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Stories filed under: "healthy"

DailyDirt: Eating At Chipotle

from the urls-we-dig-up dept

Some people really like eating at Chipotle. It’s supposed to be healthy (although it really depends on what you order). The ingredients are often (but not always) from sustainable sources, and customers enjoy their meals. A few really fanatical eaters have devised some bizarre eating games with Chipotle food. Almost every fast food restaurant has a “secret menu” of some kind nowadays, but if you really like Chipotle, here are some extreme eaters who have documented their Chipotle purchases.

• Andrew Hawryluk gave up NOT going to Chipotle for Lent, and he called his strange non-abstinence “Chipotlent” and blogged about it. Since February 18, 2015, this 23yo animator from Los Angeles has been eating at Chipotle at least once a day… for over 6 months now. He’s been compared to Jared who once represented Subway, but maybe that’s not such a favorable comparison now. [url]
• It’s one thing to order a meal at Chipotle every day, but it’s another process entirely to try to maximize the weight of your food. If you want to do it, though, you can apparently get 86% more food (by weight) than just ordering like a normal person. [url]
• The ‘Chipotle Quesarito’ is a secret menu hack that uses a cheese quesadilla to wrap your burrito, instead of just a plain tortilla. Recently, however, Chipotle has started charging $3.50 extra for this “have it your way” hack, but it’s still a popular order. [url]

After you’ve finished checking out those links, take a look at our Daily Deals for cool gadgets and other awesome stuff.

Filed Under: andrew hawryluk, chipotlent, dylan grosz, fast food, food, healthy, jared fogle, quesarito, restaurants, secret menu
Companies: chipotle, subway

DailyDirt: Eating The Right Stuff

from the urls-we-dig-up dept

We’ve all heard the phrase, “you are what you eat” as advice to avoid junk foods (even ethically-shady foods). It does make some intuitive sense that the foods we consume have a significant impact on our health, but it’s often difficult to separate the fact from fiction for what constitutes heathy eating. There are raw food trends and diet fads to avoid just about any conceivable food category. Here are just a few interesting links on the topic of the things we eat having some rational health benefit.

• Cooking food allowed our ancestors to grow bigger brains since we didn’t have to spend as much energy on hunting and gathering. Big brains need a lot of calories, consuming about 20% of the calories we ingest even though the brain is only about 2% of our body mass. [url]
• There’s a common myth that taking vitamins can produce almost magical health benefits, but more scientific studies are finding that vitamins aren’t necessarily a boon to society. Linus Pauling, the famous chemist who won two Nobel prizes, promoted the idea that vitamin C was particularly beneficial… but the science doesn’t quite back him up. [url]
• Iodine has been added to dietary salt since 1924, originally to prevent goiter, but there’s some evidence that iodine also plays a critical role in brain development. Economists studying the differences between areas of low iodine consumption versus higher iodine intake have found that people in areas that avoided iodine deficiencies have gotten smarter and may explain part of the Flynn Effect (which observes that developed countries saw a rise in IQ scores of 3 points per decade throughout the 20th century). [url]

If you’d like to read more awesome and interesting stuff, check out this unrelated (but not entirely random!) Techdirt post via StumbleUpon.

Filed Under: cooking, flynn effect, food, healthy, intelligence, iodine, iq, linus pauling, nutrients, vitamin c, vitamins

DailyDirt: Food — What You See Is Not Always What You Get

from the urls-we-dig-up dept

These days, it actually takes some effort to find food at the grocery store that contains fewer than five ingredients. Processed foods contain so many ingredients that it might be better to just avoid them altogether. But even when you think you’re getting “whole foods,” they may actually contain hidden ingredients. When did food get so complicated? Here are a few things that will make you think twice before you decide to eat something.

• Potentially harmful ingredients that have been banned in other countries around the world are still legal in the U.S. What’s worse is that many food companies have already reformulated their products to be safer for the foreign market, but they continue to sell Americans the “original” versions. [url]
• Olive oil, milk, honey, and saffron are the most commonly adulterated foods. The U.S. Pharmacopeial Convention has created a database of more than a thousand cases of food adulteration from 1980-2010, noting what the foods were mixed with, and providing links to press reports and scientific papers on each case. [url]
• Some people choose to eat organic food because they think it’s more nutritious, but studies seem to suggest that the health benefits are minimal. Buy organic if you have deep pockets, want to avoid ingesting small amounts of pesticides, and want to support more environmentally friendly agriculture, but don’t be fooled into thinking that it’s necessarily more nutritious. [url]

If you’d like to read more awesome and interesting stuff, check out this unrelated (but not entirely random!) Techdirt post via StumbleUpon.

Filed Under: adulterated, food, healthy, ingredients, nutritious, organic

DailyDirt: Happier Meals on The Way

from the urls-we-dig-up dept

Eating healthier has a lot of benefits. And all sorts of food distributors are trying to figure out ways to incorporate healthy snacks into people’s meals… while still keeping profits as high as the usual not-so-healthy snacks. Here are just a few examples.

• McD’s is about to change their Happy Meals by adding some healthier snacks to them. Hmm. Does adding fries to a Healthy Meal make it a Happy Meal? [url]
• Healthier salads are on the way — replacing romaine lettuce with other varieties of greens. Not just healthier, but also more amenable to machine processing, too… [url]
• Folks seem to like baby carrots a lot more than regular carrots… but not carrots cut up into little balls. And don’t advertise carrots as healthy anymore. [url]
• To discover more food-related links, check out what’s floating around in StumbleUpon. [url]

By the way, StumbleUpon can also recommend some good Techdirt articles, too.

Filed Under: carrots, eating, healthy, meals, salads, snacks
Companies: mcdonald's