Currently browsing posts about: Calories

Ben & Jerry’s is now owned by Unilever.

Here are its top-ten best-selling flavors:

1. Half Baked: unbaked cookie dough and baked fudge brownies.
2. Cherry Garcia: in the top three since its launch in 1987
3. Chocolate Chip Cookie Dough
4. Chocolate Fudge Brownie: this contains brownies from New York’s Greyston Bakery, which provides jobs and training to low-income people in Yonkers
5. Tonight Dough: Jimmy Fallon’s second flavor; proceeds to SeriousFun Children’s Network
6. Strawberry Cheesecake
7. Phish Food: since 1997
8. Americone Dream: a partnership with Stephen Colbert, whose staff chooses the nonprofit its proceeds go to
9. Chunky Monkey: banana ice cream with fudge chunks and walnuts
10. Brownie Batter Core

Whether or not proceeds go to charity, these are commercial ice creams, and highly caloric, ultra-processed ones at that.

Here, for example, is the ingredient list for a Cherry Garcia.

CREAM, SKIM MILK, LIQUID SUGAR (SUGAR, WATER), WATER, CHERRIES, SUGAR, EGG YOLKS, COCONUT OIL, COCOA (PROCESSED WITH ALKALI), FRUIT AND VEGETABLE CONCENTRATES (COLOR), COCOA POWDER, GUAR GUM, NATURAL FLAVORS, LEMON JUICE CONCENTRATE, CARRAGEENAN, MILK FAT, SOY LECITHIN.

And here’ the Nutrition Facts label for a pint.

The new serving size is 2/3 cup and you get three of those in the container at 340 calories each.  Eat the whole pint and you’ve done half your daily calories along with 78 grams of added sugars (oops).

Half-Baked has even more!

If ever a situation called for moderation, this one is it.

I like potatoes and they have plenty of nutritional value along with their calories, but their calories mainly come from starch—a rapidly digested carbohydrate.

The Harvard Food Pyramid puts potatoes in the “Eat Sparingly” category, right at the top with red meat, butter, and sugary beverages.

Potato industry marketers to the rescue!  Take a look at the website of Potatoes USA, which has as its mission developing marketing campaigns for the industry.

Industry participation is key to making any campaign a success. Here you’ll find marketing tools that will help you promote the positive potato nutrition message.  Find the tools that match your organization, whether you’re looking for resources for retailers, manufacturers, consumers, foodservice operators, or information on potato nutrition.

Here you can find a toolkit on how to market potatoes:

For years we’ve talked about why you can eat potatoes. Now we’re talking about why you should eat potatoes. Getting the whole industry involved is key to getting this message heard. Find the tools you need to support the process with events in your area.

I was interested in what they have to say about nutrition, of course: “Potatoes are more energy-packed than any other popular vegetable and provide the carbohydrates, potassium and energy you need to perform your best.”

The nutrition campaign focuses on energy for performance.  It provides a Nutrition Facts label that reassures you that one 5.3-ounce potato has only 110 calories.

It doesn’t say much—anything, really—about how Americans mostly eat potatoes, which happens to be as fries or chips.

It does provide tons of information about marketing methods, the research sponsored by the potato industry, and even issues regarding international trade—a goldmine if you are interested in this sort of thing.

If you just want to eat them, watch out for the added fats.  The bigger the potato—and the more butter and sour cream—the higher the calories.

Tobacco, alcohol, and opioids are not enough; now we have cookie addiction to contend with?

For this I am indebted to Rija, whom I do not know, but who emailed me this message:

To celebrate National Cookie Day, TOP Data conducted a study and found that American cookie consumption has increased by over 25% during COIVD.  So much so that now 1 in 5 Americans are considered cookie addicts, consuming over 3 cookies per day.

Cookie Day Insights:

1.  Cookie Consumption across the country has risen 20% during COVID
2.  1 in 5 Americans consume 3+ cookies on an average day
3.  Utah leads the nation in cookie consumption
4.  The 7 states that love cookies the least are all in the south

To see where your state ranks check out the full report and infographic.

Who knew that someone was keeping these kinds of statistics.

More than 16 percent of Americans consume 96 or more cookies a month?

One third of Americans has a cookie a day?

How big are those cookies?

Recall: big ones have more sugar and more calories.

I’m all for cookies, but small ones please.

No wonder some people are at high risk for bad outcomes from Covid-19.

I was fascinated to see this article about how offering kids greater amounts and varieties of snack foods encourages them to eat more and, therefore, take in more calories.  Snack variety has a greater effect than just larger package sizes (1).

This article immediately reminded me of the infamous cafeteria diet studies of the late 1980s.  The investigators fed rats all kinds of junk foods and compared the calories they ate to those eaten by control rats allowed only rat chow.  The cafeteria-fed rats ate more (2).

This, of course, is what Kevin Hall and his colleagues found when adults were allowed to eat as much as they wanted of ultraprocessed junk foods (3).

The message is clear: junk food encourages overeating; overeating means taking in more calories; more calories means more weight.  Eating a lot of junk food is a sufficient explanation for obesity.

References

1.  Kerr JA, et al. Child and adult snack food intake in response to manipulated pre-packaged snack item quantity/variety and snack box size: a population-based randomized trial. International Journal of Obesity (2019).
2. Prats E, et al.  Energy intake of rats fed a cafeteria diet.  Physiol Behav. 1989 Feb;45(2):263-72.
3. Hall K, et al.  Ultra-Processed Diets Cause Excess Calorie Intake and Weight Gain: An Inpatient Randomized Controlled Trial of Ad Libitum Food Intake .  Cell Metabolism 2019; 30:67–77.

Kevin Hall at NIH has done a controlled diet study demonstrating that people who consume ultra-processed foods eat more calories—500 more a day (!)—and, therefore, gain weight.

Carlos Monteiro at the University of São Paulo and his colleagues explain how to identify ultra-processed foods.  

They also demonstrate that ultra-processed foods comprise nearly 60 percent of calorie intake.

No surprise.  Calories matter, as Mal Nesheim and I explained in our book Why Calories Count: From Science to Politics (and thanks Kevin for confirming what we wrote in that book).

The clear conclusions of this study have elicited a lot of attention.  Here’s my favorite from Francis Collins, the head of NIH and Kevin Hall’s boss, who also did a blog post:

Examples of media accounts (there were lots more)

• New York Times (this comes with pictures of the two different diets)
• Consumer Reports
• Mother Jones 
• Medical News Today
• NPR
• Center for Science in the Public Interest

I thought this was an April Fool joke, but apparently it’s for real.  According to The Guardian (and many other sources), Burger King will be serving this plant-based meat alternative.

Much has been said in favor of and opposed to the Impossible Burger.

I give Tamar Haspel credit for the most cogent comment:

The Wall Street Journal reports this mind-boggling statistic:  Cheese producers have put 1.4 billion pounds in cold storage in the hope that the market will improve and prices will rise.

Compared to other countries, Americans do not eat much cheese—35 pounds or so per capita per year.

That may be a lot less that the amount consumed in Denmark and other cheese-loving countries, but watch out for the calories: pound of cheese is 1100-1800 calories or more, depending on type.