It was the Taco Bell
Today I was randomly thinking about this party I went to over a decade ago.
One of my friends drank a bit much and got pretty hammered. We all became pretty hungry at one point and food was ordered for the group. As you might have guessed by now, the food in question was Taco Bell, so obviously the quality of it all was fantastic. Everyone knows how healthy it is to eat fast food.
In any case my friend became sick and vomited profusely. These things happen. What I did not expect was that he would then proceed to absolute insist that it was not the alcohol that made him sick, but rather the food that we ate.
It was the Taco Bell!
This has actually become a long standing inside joke within this old friend group of mine. Need a scapegoat? Need to deflect blame from one thing to another? Ah well, then it must have been the Taco Bell's fault.
Got sick with the flu?
Must have been the Taco Bell.
Got into a fight with your significant other?
That Taco Bell is a crafty one.
Late for work?
Damn you T-Bell!
The funny thing is...
I went to Taco Bell the other day and I ordered something that I do not usually order. I'm one of those people who finds something on the menu at a restaurant and usually will only order that thing from that particular establishment until the end of time. Boring I know, but when I deviate from this strategy I tend to find myself disappointed the vast majority of the time.
However this time, for whatever reason, I decided to live mas and order the most ridiculous thing on the menu I could find. And it was a doozy! If I recall correctly it was the infamous grilled cheese burrito, which I did not even know exited before seeing it on the menu just then. This thing was absurd. It literally had melted cheese on the outside of the burrito, which I thought had to be a mistake but apparently not.
In any case after eating this monstrosity and following it up with a chicken soft taco, I ended up feeling like absolute trash for a little over an hour. I have an iron stomach so stuff like this doesn't upset it, but I definitively could not function for a while. I was tired to the point of exhaustion. I laid down on the couch in the middle of the day, say 1 PM, and simply passed out for an hour. It was kind of a crazy experience honestly. Haven't had that feeling in quite a while, and especially not after eating such a relatively small portion.
I've been avoiding garbage low-quality food for the last year or so, and after this little adventure I have every reason to keep it going. It's wild how easy it is to fall into these traps of just taking shortcuts and getting really poor quality nourishment. Door Dash is not my friend.
Nutrition facts
Anyone who looks into these things knows that fast-food, freezer-food, and just restaurants in general are often loaded with obscene amounts of salt and saturated fat. Turns out salt and fat are not very healthy for a person. At the same time nutrition labels can be very misleading.
If the amount of calories in a particular dish is measured by how well it burns and how much heat it creates when you light it on fire... is that really useful information? What happens if you put a block of wood in the machine? Isn't it going to tell you that the block of wood has high calories because it burns well? I'm fairly certain the human body cannot absorb any of that energy. I am not a deer. I can't eat twigs.
Surely the reading from a calorimeter means something, but most are blissfully unaware of such nuance and treat it like it's the end all be all deterministic measurement. We then have to ask ourselves how accurate all these other measurements are, and if it even matters. After all consuming ionized table salt can't be exactly the same thing as consuming pink Himalayan sea salt. This can be confirmed with even a simple Google search.
So not only can we be damn sure that fast/frozen food is teeming with salt, but also it's all but guaranteed that the kind of salt used is going to be the cheapest and low-quality garbage the market has to offer. Capitalism!
Personally I don't even worry about my fat or cholesterol consumption. I don't really worry about my sodium-chloride (salt) consumption either, although there was a point in 2016 where I was eating so much frozen food (taquitos and teriyaki bowls) that my feet would swell up at my desk like I was a diabetic. That was certainly a wakeup call to say the least. Perhaps eating 400% of daily recommended salt is not the best idea! Of course I didn't even realize what I was doing until I actually read the labels, so nutrition-facts certainly can be good for something.
EGGS!
Eggs are one of the craziest examples when it comes to nutrition and giving health advice. Seriously go look at up. Doctors are constantly flip-flopping back and forth on eggs like it's straight out of 1984. Eggs are unhealthy! Don't eat too many because they are packed with cholesterol! Eggs are healthy! Eat as many as you want it's fine! It is truly is a sight to behold.
My personal experience with eggs is that they're fine, and you can eat them quite often without any problems. As counterintuitive as it sounds, eating cholesterol doesn't necessarily even increase one's cholesterol. In fact there are two kinds of cholesterol and one is very good for you. High density lipoprotein is good for you while low density is not.
So if consuming cholesterol from food isn't even the primary source of cholesterol problems, then what is? As someone who has actually had high cholesterol in the past I can safely say it's more about cutting out saturated fat from one's diet than anything else.
In fact, just like their are two kinds of cholesterol, there is also more than one type of saturated fat, and they are very different. The bad type of saturated fat one might try to avoid tends to be poly-saturated fat, while mono-saturated fat is not really that big of a deal.
This is why eating an avocado is not the same as eating a steak. The steak (and other animal products and processed foods and baked goods) are loaded with poly-saturated fats, while plant-products tend to unsurprisingly contain the more healthy version. So while it might look the same on a nutrition label to eat a bunch of almonds as it would to eating a piece of cheesecake, it is quite simply just appears that way because nutrition labels are extremely reductive and oversimplified for mass consumption.
Making a comparison to crypto or the stock market
It would be like measuring the entire worth and value of an asset using only the market cap. Sure, the big number look good. Number go up. Everything looks safe. Then we realize that the thing we are looking at is Tron and the entire network is in the hands of a single malicious man-child. Whoops!
Conclusion
Like everything else in this world, getting good and accurate information tends to be a lot harder than it should be. Nutrition and health are no exception, and by no means should anything I've said today be taken as 100% fact. Do your own research, as they say.
I believe the importance of nutrition is only going to become more and more prescient over time. We live in a world of shortcuts, quick-fixes, and quantity over quality. It only makes sense that we would continue on this trend until society itself hits rock bottom.
Was it the Taco Bell? Maybe it was! Or maybe it was just the masculine urge to deny alcohol having the intended affect. The world may never know.
I love reading your experience, it seems you know a lot about nutrition For a long time I had a weight problem because of junk food, especially soda drink them several times a day thank GOD, I can balance my a healthy eating style and exercise, I am today in my ideal weight, but I still struggle with leaving junk food, sometimes for days I leave it, but life seems to cross my path, all my family and friends invite me to eat and I end up giving in to temptation.
In this age of information, we have to put up with the age of dis-information too! I won't make the argument that Taco Bell is healthy and should be consumed, but perhaps (depending on what you order) it's not as bad as their reputation has become.
Oh and NO it wasn't the Taco Bell.
I'm going to use that opportunity and share a talk that I've watched couple days ago. It is about highly processed food and how its proliferation correlates with the nutrition related problems observed today (and why).
The Taco Bell Story.
Thank you for sharing
Indeed knowing the nutritional value of meals is important in deciding to meals to eat, in order to eat healthy meals and to shed unnecessary weight and be healthy generally.
Less Junks and more healthy meals.
Hm
I love the way you people made jokes with Taco Bells
Also, thank you for calling our awareness to eating more of healthy foods
It is important
Fun fact - the crappy table salt is made by removing the valuable minerals from natural salt. Where do they go, you ask? They are sold as mineral supplements.
So you become deficient partially due to the demineralisation of the salt and then people who notice they are dying pay extra to get some of them back.
(It's a much better approach to grow your own plants and mineralise the soil yourself using rockdust).
I wonder if they test this stuff to confirm that it can in fact be digested by humans???
This post has been manually curated by the VYB curation project
Taco Bell is the most memeable food of all time
I've never eaten at Taco Bell*
*As a kid, I remember eating the cinnamon twists once-but I don't count this, instead insisting on this lengthy disclosure
This really looks tasty and makes me salivate. In every meal we consume it is important we know what we are getting from it
Today out scouring the news feeds there was an article of a long term study done in the UK with thousands of people. They said that some processed foods weren't as bad as first thought. That included baked sweets, deserts, and frozen foods. It didn't say what frozen foods were looked at, if they were high salt content or low salt content. I guess when it came to baked goods it was the fiber content that made the distinction different.
After recently discovering that a large variety of spices, which they have claimed for years is better than using salt on food, is loaded full of lead I became more skeptical. Walmart chili seasoning for example has dangerous levels of lead even for adults. Turmeric, which in the last few years has gotten rave reviews for its health benefits, but according to the study done by Consumer Reports just about every container of Turmeric sold in this country, including at health food stores, is loaded with lead. Remember it was so healthy that they started using it in Kraft Mac and Cheese to make it have a healthy rather than dye filled unhealthy effect. But unbeknownst to me it didn't apply to all KM&C, just the ones that aren't the original, the ones most parents will tend to grab. I am getting on about something here in a minute, just hold on...(lol), with that said at first I felt bad going the extra mile (penny wise) to buy the better Kraft product over others after having found out about lead in turmeric. When I found out it was the cheaper versions that had it than not so much because the grand kids don't tend to like the thicker noodles found in those versions.
So all that had me going back to a few years ago about how great spinach was for people when come to find out spinach has more aluminum in it to the point that consuming spinach on a daily basis that over a lifetime one can consumer seventy percent more aluminum than given in (which they've take most out of) childhood vaccines. (which was the raging debate I came upon that discovery)
Okay so now we're on about using spices instead of salt because spices are much healthier for you but finding that a lot of spices can hold dangerous amounts of lead for children, with some even dangerous amounts even for adults. We're on about turmeric being oh so healthy they started using it as a healthier alternative to color Kraft Mac & Cheese....just not healthy enough though evidently to put it in the higher priced versions that most parents will opt not to buy. Talking about vegetables, spinach reigns supreme but will add seventy five percent more aluminum over a life time than all childhood vaccines...but most vegetables also contain unhealthy byproducts like lead....due to the environment having been contaminated from the use of lead based gasolines. The ground is where spinach gets it aluminum from, so though they don't trot out this fact when it comes to vegetables overall, but the ground naturally contains a lot of aluminum, its just for some reason spinach absorbs it more. Now we'll get on about dark chocolate. Dark chocolate, if you listen to them, is probably one of the best things on earth you can eat. (in moderation) If you listen to consumers reports study it has elevated levels of lead above what an adult should consume. Just about every brand, including the most expensive. (Think about the environment that the majority of cacao is grown, it's not a good picture, same with the majority of turmeric coming from India) So you begin to see a pattern develop here, the stuff they really, really, really want you to eat are contaminated with dangerous levels of something or the other, so the big question is does whatever it contain that is good for you outweigh the risk of what's not. Since they don't tell you my guess is that it does not.
I know this lengthy but...I was actually going to do a post on the lead boogey man because our city just implemented that all rental properties will now have to be tested for lead. From what the people at the Health Department stand at a fair giving out literature told me it was going to be an additional cost of about two hundred for the testing. I told them when they come to announce that to me I don't intend upon complying because I had my house tested for lead years ago when I decided to paint it. Back than, I don't know if they still do it, they would come out and test your house for free. They couldn't find any lead paint, not even on the bare wood, as I guess it can absorb into the wood. So why should I have to have it tested time and again. Because of the boogey man. That would be the oil conglomerates and congressional members who let them pollute the environment for years, and the closer you lived to an expressway the more containments that landed upon your ground. So it's everywhere, some more than others. I am not saying there aren't slum lords out there who still have lead paint stuck on their walls that might peel but with my house that's probably long been taken off the majority of places, or as for the outside long done peeled away over the years. My house though is so old there was still wall paper on the walls from the beginning of time, much of that has been removed by me and/or on the other side it was entirely redone with new drywall before I bought it. Like prehistoric wallpaper that looked like brown paper bag with a one color single print design. With natural woodwork through the majority the likelihood of lead paint is slim to none. Now take for example last year when they came through and put in new sewer lines and repaved the road, if they'd come in and swiped their swipe on my woodwork chances are greater than not they'd found lead....because it's in the soil outside. It doesn't matter they carefully took off three, four layers off the top, it's to late for that. Years of remodeling roads, revamping/replacing lines before they started being environment conscience mixed all that dirt up. Chances of there ever being complete removal at this point is slim to none. When they dig that up and the wind blows it all over your house and into the house through your windows, if you don't wash it completely off chances are you could end up with a positive reading. Than you would be subject to remove all tenants and your house surrounded by caution tape and spend thousands upon thousands tearing out all the walls and replacing them. Not to mention you have to hire a professional to remove it off the outside your house. Which they did once to one landlord who was down at a city commission meeting two, three years ago. I was down there for something unrelated but when I got my three minutes I felt I had to speak out on behalf of this landlord who was being tarred and feathered by neighborhood members but claimed he'd done everything requested by the housing authority and the kids living in the property were still testing positive for lead. When I told the commission that those baby snacks cheese sticks, puffs were found to be loaded full of lead their faces about dropped onto the commission desk.
This was one of the reasons I asked those Health Department people if they were testing parents not just the kids, because lead can come from a multitude of places. He said they were not testing parents and they were basing their recommendation on the Cincinnati Ohio study. So I went home and looked up that study. The study done in a highly industrialized area now sitting condemned and empty with contaminates of lead paint feeling away and asbestos wrapped pipes, broken out windows where wind could blow the stuff any which way the winds blows. Doesn't help it was an older run down neighborhood, probably had a lot of slum lords, but the point being is this is all based on kids eating lead contaminated paint chips or chewing on window sills full of lead based paint. The guy even told me that if you so much as have a chip of paint peeling that dust can result from that, land on a window sill and a kid can lap it up. Sort of hard to believe one chipping piece of paint can cause all that havoc but you know it's always got to be another boogey man that isn't the oil conglomerates. Personally, to be honest with you, I can't ever remember a time my kids ever licked let alone bit the woodwork but it must be an epidemic if you listen to them. They come on up into here and find any lead first thing I am going to do is tell them to test the parents first, if they find lead than take inventory of everything they have in their cupboards and test it, once they tell Walmarts they can't sell their chili powder here than I'll pay two hundred for the test. Once they eliminate all turmeric and baby cheese puffs, I'll pay for it. Once they can prove it didn't come from them digging up the road last year, I'll pay for it. Until that time I'll see you at the SC level in appeals.