What 2,000 Calories Looks Like (2014) | Hacker News Reader

What 2,000 Calories Looks Like (2014)

nytimes.com

225 pointssmacktoward213 comments

Man, as someone trying to gain weight, this article was kind of depressing. Sure you can get a ton of calories if you add a bunch of carbs or fat, but do you know how much stuff you have to eat to get a caloric surplus on a protein-based diet, without the addictiveness of carbs? Pretty much any time you think of it, it's time for some milk/peanut butter sandwich/hard-boiled egg/spinach.

I know, I know, first-world problems. But the corollary to "it's so easy to get fat eating junk" is "it's surprisingly hard to get big eating well."

Several people have mentioned trying to follow Dwayne Johnson's diet, and they end up spending all their time (and a substantial amount of their money) preparing chicken and cod.

http://www.muscleandfitness.com/nutrition/meal-plans/smell-w...

The trick is to cook all the food en masse, in one fell swoop, maybe once or twice per week.

The trick is to be a millionaire and hire a personal chef.

Not to mention a plethora of PEDs so you can grow enough muscle to burn all those calories.

And the consistent hours and hours of hard work in the gym. Day in, day out. A lot of which was before he was a millionaire.

Im also pretty sure he does most of his own cooking. The current Mr Olympia, Phil Heath, certainly does.

Diet > Training > Meal timing / cycling etc > Drugs.

> Diet > Training > Meal timing / cycling etc > Drugs

Haha, good joke. You should work for a supplement company. They can always use more people peddling that myth to gullible youth with money to burn.

"Train like Phil, eat like Phil, look like Phil! Just ignore the fact that he's taking enough drugs to kill a small horse, that totally doesn't matter and you WILL achieve the same results if you buy our plans!"

Where did I say that?

Diet and years of training when coupled with the top tier genetics will get a person very far. Even with average genetics it will. My comment was in retaliation to how quickly people overlook the years of grind, dedication and hard graft.

Of course the drugs let guys get past their genetic limit but they should be used only when everything else in on point and has been for years. Hence the heirachy in my post. It's not a duality, plenty of grey there.

If it was all drugs the how come idiots like Boston Llyod are not Mr O?

The Rock looked like he barely lifted prior to becoming famous. You can even find pictures that are clearly post-gyno surgery (clear indication of steroid use) where he still looks more fat than fit.

1. Bostin went overboard with the drugs, but his original transformation proves how easily a good cycle quickly trumps diet + training.

2. Olympia judging is more political than objective. Just look at Sadik's placing in Classic Physique this year if you want crystal clear evidence.

This comment and your other sound like you think drugs are not a big part of the equation, which is totally wrong.

You can take PEDs and barely work out at all and eat junk food all day and you'll make more progress than even the best training/diet regime done with the highest intensity. There are studies that show PEDs and not working out at all resulted in more gains than rigorous training without PEDs.

If I were trying to eat that diet and not break the bank/use all my time I'd invest in 4 things: 1) A ricecooker. 2) A food processor. 3) A sous-vide/vaccum sealer. 4) A Costco membership.

The ricecooker makes rice and keeps it warm all day. The food processor makes quick work of chopping veggies.

You could pack the cod/chicken in vacuum bags and freeze it, and then pop it in the water bath when it's time to eat. The sous-vide means you're not worried about over-cooking/attending to the process so you can do other things while your food cooks.

Costco will sell you high quality cod and chicken at ~$10/lb (probably less in store) and steak around $20/lb. You could similarly buy rice/potatoes/fish oil there in bulk.

Admittedly you're still spending $50+ on food/day, but that's not out of the question for someone earning $150k/year.

That said, it is probably much easier when you're earning $150m/year and can afford a private chef.

Especially when you can write literally all of it off as a business expense as well!

To be fair, Dwayne Johnson is still a much better deal per pound than, say, Justin Bieber.

> Costco will sell you high quality cod and chicken at ~$10/lb (probably less in store) and steak around $20/lb.

Not sure where you're shopping or how much cod costs, but chicken is more like $3/lb ($2.50 on sale, and it can be frozen - and yes whole chicken is cheaper and more flavorful, but you get less protein per pound and it's just easier to compare) for boneless skinless chicken breasts and $5-10/lb for various cuts of steak around here, which makes it much more affordable.

And don't forget the Costco rotisserie chicken! I don't know what the cost/pound comes out to, but considering all the work that goes into cooking it, it's an unbeatable deal. I think it's well known it's a loss leader for them.

Buy several of those for the week, portion them out as you like. throw away the skin to minimize a bit of the sodium, though I'm sure a bit is also in the meat, so for the truly neurotic this maybe a deal breaker.

But if I were trying to just go for low cost, low maintenance protein with some semblance of taste, this would be the way to go ( for me ).

I used this calculator[1] to sum the nutrition in that diet, and here's what I got: http://i.imgur.com/xdQftNY.png

Serving Size 4358 g Amount Per Serving Calories 7,890 Calories from Fat 774 Total Fat 86.0g 132% Saturated Fat 19.2g 96% Trans Fat 0.0g Cholesterol 1330mg 443% Sodium 1835mg 76% Potassium 10461mg 299% Total Carbohydrates 1165.3g 388% Dietary Fiber 55.4g 222% Sugars 44.7g Protein 570.8g Vitamin A 165% Vitamin C 486% Calcium 92% Iron 504% Nutrition Grade A-

I noticed this doesn't include the 60g protein and the 32oz gatorade in the notes at the bottom of his diet.

There's not really anything special in there either, it's basically Meat + Rice/Potato + Vegetable - which is the diet I grew up with and what I would consider typical American diet (although maybe I lived in a bubble).

[1]https://www.caloriecount.com/cc/recipe_analysis.php

Ha that calculator was amusing to play with. Evidently my dinner last night (stir fry that I cooked at home) was 1250ish calories. Good thing I don't need to worry about scurvy!

https://i.imgur.com/oxVBEgi.png

Most people I know get grossed out when I mention this, but one way I saved a bunch of time re: all the chicken I had to eat for my bulking diet was to just buy canned chicken breast in bulk [0].

It's not nearly as gross as you think, and it saves so much time!

[0] http://www.costco.com/Kirkland-Signature%E2%84%A2-Premium-Ch...

What is so hard about throwing 10 chicken breasts into the oven one night a week?

Is there a specific recipe you have in mind? (honest question, I'd love to throw 10 chicken breasts into the oven one night a week)

If you don't want to cook in bulk, a pressure cooker is very easy as well. It takes about 15-20 minutes to build the pressure and cook the chicken, but my own time investment is somewhere around 30-45 seconds.

The chicken does come out moist and tastes awesome, but that goes for the outside as well which I don't mind that much, but you can also toss it on the grill for like 20-30s a side after it's done if you want nice grill marks and a little crispier outside.

There's a lot of prep/clean-up I just don't want to deal with. I've tried this method before, and it just didn't work out.

All the washing of things you have to use in intermediate steps really adds up. And unless you eat chicken breast for every non-breakfast meal, 10 cooked chicken breasts will get gross in the fridge pretty quickly, so you'll probably want to do something like 3 breasts at a time if you're only eating one meal with chicken breasts per day. This means doing meal prep twice in the week, as opposed to once. If you don't refrigerate them, then you have to wait for the breasts to thaw, which is time I don't want to spend every day, multiple times a day potentially.

I have a busy schedule, and every hour counts some weeks, so the time saved after buying canned chicken breast really adds up.

What medical contraindication do you have for carbs, or is this just making life difficult for yourself?

(Conversely, what do you have as a handy low prep widely available lunch in the low-carb world that doesn't involve bread or pasta?)

A few low-prep protein high lunch items include any form of aged, dried, or smoked meat, cheese, hard-boiled eggs, and a number of various nuts.

Could also go for some pemmican, premade or made ahead of time.

I'm currently on a 40% protein, 20% fat, 40% carbs split, which is pretty common for male lifters who trying to lose weight and increase strength at the same time. For a powerlifter, this might be combined with around 40 to 50 heavy sets per week.

The high protein numbers are intended to support muscle protein synthesis. (I could drop to 30% protein according to most studies, though.) The high carb numbers are intended to support muscle glycogen replenishment and still leave me with enough mental energy to actually write code for a living. The low fat numbers are simply because something has to give.

It seems to work. It certainly works much better than my previous macronutrient breakdown, which had less protein and less carbs, and which left my lifts stalled and left me feeling like roadkill.

Anyway, eating a large quantity of lean protein is boring and time consuming. It's easy to blow 2000+ calories on fast food meal, but if you eat 800 calories of lean protein a day, it requires planning and work.

In a pinch, I used to take a bunch of greens (spinach or kale) and dump black beans, salsa and some cheese on top, and throw it in the microwave. For breakfast, I frequently do something similar, by putting a lot of greens, beans, salsa, and cheese on top of eggs in the skillet. Put the lid on it until the cheese melts or the eggs are cooked to your liking.

Leftovers for lunch can be cheap, healthy, delicious and basically no-prep. For a low-carb option I like sauteed Brussel sprouts, green beans and protein (pork or tofu are my preferences); if you have a big skillet you can cook that and something else on the side for 4 meals (dinner and then lunch for you and your dining buddy). You can experiment with seasonings to your liking, and add some variety by picking seasonings (ginger, spices, soy sauce, etc.) from a variety of regional cuisines.

Why are you on a protein-based diet if you are trying to gain weight?

Muscle growth. A controlled calorie surplus with a good macro split of high protein and the rest split into carbs and fats, the % of which depending on goal.

Nope. No reason not to be eating carbs when trying to gain muscle. Yes, you need protein. No, that doesn't mean you can't also eat carbs. In general if you're trying to gain muscle you should be eating quite a bit of carbs (and fat) because the alternative is to make it really hard to eat enough, for no real reason.

Agreed its undoubtedly easier. 40/30/30 or a 40/40/20 etc. Only real reason i can think for OP to do it is part of some form of prep?

So, by most research [1-4], you need unlikely more than 1.8g/kg of body mass. Slightly more if you're _cutting_ weight, and less the more well trained you are. Let's count high (2g/kg) for the sake of argument. I have no idea how big you are, but let's say you weigh 90kg. That's 180g of protein a day.

That's 667g of chicken a day, or less if you combine it with yoghurt, eggs, beans, protein powder, etc. That's ~1050kcal if going just chicken.

That's all the protein you need. If you're gaining, I'm assuming you're aiming for 2500kcal and up. 3000? 4000?

Eating any more protein than that is a waste at best, and kidney stones at worst. Just eat whatever you want on top of getting your protein quota. Carbs aren't great, but some won't hurt you. And you should really go for more fat, and that's very calorie dense.

And just to reiterate: I'm counting very high on protein, it's unlikely you'll use more than 150g a day, if that. And that will significantly decrease the amount of kcal you'll get in the pursuit of protein. Go nuts with the rest.

[1]: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/22150425

[2]: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/19927027

[3]: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/24472635

[4]: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/22935440

On the "Actually dropit, it's quite achievable if you plan for longer than ten minutes into the future" correction---yeah, you're right. It's just cathartic to complain, ha. Thanks for your reply.

Heh, I get it. Anyone should go with what works for them. I sure as hell have tried handfulls of different macros/diets/regiments to see what fits me physically, socially, mentally, timewise. Good luck!

3250 even though im currently injured. This might not end well ;-)

I still follow the 1g per pound even though im aware its too much based on research. Its a habit now. I was just answering in the the context of why high protein in general. Not high protein zero carb. I should have made that clear.

I like what Michael Pollan says. If a food item is being advertised, don't eat it. Not as easy as it sounds but a good goal to strive towards.

In Defense of Food. A 3min video.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=37NHX2iZrBA

Bleh. This is equivalent to saying that you should never eat at restaurants. A menu is literally an advertisement for all the food items.

It's fine if you don't want to eat out, but I would not consider it a "good goal" for most people.

In the video, the context is specifically supermarkets, and the author (Michael Pollan) does qualify his statement with the word "likely" so it isn't universal.

Taken in that context, it's a good rule of thumb. Less advertised food items do tend to be healthier, because they generally require more meal prep and are just raw components.

Fair enough. Taken as a global "never buy advertised food", I'd consider it a poor goal. In the context of the supermarket it mostly means don't buy frozen pizza and other premade food. Which I guess is fine advice in general.

That's literally exactly what the article is saying.

"As you’ll see below, it’s not so hard to eat bountifully and stay under 2,000 calories. It’s just hard to do so at most restaurants."

It's fine if you want to eat out, it's just not the best way to achieve your good weight loss goals.

That message was pretty weak given that they did things like fill out restaurant meals with soda and milkshakes, but for the home cooked stuff they used black coffee and diet soda.

You can totally eat reasonable portions at restaurants. You can lose weight eating at restaurants. Yes, it's probably a bit harder, mostly because you don't fully control the portion sizes, but it's entirely possible. Many restaurants also have reduced calorie menus now.

Yes, you're right on all counts. The article was stacked, and anyone who cares already knows to avoid fries and milkshakes. And it is harder to count when eating out, but it is doable if you pay attention and slowly getting easier over time.

That was a good video, thanks for sharing. Nothing groundbreaking, but nice short presentation on it.

Similar personal experience and communities like https://www.reddit.com/r/ketogains/ make it clear to me what the easiest way to keep your weight optimal is. Personally, I gave up on bulking on low-carb diets. It takes too long, I feel bloated all the time, and it just isn't fun.

Keep up the good fight :)

... first world problems indeed.

I eat 3,000 calories a day with 40% of my calories coming from protein. The key is to do bulk meal prep at the beginning of each week and eat a lot of chicken and seafood. I have two packed lunches for today - one is homemade cashew chicken, and the other one is a homemade turkey sandwich. Supplement that with a couple whey protein shakes throughout the day and you can hit 40% protein easily.

Why 40% in particular? 300 grams of protein per day, every day, sounds incredible (~1.5kg lean meat), is there some science explaining the effects of such amounts of protein?

My actual calorie/macro amounts vary based on whether I am trying to bulk/cut/maintain. Two weeks ago I just finished a cut where I was losing 1.5 lbs/week eating 2200 calories/day and I was at 40% protein. I lost 25 lbs during that time - although probably 80% of the weight I lost was fat, I also lost some muscle and a lot of strength. I imagine my strength loss would have been even worse if my protein wasn't that high.

So right now I'm trying to find my calorie level where I can get back to gaining muscle and this time I'm going to try to gain as little fat as possible. This is extremely hard to do - if you are eating just too little you'll be wasting workouts, and if you are eating just too much you'll find yourself putting on a lot of fat (and then being forced to lose 25 lbs).

So I want to stay as clean as possible while finding my target calorie level. Once I find that level in the next couple of weeks I will dial it back down to 30% protein.

For someone who is bulking, the "street science" says 1 gram of protein per pound of lean body weight is sufficient. So unless the parent weighs 400 lbs, 300 grams of protein is a gross overkill. Your body cannot metabolize that much protein.

Of course, some people are in the "better to have too much protein than too little" camp, which I guess works. But it's not a requirement by any means.

> protein-based diet

Well there's yer problem! Drop the fad diet.

I shouldn't have used that phrase. What I meant was "diet that includes enough protein and vitamins, and has a caloric surplus---which, relative to my prior (terrible) eating habits, is "protein-based."

I've been through plenty of bulks and cuts, and it's very easy to eat a surplus if you don't impose silly limitations on yourself.

My personal preference is to blend the calories and drink them:

    - Milk
    - Oats
    - Peanut butter
    - Banana
    - Whatever else you like (flax seed, whey powder, etc.)

Plenty of calories, good macros, and very easy to consume in large quantities.

The phrase "first world problem" needs to die. It's nothing more than invalidation of real concerns and issues based on poorly calculated relativity, and a very dangerous mentality because it effectively promotes doing poorly to get simple empathy from people.

And people have been worried about getting big without getting weak, fat, or unhealthy for much longer than the first world even existed...

I wonder if there will become a time where globalization has evened out living standards for most of the non-wealthy, and "first world problems" become "modern world problems," and real problems like obesity become taken seriously, instead of derided as a reflection of "poor values."

Buy the biggest slow cooker you can find. Once or twice a week, fill it with huge chunks of meat, onions, parsnips, garlic, salt, pepper, chicken broth and whatever else you like. You now have dinner for most of the week.

This is also a good strategy for people who are time-pressed or who simply don't like to cook.

I love this strategy. One thing that I like about it is that the volume of vegetables you'd reasonably use makes it very difficult to over-eat on. This would be a difficult meal plan to use to gain significant weight.

interesting, how do you store the food so it doesn't go bad? freezer or fridge? air-tight ziplocs or ordinary plastic containers? :)

Chug a whey shake 3-4 times a day ? Unflavored whey in bulk is about as cheap as it gets in terms of protein/$ and it's optimal BV for muscle protein synthesis, extremely fast to prepare and you can add stuff in for flavor/fiber (eg. Cocoa powder and powdered oats)

I don't really pay attention to my macronutrition, beyond just having a general sense for it, but I'm at roughly 3000-4000 kCal daily, before alcohol, which, well, different subject entirely. I'm still at a deficit though, and still losing weight, even though (like you), I'm trying to gain.

That being said, meal planning and grocery shopping are some of my least favorite times of the week. It consumes a ridiculous amount of mental energy. I don't mind the cooking, even though my time is super short, but trying to simultaneous solve for budget + time + calorie ( + extras like "reduce meat consumption") constraints is really very tough.

I generally have a problem with balancing shopping, storing, and cooking time wise. You need to buy the right amount of things, figure out more or less what you're doing to do with them, make sure you don't forget about them, and then hope it doesn't spoil on you in the wrong order.

Then people wonder why many don't like cooking at home, especially with fresh ingredients. I'm a big fan of frozen/canned/packaged stuff for this reason... my chickpeas or soba with tofu never fail me. Or the frozen salmon fillets. But reportedly it's unhealthy.

I keep meaning to sit down and start writing a tool to help me with this, but I keep being too busy with other stuff. If you could combine a nutritionist with awareness of local grocery availability with budget and time (etc) requirements with recipe websites... You'd save me so, so much time and effort planning meals.

Have you tried Soylent?

https://www.soylent.com/

> but do you know how much stuff you have to eat to get a caloric surplus on a protein-based diet, without the addictiveness of carbs? Pretty much any time you think of it, it's time for some milk/peanut butter sandwich/hard-boiled egg/spinach.

Milk is pretty carb heavy.

Peanut butter is mostly fat with a little protein.

Spinach, insofar as it provides calories, is almost entirely carbs.

Except for eggs -- which are still fairly high fat:protein ratio -- those are all odd choices for a "protein-based diet, without the addictiveness of carbs".

If you're on a ketogenic diet then nut butters are your best friend and probably the only thing that would keep a vegetarian from losing their mind.

Carbs are not addictive? Avoid trans and poly-unsaturated fats (including peanut butter), not carbs. Eat fruit, drink orange juice and milk, moderate amount of potatoes, butter, coconut oil, eggs, chocolate, ice cream, jello, pudding, etc. Look into the work of Ray Peat, and you will realize carbs, and especially sugar, are not evil.

One of the things I wonder about is how many calories your body can actually metabolize into fat and glycogen in a given day. For example, if you eat 15,000 calories, how many of those calories will your body just pass right through your digestive tract? I could see liquid calories like pop or juice being metabolized easily, but do all the beans in a Chipotle burrito end up clinging on your thighs and gut also?

your body's ability to metabolize will increase too as you eat more. that's why skinny people who eat massively for a single meal once a week don't really gain weight, it's the regular over eating that does it.

I don't think that's why. Those people would gain weight, but it's hard to "massively overeat" for one week to the tune of "noticeable amount."

You're talking 1 lb, maybe 2 if you really go overboard.

A pound of fat is about 3,500 calories of overeating. Real hard to do that much in one sitting for someone who doesn't do it constantly.

Yes but how much of those calories are you burning off every day ? - you would need 3,500 above your daily burn rate

That's what I meant by "overeating": whatever is beyond what you need to sustain.

3,500 calories of fat, or 30% extra of carbs or protein. protein is also insulinogenic so eating too much fat along with similar amounts of protein will make someone balloon (i.e fried chicken)

Here's a reddit thread that poses the same question:

https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/p1qhc/is_there_...

Similar thread that I thought was pretty interesting:

https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/4ra09i/joey_che...

You really shouldn't worry about the beans clinging to your thighs and gut. Nutritionally, beans are high in protein, have zero fat, and high in fiber. The beans are what will allow you to pass that burrito brick in the future.

> if you eat 15,000 calories, how many of those calories will your body just pass right through your digestive tract?

Depends on how much you're burning, how much you weigh, and how many calories you normally eat. If you're not used to eating that much, you will find it really hard to.

There are loads of videos of average build people trying to eat 8000 or more calories, and at least some end up puking like this guy -- does that count as passing through the digestive tract? ;)

https://youtu.be/jWgsLGJUOc0

> I could see liquid calories like pop or juice being metabolized easily, but do all the beans in a Chipotle burrito end up clinging on your thighs and gut also?

When you eat more than you need in the form of a combination of fats & carbs, since carbs metabolize faster, fats get stored.

A Chipotle burrito is very high on fats, and carbs, and calories. So the answer is that the burrito will hit the thighs or waist almost as easily as juice, but it's not the beans, it's the whole burrito, and specifically the tortilla and cheese, sour cream & guacamole, those are the big ticket items.

A Chipotle burrito is:

  Beans:                      120 cals, 22g carbs
  Tortilla:                   300 cals, 46g carbs
  Cheese + Sour Cream + Guac: 415 cals, 36g fat

http://www.chipotlecaloriecalculator.com

Thanks for the detailed answer!

The reason I asked about beans specifically was because, as I understand it, they're harder to digest. I'm guess the corn I see in the toilet doesn't leave many calories on my stomach either.

Using net carbs (since you don't digest fiber), those beans drop to 12g of carbs. Also don't forget rice:

  Beans:   115 cals, 12g carbs
  Rice:    185 cals, 33g carbs

To be fair, avoiding the fries and shake (or chips and coke or what have you) seems to cut 50% or more of the calories. 760 calories on a burger is a fine portion. Then again, the macro ratio is probably not where you want it if you're counting that sort of thing.

The macros on a burger are actually pretty good. Lots of protein, lots of fat, 30-40 carbs. In-n-Out was one of my post workout go-to's when I was really paying attention to my diet.

The McDouble has been touted as well as a !/$ macro comp [1].

[1]: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/foodanddrink/10210327/McDouble-is...

I'd be careful with that claim. Looking at the nutritional info on the In-N-Out website[0], I wouldn't say the macros are pretty good at all. Let's take the Double Double which clocks in at 670 total calories, a decently sized meal as the parent comment would suggest.

Double Double Total Calories: 670 [520 Protein® Style (lettuce for bun)]

  Fats: 41g (18g from saturated fats) * 9 = 369 calories, ~55% [~68%]
  Carbs: 39g * 4 = 156 calories, ~23% [~7%]
  Protein: 37g * 4 = 148 calories, ~22% [~25%]

For comparison, Cheeseburger Total Calories: 480 [330 Protein® Style]

  Fats: 27g (10g from saturated fats) * 9 = 243 calories, ~50% [~68%]
  Carbs: 39g * 4 = 156 calories, ~32% [~13%]
  Protein: 22g (a normal Hamburger is only 16g) * 4 = 88   calories, ~18% [~22%, total calories using my crude calculations adds up to 341]

Now, I realize arguing about ratios is about as good as arguing about editors, but, for bulking, I'd rather scarf down some milk and I still think that's a tad extreme (its ratios come to about 30% fat/45% carbs/25% protein even at a quarter gallon for a comparable 632 calories)[1][2]. As for cutting to preserve lean mass, it's definitely not something you can easily put into your day without some prior planning or fallback options. Personally a Double Double would put me at only slightly north of 1kcal allowance on a cut, and I'd need to get another >~100g protein to come near my goals. Obviously I'm not saying someone can't enjoy a burger every so often, but I wouldn't suggest they compose model macros for most purposes.

0: http://www.in-n-out.com/nutrition.aspx

1: https://fitness.stackexchange.com/questions/3967/weight-gain...

2: http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=1/4+gallon+milk

tldr: amateur bodybuilder (me) doesn't think fast-food burgers are particularly great on their own, even for gaining mass. If you're a non-bodybuilder/don't care about macros, just watch the sodium and saturated fats if anything.

It depends on your diet goals. For me the 7% carbs was the attractive part.

You specified the "30-40[g] carbs", which is the proper, bunned burger (as opposed to the 11g carbs on the lettuce version). I realize I am being a jerk, but I don't want people to walk away from reading comments like this convinced that a burger can be a staple of their diet without some scrutiny. I'm in CA and in particular I have talked with enough people who believe that because they chose In-n-Out over whatever other franchise that they are "eating healthy".

Who said anything about protein style? 40g of carbs is 40g of carbs, which is a totally healthy amount for a meal.

Anyways, the point was that a hamburger can totally be a part of a healthy diet and it's the fries/soda/shake that get you.

Edit: ah I see, I misread the chart. Still, a quick burger is a convenient option even if you're watching calorie intake.

> 760 calories on a burger is a fine portion.

Depends; most people should not be eating 2000 calories a day, because most people don't burn anywhere near that many calories a day with activity.

You don't burn most of your calories with activity. You burn them by existing. The average male gets pretty close to 2k calories consumed a day with no activity, depending on their height.

> Depends; most people should not be eating 2000 calories a day, because most people don't burn anywhere near that many calories a day with activity.

I think the averages are about 1500 for women and 1650 for men even before activity (that is, just basal metabolic rate). +500kcal/day from activity isn't a huge amount.

I run about 2300 kcal/day BMR (I'm, well, not a small guy), and average somewhere around 3500 kcal/day total, and I'm not super active.

> I think the averages are about 1500 for women and 1650 for men even before activity (that is, just basal metabolic rate). +500kcal/day from activity isn't a huge amount.

That's the average, which means many people are below that average. And even if you consistently eat 2000 calories and burn 1650, you'll steadily gain weight. A large number of people are almost completely sedentary.

1650 sounds catastrophically low for male, where did you get that number from? I'm seeing as high as 2500 on some websites for a sedentary male...

Not a great source but: http://www.webmd.com/diet/features/estimated-calorie-require...

> 1650 sounds catastrophically low for male

Its a BMR number, not a daily requirement. That's basically what you'd burn if you didn't move a voluntary muscle all day. Even a sedentary lifestyle gets you several hundred kcal/day above that; that was my point. Yes, it would be a catastrophically low consumption number for even a typical "sedentary" lifestyle.

> I'm seeing as high as 2500 on some websites for a sedentary male...

That may be a little high, but is probably about in the ballpark.

Look at the chart again: the common denominator for all the worst foods there is refined wheat. Take a look at the pasta dish!

Having said that, a food's glycemic index is also a factor. You could feed the big steak in that photo to a diabetic, no problem at all. You'll be digesting that steak for the rest of your day.

The bag of chips on the other hand, well you might as well use a syringe and inject the sugar right into your arteries.

Many of the foods shown have little to no wheat in them. The common factors are high fat and huge portions. Fats are not bad for you but they do make it easier to overconsume because they are more calorie dense. Huge portions are also not strictly bad for you because you could just not eat it all, but the reality is that bigger portions lead to overeating.

That pasta dish is just entirely too much food. It's fried chicken and creamy sauce and yes a lot of pasta.

As far as I can see, almost all the foods that don't have wheat have sugar, which I assumed everyone knows is bad. The remaining five "bad" dishes are potato-based, which is another starch (ie: sugar)

So basically you're anti-carb. You started with the claim that "the common denominator for all the worst foods there is refined wheat" and now you're dragging in potatoes and sugar. If you're anti-carb, that's fine I guess, but it's utterly irrelevant to why these meals are "bad". They're bad because they are too many calories.

Wheat is a minor component of almost all of them. There's nearly as many calories in the chips and guac from Chipotle as in the burrito. Even in the flour tortilla, nearly a third of the calories are actually from fat (and it's only 300 calories total). In the steak and martini from Ruth's Chris, there's no wheat, no sugar, no starch at all. It's still 2000 calories and a third of that from fat. In that absurd milkshake from Sonic, there's no wheat. More than half the calories are from the fat, which is pretty impressive considering how much sugar is in it. Even that pasta from the Cheesecake Factory has over a third of its calories from fat. I find it amazing that even the IHOP breakfast has more than half its calories from fat, considering it literally has a pile of wheat in the form of pancakes.

The idea that refined wheat could somehow be responsible for the caloric excess of most of these dishes is absurd. Most have little or no wheat. They all have too many calories.

> They all have too many calories.

Agreed.

Eating too much, and consuming sugar, are real problems. I like to bring up starch because so many people underestimate how many calories are in starchy foods.

That said, I overstated my point.

Chips is by no means good, but the soda and milk and shakes are all much worse. The insulinemic index of milk is kind of ridiculous [1], and also why the GOMAD diet (gallon of milk a day) is really effective at building on mass. By no means would I suggest that as healthy though, for obvious reasons.

[1]: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/11451723

I don't mean to suggest that refined wheat is any worse than sugar, but rather that it's not much different.

The Sonic 2000 calorie single shake is pretty nuts. I can imagine someone pairing it with a 2000+ calorie meal and not thinking they're slamming nearly 5k calories into their bodies. Although I suppose someone who drinking half a gallon of milkshake with a meal probably doesn't care.

Also personally I could eat 2 burgers at shake shack with fries. Such a fatty :<

I don't think that's really a big problem if it's occasional. Once you're doing that a couple times a week is when it adds up.

If you can consume this and not feel sick afterwards, your diet is already fucked up.

Many, many animals evolved in this fashion. Any animal that hunts.

I don't think you should have a digestion problem after ingesting 4k calories.

Indeed. There used to be a lot more people with heavy manual jobs for whom eating 4k at a sitting was a very regular event. But they've mostly been automated away.

Yeah, but the way you're getting the calories matters. There's nothing similar about metabolizing 4000 calories worth of raw meat vs. metabolizing an enormous milkshake.

Doing that even once a week with a regular diet the rest of the time, someone could gain 35+ pounds per year.

Agreed, 19k calories per week vs 14k calories, say. That's a 35% increase. One would have to plan and follow their daily calorie intake very well to be able to consume that milkshake regularly...

I was once addicted to venti java chip frappuccinos. i'd have them every day (sometimes 2) which is one of my low points. So just went back to compare and that's just 500 calories!

https://www.caloriecount.com/calories-starbucks-coffee-java-...

Kudos to Sonic for squeezing 4 times more into similar size cup. That thing must taste like a pinnacle of our culinary achievement.

Cinnabon rolls used to have ~1,800 calories, though I think they've dialed it back to 900 now. The smell is 0 calories at least.

Shakes are very good for exactly that. When I was recovering from anorexia, I got a large milkshake every night. Milkshakes are really, really easy ways to get enormous amounts of calories into yourself.

I spent so much of my life trying to make rent that some part of me read the article backwards - looking for the densest meals for the buck. Burger Kings seems like a pretty good value in a pinch. If eating out triggered the obesity epidemic, then working long hours for poverty wages (or cost of living outpacing incomes) surely exacerbated things.

I find that restaurants listing calories on their menus can make it harder for me to watch what I eat for just this reason. I see a 600 calorie meal for $10 and a 1000 calorie meal for $10 and I feel like I'm getting a bad deal if I don't take the second one. Intellectually I know that I have no trouble affording it either way and regulating my intake is much more important for me, but it can be tough to overcome.

I've been using variations on the following smoothie recipe for years. Works great for nutrition, energy, and is really easy to make.

As an added bonus, for focused work, it's really easy to sip while coding and doesn't require those flow-busting lunch or snack breaks.

  1 can coconut milk/cream (thick) - 920 calories
  1 c plain coconut milk - 45 calories
  1 banana - 105 calories
  1 c blueberries - 85 calories
  2 c plain yogurt - 300 calories
  2x scoop whey protein - 220 calories
  2x serving 100% baking chocolate - 160 calories
  2c spinach - 14 calories
  2-3 tomato - ~60 calories
  Total: 1909 calories

So that (and probably water) is all you'd eat and drink in a single day?

Sometimes. I usually have 3-4 eggs in butter along with some more veggies. If I'm active, then a handful of nuts or two. Occasionally (due to cost) some grass fed ground beef stir fried in avocado oil.

The smoothie counts for breakfast and lunch. The eggs, for dinner, take ~5 minutes to make. All simple, easy, healthy foods.

1909 calories is going to be a caloric deficit for most people in the West

but what about flow busting toilet breaks?

YMMV. One could argue that's just compounded flow ;)

My body conveniently schedules those breaks at the very ends of the day. Rarely an issue.

Different strokes for different folks but 'flow busting' is exactly the point of lunch breaks, to get you away from your screen and desk for a while.

There's no virtue in overworking.

Breaks are good, yes, but I prefer to decide on them based on the rhythms of my work, not the demands of my belly. I still take breaks, but when _I_ want to.

At home we picked diet soda and water to drink? Why didn't we do that when we were out?

Indeed. I do sometimes get a milkshake or an alcoholic drink, but most of the time I just drink water at restaurants.

At home I make beverages with stevia and erythritol sweeteners. When I go out, about everything non-caloric is sweetened with aspartame, sucralose, and acesulfame-potassium.

Also, I don't like kola-flavored or caffeinated beverages, and very often the only "diet" option is a cola.

Because of that, I either drink water or the HFCS-sweetened beverages when I'm out. Some restaurants get snotty when you order water. That's probably because fountain drinks are a huge profit center, and corporate accounting leans on managers, who in turn lean on line employees, whenever the break-even or loss-leading entrees outnumber fountain-drink cups by too wide a margin.

Yeah, drinkable desserts (soda, milk/ice cream drinks) seemed to be best intersection between "easy to address" and "removing would cause a major calorie reduction" in their fast food picks. The food portions wouldn't have looked quite so small if they'd bumped those up to account for cutting that crap.

Then again maybe they were going for the typical order, which I'm sure does include a giant soda or shake.

The results at starbucks really make me think that we should mandate visible calorie counts for food establishments. No need to regulate calories directly, just inform people about what they're eating and let behavior follow.

I fully agree. I've found this to be quite common in NYC now which has already had positive impacts for me. For example, just yesterday a friend wanted to grab a smoothie and after looking at the caloric values, I ended up making a selection that had at least half the calories I would have consumed had I just gone by ingredient listing alone. Smoothies can be deceptive!

They'd need to be accurate labels though.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hE2lna5Wxuo

Most overweight people I know are keenly aware of how many calories they're consuming, they just can't help themselves.

I don't know how someone can drink a extra large milkshake without feeling like they just dropped a bomb on their digestive system.

When it comes down to it, you need to be in tune with your body. If you need a nutrition label to know whether or not you're feeding yourself right, you're already in trouble.

We're already doing it in many places, it's mandated by the FDA for certain establishments like McDonald's. And all we hear about is Americans getting fatter and fatter. So maybe we could chill with the paternalism? When I moved out of the house I was done with having parents tell me what to do.

If a piece of information is telling you what to do that's your own problem. Other people may actually prefer it when they have are able to make informed decisions.

In the 80s and 90s they used to sell little paperback books that contained all the calorie information for all the popular chains in the US. People who wanted to be informed bought them.

Now you have the internet. There's literally no excuse. If you want that information you can pull out your smartphone and look it up, right there, standing in the line.

If you are a restaurant owner, it's just one more choice that's been taken away from you - what you want to put on your signs. You may think it's trivial, but it adds up. These choices are never ours to make again.

Although you could google calorie counts in every meal you buy, the vast majority of people don't because of a) it would be tedious b) our body is telling us to eat calories and resisting the urge to think too much about what we are eating and c) everyone else would think you were a bit weird when you were looking up calories instead of having a conversation.

As a customer you don't get a choice whether or not you get exposed to a lot of intrusive advertising encouraging you to eat more (at least in your McDonald's example). It seems to me this is in a small way redressing that balance.

In purely pragmatic terms you are balancing the health of the population (heart attacks, strokes, mental state quality) against the right of a multinational restaurant chain to be slightly more profitable. I think it is well worth it. There are far more egregious abuses of personal liberty you could complain about.

This is just utter baloney. The information exists. You can get it before you leave the house. Standing in line was just an example of how absurdly easy it is.

Enough with treating the population like babies.

This isn't even going to have any effect! And it would still be wrong to do even if it made everyone skinny.

This argument borders on the absurd. Government/voters have regulated commerce since the inception of the United States. You benefit from plenty of regulation mandating additional information. A decade ago, airlines weren't required to include additional fees in their advertised prices. Now they are. I find it bizarre that requiring companies engaged in interstate commerce to provide information germane to the business transaction to be babying consumers.

If we as HN commenters praise a reduction of 1 second of latency for an RPC call to a microservice, surely reducing the latency for consumers standing in line by 5 minutes is laudable! Especially because of the low burden by fast food owners!

If you want to discuss some other encroachment of liberty by the government, feel free. But this proposal in isolation is reasonable.

If you don't think this is going to have an effect, the cost of this is that calories are going to be presented on a menu which customers can choose to look at or not. I am genuinely bemused as to why anyone would find this offensive.

Do you think alcoholic drinks should be labelled with the percentage of alcohol contained? Should food be labelled with the ingredients? Should you be allowed to know if your food contains nuts? And so on.

Alcoholic drinks aren't universally labeled, and even when they are the value is dubious. You can see a proof number on liquor bottles but that tells you nothing about its effects on your physiology. You still have to educate yourself.

You can argue a compelling interest for labeling food allergens, because they can kill people almost immediately. Calories can't.

> In the 80s and 90s they used to sell little paperback books that contained all the calorie information for all the popular chains in the US.

How well did that work?

Today more than a third of Americans are obese.

It worked well for the people that cared to use the information.

A third of Americans are obese. You know what will fix that? A pill that reverses obesity. Invent that and I promise you every obese person will take it. Nobody likes being fat. Until that day, all these other "solutions" are just authoritarian feel-good nonsense.

And you assume everyone has access to a smartphone? Here is a newsflash: they don't. Actually the people who need this info the most often don't have access to a smartphone. Can you guess who these people are?

Go to the public library. Get a piece of paper and a pencil. Look up info on internet. Write it down. Ask librarian if you need help.

The FDA already has some mandates[1]. Using your example, Starbucks falls under those mandates, and if you look at the Starbucks menu at their stores they do contain the calories of the drinks.

The real problem is that often times the calories listed are not 100% accurate.

[1] http://www.fda.gov/Food/IngredientsPackagingLabeling/Labelin...

Casey Neistat made a fun little video[1] that explores this a bit. Without spoilers, it was a bit surprising just how off some of the food is.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hE2lna5Wxuo

Saw that a while back. It is pretty interesting how off most were. Makes you wonder about all foods.

This is a fairly biased article.

It is possible to have a healthy calorie consumption with fast food. During college, I was able to compete in a natural bodybuilding competition by mostly eating like this.

It's all about what you choose to eat. No matter where you are.

Yeah, the fact that they included a zero-calorie soda and black coffee in the "home" meal is so heavy handed. They could've included a diet soda in any of the other meals, but they didn't.

How insulting. The author has neither respect for their readers, nor apparently belief that their editorial thesis stands on its own merits.

Most things on the dollar menu are 300 to 400 calories. 3 meals with 2 items and you're hitting around 2k calories while only spending $6 a day. Just need to give up the soda and the snacks.

Seriously. I don't think I could even eat a whole Chipotle burrito and also guacamole and chips. Chipotle has a lot of filling lunches under 500 calories. My go tos when I was young was a salad with chicken, guacamole, cheese, and salsa. The soft tacos with just meat, veggies, and cheese also keep you under 500.

The article reminds me why I'm always pretty skeptical of the "eat good food" angle. The TV dinner generation (1950s-1980s) didn't have the same problem with obesity. My pet theory is "calorie inflation." Coffee and a donut for breakfast isn't "good food" but it's probably 250-300 calories. A Starbucks latte and pastry is easily double that.

> The TV dinner generation (1950s-1980s) didn't have the same problem with obesity.

Subsidizing corn -> way too much corn -> dirt cheap sugar (HFCS) is a fairly new problem. Today's processed food contains too much sugar, because it's the cheapest way to add some taste.

The "low fat" and "no fat" variations, where fat is often replaced by sugar, also made things much worse.

Be interested to see the same article for the UK.

How a fry up measure up? 5 pints and a kebab?

I hate to think what some of our culinary "specialities" here in Scotland would come out as?

Deep fried battered pizza?

Deep fried battered white puddings?

[NB A white pudding is pretty much a savoury porridge sausage].

Butteries - which are basically 140% fat. (And delicious).

I'm now wondering if anyone has tried deep fried battered butteries....

Not a buttery, but there is https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deep-fried_butter

All washed down with larger and fags. Isn't there a part of Glasgow where life expectancy is 54?

s/larger/buckie/

Calton: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Calton,_Glasgow

I thought Scots were supposed to drink Irn Bru or whisky with everything.

I'm fond of a "munchy box", eaten over the course of two days. The buttery is lovely, it's basically an all butter croissant that someone couldn't be bothered to roll up.

"I'm on a diet, hold the kebab"

I was interested too.

A large breakfast at Wetherspoons ("Two fried eggs, bacon, two sausages, baked beans, three hash browns, mushroom, tomato, two slices of toast") is 1530 calories - probably bigger than your average fry up though.

Kebabs are quite variable... 5 pints of ale + a really crappy fatty doner could be over 3000 calories. 5 pints of lager + shish kebab might be just under 1000 calories.

I don't know if fast food is really a problem per se. Getting a lot of calories from a restaurant visit is quite expected. That's why you do it occasionally and it's often your entire meal for the day. Like the article says, whether it's a fancy steakhouse or Burger King doesn't really matter. And fancy steakhouses existed for a while, though.

I do, though, think that the US has a problem with portion sizes. A lot of the time, any given meal is just way too large for me. I just don't really like to eat that much per sitting and sometimes I can get filled up on appetizers and I really wish there were smaller portion options in addition to the larger portion options at more places and I wouldn't waste money by plain not being able to finish the food. Especially if I would have been perfectly happy being able to have a small plate, then a small desert, and a drink, instead of one giant plate that leaves room for nothing else.

Having a somewhat warped portion size may mess with peoples' heads, especially those who want to get the most for their money. It doesn't help that the bigger portions are often only marginally more expensive. Even worse for women and children, who should be eating less in general.

That being said, I'm not really convinced the obesity epidemic is not a consequence of the average human syndrome and mental health issues and that the fast food industry isn't simply capitalizing on that as opposed to causing it. I think counting calories and lamenting how people are not doing this or that is missing the point.

> and it's often your entire meal for the day.

I don't know anyone who only eats one meal on days they go to restaurants. For most people, going to a restaurant for a meal simply means they eat more in total that day.

> I do, though, think that the US has a problem with portion sizes. ... I really wish there were smaller portion options in addition to the larger portion options at more places and I wouldn't waste money by plain not being able to finish the food.

The problem is that it's not much cheaper to serve smaller portions. That's why when restaurants have half portions they still cost 75+% of the bigger portion. As you noted, people want to "get their money's worth", so restaurants give them absurdly large portions rather than charge 20% less for half as much food and have patrons complain about getting so little food.

Well, you know at least one person now. Eating a lot less or not at all on restaurant day has always been fairly normal for me and my family. I just won't really enjoy a big lunch much if I already had breakfast. But that is if I don't exercise, if I do, the restaurant meal may not actually fill up the entire day. People who can eat one large meal in a day are likely correlated with people who exercise, which means, on average, they won't end up eating just one meal a day because they'd end up under their calorie intake and because it's actually non-trivial to stuff that many calories into yourself at that point.

> For most people, going to a restaurant for a meal simply means they eat more in total that day.

Most people (in the US, at least) are also obese, bringing them up in this context doesn't prove much.

> The problem is that it's not much cheaper to serve smaller portions.

It may not be cheaper to serve smaller portions, but other countries seem to manage it just fine. That's not a good enough reason. It seems more culture bound than business bound.

> Well, you know at least one person now. Eating a lot less or not at all on restaurant day has always been fairly normal for me and my family.

I think this is pretty abnormal. Even when I lived in Germany I didn't observe this behavior.

It's fine if you do this. In fact it's probably good. It's just not common. If it were common, huge restaurant meals wouldn't be an issue. (And actually, if you do this I'm not sure why you're complaining about the big meals.)

> Most people (in the US, at least) are also obese, bringing them up in this context doesn't prove much.

I'm not sure what you think I'm trying to "prove". I was responding to your broad statement that a restaurant meal tends supplant other food for the day.

Given that we're talking about American restaurants and enormous American portions, I think the context of how Americans eat is extremely relevant.

> It may not be cheaper to serve smaller portions, but other countries seem to manage it just fine. That's not a good enough reason. It seems more culture bound than business bound.

It's quite obviously a cultural consideration. That doesn't mean it isn't a business consideration as well. If your customers' expectations are that a $20 meal has enough calories for a day and you're serving half as much food for the same price, you're likely to have trouble staying in business because your customers think you're ripping them off.

Shameless plug for anyone interested: I have a (German) healthy-food channel on YouTube https://www.youtube.com/user/CookedAndShredded/videos

No processed foods used. No supplements. Just real food.

if you eat like this 3 meals a day is probably too much. your BMR is covered by a single meal.

subway does look like 2.5 meals tho.

Yes. We all know (and the article starts out saying) most adults need 2000 calories a day.

But then we see pictures of what most would consider one meal, and since we have 2 - 3 meals a day, eating any of these actually leaves you with 4000 - 6000 calories a day.

Wouldn't it have been more instructive if this article showed pictures of meals that were 700 - 1000 calories?

It looks like the really had to try hard to get that Chipotle burrito to fit into the 2000 cal. I've never seen a Chipotle burrito that small.

I'd be interested to see the results of independent lab testing to see what the actual calorie values are. Some companies consistently under-report calories.

What is not obvious from some of the photos (in particular the Cheesecake factory chicken) is how big the portion sizes are.

I clicked the link just to see if it would be an article about Soylent, since it comes in 2000-calorie pouches.

or you could have 5 Soylents. Problem solved.

Off topic - Paywall link? [Also not working for me in incognito mode - and can't remember the last time I deliberately click on a nytimes link] and the web link doesn't work?

I'll answer for them. None. It's just another fad diet, no less ridiculous than any other.

Except for the long, long, long history of well established medical benefits from cutting out carbs. http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/mind-guest-blog/the-fat-...

Besides the plain fact that you can't "answer for [someone else]" when the question is about their body's reaction to certain things.

I personally don't deal with carbs well, which is probably related to the diabetes that runs rampant through my family despite myself not having it.

You know how there are probably foods that you like that others don't? Or that others like and you don't? Some people simply don't like consuming carbohydrates. Not because they have any disease (real nor imagined), but simply because they don't like it.

It seems like you take a personal affront to people eating how they prefer to eat. Could I ask why you care?

Historically speaking, in fact, the uber carb-rich diets that dominate developed western culture is the real fad. Never before have humans ingested carbohydrates in the proportion that your average American does today.

> Although dairy products, cereals, refined sugars, refined vegetable oils, and alcohol make up 72.1% of the total daily energy consumed by all people in the United States, these types of foods would have contributed little or none of the energy in the typical preagricultural hominin diet (20). Additionally, mixtures of foods listed in Table 1⇓ make up the ubiquitous processed foods (eg, cookies, cake, bakery foods, breakfast cereals, bagels, rolls, muffins, crackers, chips, snack foods, pizza, soft drinks, candy, ice cream, condiments, and salad dressings) that dominate the typical US diet.

http://m.ajcn.nutrition.org/content/81/2/341.full

From that blog, "While promising, large-scale placebo-controlled clinical trials in patients with neurological disorders are still lacking."

That's the opposite of "well established medical benefits", and is more in line with, "Lots of gaps to find your god in!"

http://www.nature.com/ejcn/journal/v67/n8/full/ejcn2013116a....

Strong evidence of therapeutic effects for: Epilesy, Type 2 diabetes, weight loss, cardiovascular disease

Emerging evidence for: acne, cancer, PCOS, MS, Alzheimer's, Parkinson's

An example of the "strong evidence" being cited in that tome.

http://press.endocrine.org/doi/10.1210/jc.2002-021480

Nutrition research a is a joke, and with 53 subjects it's easy to see where the punchline is.

Oh, so you're one those people who believes low n means a study is meaningless. Not sure why you even bother looking up the studies if that's how you're going to attempt to understand them.

I'm one of those people who doesn't think they constitute, "Strong evidence", but rather a good starting point for a more telling study.

> It seems like you take a personal affront to people eating how they prefer to eat. Could I ask why you care?

You're probably reading too much into my comment. However—to answer your question—the overwhelming evidence of every large-scale, forward-looking nutrition study points to the consumption of complex carbohydrates (in the form of whole grains, legumes, and tubers) as the staple of a healthy diet.

We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12606335 and marked it off-topic.

2000 calories is a lot, I try to limit myself around 1000 / day. This is no way a golden rule, I just figured it out a few years ago. I'm pretty much done with eating for the day with a tactical kebab from the turkish guys.

Off: why is this on the front page? Anyone else hungry? :)

1000 calories of what? are you sure you're not counting 1000 and getting the rest in hidden calories?

Energy :) I know not all calories are made equal, but I really don't care, I mix meat + vegetables + various carbon hydrates.

I get most of the extra calories via alcohol, beer mostly.

oh, I see. the "make room for alcohol" diet :)

Unless you are female and tiny and engage in no physical activity whatsoever that's a dangerously low calorie intake.

You're probably not counting your calories right...

Male, ~85kg, and yes, little physical activity other than typing :) 1000 is fine, really. I had two coffees today, and some pasta + pesto, I think I'm still below 1000.

http://imgur.com/a/ayFgF

That's decidedly not fine. It's beyond any arguable definition of "fine". A normal average size male should not be subsisting on 1k calories.

The thing you're linking says you need 2k to maintain weight... you're claiming to eat half of that and still maintain weight? Then you are not counting your calories right, plain and simple.

Don't exaggerate :) 85kg is too much for my height. I never said I want to maintain weight and I consume around 1000, but probably 1200 - 1400 on average. 800 if I have hangover :)

Turkish guy here :)

I eat around 1300 calories a day. Lost 50kg (110 lbs) in 9 months doing that. 1000/day is too freaking low to be able to function properly.

Why isn't there an outcry to regulate the fast food industry to prevent this kind of thing from happening? This is one of the biggest issues in North America.

The easy and obvious first target would be a sugar tax on large serving sodas. That doesn't seem to be so popular in the US for some reason.

not only on large serving sodas, there is sugar in %80 of stuff you can buy in supermarkets !!!!

But if we can't even tax large serving sodas there's no hope of taxing anything else.

They're the best example of empty pointless calories, and safe alternatives (water, sugar free sodas) already exist.

It would be more effective and efficient to just put a tax right on sugar commodities.

Add something like a 30% tax with the intention of driving the price up.

Yep. Just tax the sugar and most of the problems go away. It sounds too simple to be true, but I think it could be true.

Imposing any tax (or subsidy) with a primary purpose of changing public behavior is not acceptable to me. It's arrogant and patronizing, and turns what would otherwise be objective facts into topics for lobbying and political debate.

If you want to sway people, do it with information, not by charging them extra for doing what is wrong in your opinion.

While I would never support a "sugary foods" consumer tax, I might support a uniform tax on the purchase price of all restaurant foods, that would specifically support objective dietary and nutrition science, public education campaigns on how to obtain nutritious meals at any income level, publicly queryable tracking of food items from farms to tables, random testing of restaurant foods as served to the end-consumer, and more effective nutrition labels for prepackaged foods and restaurant menu items.

If you fund objective research on what people should eat (and why) by taxing what they do eat, the information alone should be sufficient to help people choose healthier meals on their own, rather than by twisting their arms with existing biases and assumptions.

I personally believe (without objective data to back it up) that excessive dietary sugars, particularly those containing fructose, are the most blameworthy single factor for American obesity, and that this is due in part to steep import tariffs on foreign-produced crystalline sucrose, farming subsidies and favors to domestic corn, beet, and cane producers, the price differential between high-fructose corn syrup and crystalline sucrose, the weakly-supported demonization of dietary fats, and the slow decline of real median-household purchasing power since the 1970s. In other words, we got to where we are now by pushing people around with overly-specific taxation and politically-influenced dietary recommendations.

The same reason there isn't a cry for stapler companies to stop making staplers that staple fingers. This stuff is fine if you don't jam it in your mouth every other day.

Nobody looks at the underside of everything they ever eat. One might look at the biggest stuff, if that, and a hamburger at 400 kcal looks pretty reasonable. I had no idea other products added so many calories. This article was quite an eye opener for me.

While your comparison might be technically true, people don't quite notice calories the same way as they notice a staple in their fingers.

>Nobody looks at the underside of everything they ever eat.

Speak for yourself. I learned way back in high school that fries were almost as damaging as the burger. Now that all the calorie counts are right in your face on the container and the menu at fast food places, I don't know how you could not know what you were eating.

For one thing, I want to have these options when I want pig out at a fast food restaurant. I'd rather regulate myself.

I don't know that we need more regulation (NYC already has the portion cap for soft drinks). But what about subsidies for carrots, lettuce, celery and tomatoes? That might help nudge things a bit.

Tomatoes are deceptively sugar heavy, because biologically they are fruits not vegetables, but I agree subsidizing lower-calories would be a good idea.

How would subsidizing vegetables get more people to eat them? They're already super cheap.

My problem is the bulk sizes. I always end up throwing more than half away because they're sold in so big packs. They're really cheap, but I just don't like throwing food away, so I don't buy it. It's perfectly irrational, but hard to change.

There has been such an outcry, which is why restaurants that operate at scale in the U.S. are now required to post calorie counts on their menus. And the article notes there is some evidence that this has impacted the choices people make.

If you get a chance, spend some time at a McDonalds watching people order. A lot of people eat off the dollar/value menu, which offers 300-400 calorie sandwiches for $1-2. Even if someone orders two McDoubles, they're only having 800 calories and the macronutrient balance isn't bad.

Another innovation that's probably helping is the Coke "freestyle" machine that has hundreds of combinations. "Low/no calorie soda" is a prominent top-level menu item and it has many, many more diet soda and sports drink options than classic soda fountains, which often only have Diet Coke or Diet Pepsi. Sadly, I don't have statistics in front of me, but based on my observations, this encourages people to choose diet soda more often.

The popularity of the Chipotle burrito bowl/salad is another encouraging trend. I don't have any statistics for this either, but I've observed that once people learn about fajita burrito bowls (no wrap, peppers instead of rice) they order it fairly often. This is a very reasonable meal and healthier than a lot of home-cooked food. A low percentage of Chipotle customers buy side orders of chips.

That said, there are still plenty of people ordering ridiculous meals. Reducing portions doesn't stop hungry people from ordering extra food, dessert with their lunch, and so on. Americans will have to change their tastes, reducing demand for junk food, in order to become healthier.

I eat burger and other fast food about once a month and would be pissed of that's taken from me. What we need is better education and marketing not a ration on sugar.

Regulation isn't the answer, for the same reasons I wouldn't support prohibition.

What is necessary is information and education. Start by forcing these companies to accurately label all of their meals with calorie counts and macros.

a government grant for healthier outlets is the way to go.

What makes you think anyone wants to eat that stuff? All these places listed already have things you can order that come in at far less than 2,000 calories. If people aren't already doing that, they're certainly not going to go eat some crappy little salad with no dressing at Panera.

Maybe people actually want to eat the giant burrito.

Plenty of fast food places accurately label calorie counts right now. If I walk into a McDonald's or a Subway, I'm going to have a pretty good idea of how many calories are in a thing from looking at the menu.

It doesn't have quite the impact on most you might think.

The best thing would be to ask overweight people to pay higher health insurance premiums.

We would have healthy, good-looking population in no time :-)

Many US health insurance plans already give premium discounts to members who maintain their BMI or waist ratio below a certain limit.

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