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!
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.
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 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.
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!
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.
