlock, ‘Super Size Me’ filmmaker, dead at 53

I saw that show up in the news today and thought of this thread.

Since they said he died from cancer, I'm expecting for the anti-meat brigade to start blaming his cancer on the 30 days of McD's 20 years ago.

It's possible. They draw conclusions to suit their viewpoint, but at McD's, I don't think the meat itself would be an issue, rather, it's how all the food is prepared.

No, apparently, he was outspoken against anti-vaxxers, so at least on Twitter, the Blue Check Brigade already decided that vaccines killed him.