Posted 05/07/2013:
(Continued from part two)
The little dipping dish of hummus is hard to resist, and some days almost half of it disappears before my wife puts the corn chips away. In that innocuous looking little dish lies seventy grams of fat (some brands). Let’s see, the brownies tally up to thirty five grams, and to that must be added another thirty five grams for the hummus, leaving ten grams to spare. But wait – the corn chips have been left out of the calculation!
Sorry to say, the corn chips have pushed us over the dietary cliff. Done day after day, this sort of diet would cause calamity, methinks. I can’t say that with the confidence of surety but I can surely think that it’s possible.
A walk through the grocery can be a real eye opener, if you take the time to look at the fat content percentages listed on the labels of the food packages. In the way of premade meals (another thing America has been programmed to consume) – it is not uncommon to see fifteen grams of fat printed on the package label for a single small tray! At the high end of the spectrum, certain brands of pot pies contain 35 grams of fat in a single (small) pie.
Soybean oil seems to be ubiquitous on grocery labels, and it drives the fat content upwards in every place it’s used. If the label says the soy oil is partially hydrogenated, it’s killer, or so I’ve read. A slice of cake almost never contains less than fifteen grams of fat. Mid sized cookies are seven! The list goes on.
Then, consider the couch potato who eats a mid-sized bag of chips. A surprising number of such people do this as a nightly habit. Do you KNOW how much fat is in an entire bag of chips? Typically a single serving (there are often eleven such servings in a bag) contains eight grams of fat. That’s 88 grams of fat, and so the couch potato has blown my personal daily fat limit by eighteen grams with a single snack!
Update 05/08/2013:
Today my daily trek took me across the tracks, and into the downtown district. On the two mile stretch to the tracks and back again, I met with one other walker. After crossing the tracks, and entering the commercial zone, I found a number of pedestrians milling around there. I’ve never been fond of Cary or anything that goes on in the place – but I’ll admit that on this particular day I discovered something they’ve managed to do correctly. As I mounted the new sidewalk on the homeward side of the center-town tracks, I noticed an unusual curve in the sidewalk ahead of me. The concrete in the subject area appeared to be so new that it hadn’t yet cured. Alongside its pink-tinged edge, straw had been spread liberally, and already it had managed to encourage a tiny stubble of grass. I drew closer, and noticed that the new walk swerved broadly to the right, missing a large (and probably old) oak tree that, by traditional footway plans, would have been sheared to make way for the new construction.
The concrete contractor had moved the walk eight feet out from what would have been an arrow-straight trajectory, in order to save the tree. I found this to be an idea I could appreciate.
Go to page four of article: https://ronaldscheckelhoff.wordpress.com/couch-potatoes-4/
Musings 