Seven Signs of the Foodpocalypse

1. Darth Vader Burgers -- soon available in France and Belgium!

2. Chicken & Waffle Wings -- because how else are you going to eat chicken and waffles in the car?

3. Bacon Soda -- swine plus sugar water equals yum!

4. Mountain Dew -- it dissolves rats!

5. Dulche de Leche Cheerios -- they're "naturally flavored" with caramel!

6. Chocolate Covered Totino's Pizza Rolls -- because why the hell not?

7. SPAM Mints -- for hot dates who love Hormel products.

Not everyone's trying to eat healthier this January, I guess.

"Fudge Tracks" Are Not Health Food

Last year, Fitness Magazine compiled a list of the "healthiest" foods you can buy at your supermarket -- remember?



Well, stop the presses! Last month, Fitness Magazine unveiled the winners of its “Healthy Food Awards” for 2011!

According to the magazine, these foods are “[t]he best of the best! The complete collection of our annual picks for the most delicious health foods on the planet”! Did you hear that? THE! MOST! DELICIOUS! HEALTH! FOODS! ON! THE! PLANET!

And how did they pick the winners? Fitness Magazine shares its methodology:

We worked with top nutritionists to find hundreds of sweet, salty, and savory treats that are low in calories and fat. Then we crunched our way through them to bring you the best-tasting options to satisfy any craving -- and still keep you slim.

Oooh! "Top nutritionists"! "Low in calories and fat!" "Crunching!" Scientific!

So without further ado, here are a few of the items selected by Fitness Magazine as the “healthiest” foods available to us:

• Funley’s Original Stix in the Mud Chocolate Cookie Clusters (because they’re “individually wrapped for easy portion control”!)
• Kozy Shack Chocolate Pudding (it’s “made with low-fat milk”!)
• Skinny Cow Low-Fat Fudge Bars ("guilt-free" because, well, see above!)
• Frito-Lay's Rold Gold Pretzels (as one Fitness Magazine editor says, “the salt helps keep me going!” -- and we all know that salt is the human body’s primary energy source!)
• Deep Chocolate VitaMuffins (hey -- it says “Vita” so it’s gotta be healthy!)
• Coca-Cola's Vitaminwater Zero Rhythm (yes, the name "Zero Rhythm" is unfortunate -- but it's engineered to have zero calories!)
• Edy's Slow Churned Fudge Tracks Ice Cream (really? "Fudge Tracks”?)

Thank you, Fitness Magazine! Thanks for showing us that food quality doesn’t matter, and that we can freely eat highly-processed, sugary, lab-engineered foods -- so long as they’re low-fat, shrink-wrapped in 100-calorie packs and (most importantly) chocolatey. Who needs real food anyway? I mean, "our intellectual development has brought us a greater scientific understanding of the nutrients our bodies need to be healthy," right? And what our bodies need is more chocolate cookie clusters, dammit!

Frankly, it’s a relief to see that grass-fed, pastured meat and sustainably-grown vegetables aren’t anywhere on the magazine’s list of “healthiest” foods. Otherwise, I would’ve suspected that Fitness Magazine’s editors had caved to the influence of the nation's evil, super-powerful lobby of small, local farmers and ranchers.

Seriously, Fitness Magazine: It's not that hard.

Three Great Flavors That Taste Great Together

Remember all those times you thought to yourself: "This hot fudge sundae could really use some mustard and chili peppers"? Well, the good folks over in Scotland have just the thing for you: Chocolate Chilli Mustard.

This is like the CrossFit of edible spreads -- it's got to be the most versatile condiment ever created. Think about it: What other topping can boast of being equally awesome on wild game, poultry, sausages, waffles and ice cream?

Sadly, I have a feeling this stuff ain't Paleo.

[Source]

Deen: Diabetes Denier?

Paula Deen has reportedly been concealing her Type II diabetes to avoid charges of hypocrisy for foisting her obesity-promoting recipes on us fat Americans.

Not surprisingly, media reports are pointing to the high fat content in her cooking -- but no one's seems to bat an eye about the truckloads of sugar that she dumps into her gut-rotting concoctions.

Case in point: Deen's "Krispy Kreme Bread Pudding with Butter Rum Sauce." Back in 2009, when I first wrote about this stupifyingly trashy sugar bomb, I, too, ignored the sugar content, focusing instead on the fat and calories:

This barf-tastic recipe contains 10,460 calories and 718 grams of fat. It's supposed to feed 12, so if you're one of the dozen people digging into this heart attack of a dish, you'll be consuming 870 calories and 60 grams of fat. It's a nutritional Chernobyl.

If I'd have been more diligent (and enlightened), I would have pointed out that this five-star rated recipe also contains 1,280 grams of carbs and 1,082 grams of sugar. That's 90 grams of sugar per serving -- the equivalent of stuffing your face with three full-sized Snickers bars. Or five scoops of chocolate ice cream. Or slurping up a cuppa coffee with 22 sugar cubes in it.

My two cents: Deen should just re-brand herself as an out-and-proud Type II diabetic. After all, she clearly doesn't have a problem pushing nutritional garbage on TV and sickening her audiences (regardless of whether they actually end up cooking and eating her recipes). (See, e.g., Deen's Cheesy Ham & Banana Casserole -- which features, among other incongruous ingredients, crushed potato chips and white bread). And besides: No one believes that eating her food's going to lead to anything other than metabolic syndrome and early death anyway.

Note to the Epic Meal Time guys: Hire her now, before she's too sick to show you how to make Twinkie Pie and Peanut Butter Cheese Fudge dipped in Shrimp & Chocolate Tortilla Soup.

Oh gawd -- I think I just barfed a little in my mouth.

The Whole30: M's Done!

Thirty days ago, when my better half announced that she was going full-tilt strict Paleo for a month, I was a little skeptical.

This is, after all, the same girl who routinely took a two-hour round-trip drive just to buy a cup of her favorite ice cream. And flew to another state for pizza. (To say we are were big pizza fans would be a gross understatement.) And dropped a small fortune to have a big box of "the world's best chocolate" shipped to our house.

But she did it! Check out her Whole30 wrap-up -- including links to each day's food -- over at her blog, and give her a high-five while you're at it.

Le WTF

Over the past couple of years, Harvard professor David Edwards has invented two new tools for dieters: "Le Whif" -- a small cylinder that puffs a cloud of vaporized chocolate or coffee into people's mouths -- and "Le Whaf" -- a humidifier that allows people to literally inhale their food instead of eating it.



"It's good for dieters," Edwards says.

Right.

Start Hoarding Your Chocolate

Looks like we're facing a worldwide cocoa shortage. Expensive chocolate'll still be around (and still be expensive), but in the future, the cheap stuff's going to be in short supply.

Thankfully, I barely touch the stuff, and M only occasionally splurges on the bars with 85%+ cacao content. But without cheap chocolate, how are we going to keep our kids in line?

(P.S.: I was going to use the Augustus Gloop photo above for this post, but aren't you glad I didn't?)