I really don’t understand this “I don’t have a choice all fast food is bad” some are pretty healthy even if they are less tasty. I think the real discussion is how addictive the trash foods are.
I agree with you, but when you factor in cost, availability, familiarity, and other psychological factors, you end up with people instinctively choosing really unhealthy options.
There's an acculturation issue IMO. I grew up white trash, while my wife grew up wealthy in an Asian household. I cook lots of healthy food, and even wrote a nutrition app before they really existed and hosted it locally, tracked my food, have spent months where I cooked everything I ate from scratch so I knew there was no added salt (I've had hypertension since I was 16yo, even though I was an elite high school athlete with a six pack and everything).
Despite all this, when under time pressure, I will instinctively prep unhealthy food because that's what I was raised with. It's completely mindless. One less thing to stress about, pure muscle memory taking over.
EDIT: My wife, OTOH, will throw stuff together that is so insanely health and based on random vegetables lying around, because that's what she grew up learning to cook.
It's not even conscious. I don't want to prep that food. It just happens because the stress of devoting even one brain cell to planning something that I didn't spend nearly two decades surrounded by just adds to the stress, even after all the deprogramming I've done the two decades since.
That’s a really good point.
You should see the meals I cook: loads of healthy bean-based vegan dishes, salads, etc. But then it's 10pm, I'm thirsty, but my body struggles to tell the difference between thirst and hunger, and I drift over to eat some spicy chips instead of chugging water like I should be. And then I realize what I"m doing.
In grad school, it was really easy to avoid this: every meal, exactly the same thing. Nothing in the pantry except things necessary to make those meals.
But now I'm married and have kids and it's a ridiculous way to expect to have a family, eat the same meals every day for years.
Is Chipotle the same price as a McDonald meal in other areas? Or just mine.
The issue here though is that no place ever subtracts cost as you cut ingredients. Add extra bacon? +$1.75. Subtract bacon? -$0.00. Chipotle prices in you getting a bunch of extras off the bat.
So you end up getting bent over for trying to be health conscious. All the junk is already priced into the cost, so you become the sucker for leaving it out.
I personally cannot eat dairy, so every sandwich I get I still pay for the cheese, and every coffee I get I still have to pay for the oat milk (despite not getting any sugar or pumps or whatever). I could rant a lot about this, as my girlfriend knows well, hah
As another comment mentioned, this particular dish has >2000mg of sodium, the recommended intake is to keep under 1500mg per day.
Based on what, exactly? Japan has one of the highest average lifespans, and the healthiest demographic in this already top-of-the-lifespan-pack nation consume significant amount of white rice, let alone brown.
https://doi.org/10.3389/fnut.2023.1209574
Many foods can become toxic in excessive quantities. That's why it's best to eat a wide variety of different foods and not get too many calories from any one food. Everything in moderation.
You also can wash your rice to remove 90% of arsenic, basically putting it to wheat and other grains levels.