"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.

I See Dumb People

Bon Appétit recently published a piece entitled "We're Calling B.S. on the Paleolithic 'Lifestyle' Trend." The headline sounded juicy -- I love a good debate, and am open to new evidence or compelling arguments. So, Bon Appétit, fire away! What've you got?

Argument No. 1: "We will note that Fred Flintstone, patriarch of the modern stone age family, wasn't exactly trim."

Wait -- what? That's a joke? Aren't jokes supposed to be funny? Besides, the Flintstones ate like crap. Hit me with the real stuff.

Argument No. 2: "Forsaking all dairy and bread for nuts and berries to recreate a body that flourished when middle age meant 15 years old just doesn't make sense to us."

That hoary myth again? Read this. Or this. Or this. Or this. Or this. What else have you got?

Argument No. 3: "While we may not have biologically evolved all that much, our intellectual development has brought us a greater scientific understanding of the nutrients our bodies need to be healthy."

Oh, good. Although I kind of wish you'd actually clued us in on the "greater scientific understanding" that's led to significantly better health outcomes across Western civilization, perhaps I'm quibbling. I'm SO glad that Type II diabetes, autoimmune disorders and metabolic syndrome are a thing of the past, and that obesity rates have plummeted worldwide. Wait -- what? They haven't? We're fatter and sicker than ever? Hmm. That's weird -- especially with all that mysteriously unspecified "scientific understanding" and all.

Okay, Bon Appétit, I know you're saving the best for last. Sock it to me.

Argument No. 4: "10,000 years ago, food was pure nourishment, a necessity and nothing more. We now have advanced to a place where eating is more than just consumption: food is culture, history, art, and science, all on one plate. Pomegranates are Pom Wonderful!"

WHAT DOES THAT EVEN MEAN? Are you saying that avoiding processed breakfast cereals, Pop-Tarts and Pizza Hut's Stuffed Crust Pizza in favor of real, whole foods is an affront to art and history, and threatens our very cultural fabric? Because if so, I'm pretty sure you're the bullshit artist.

Also? What you said about Pom Wonderful MAKES NO SENSE. Did anyone even proofread this thing? How did a piece that says absolutely nothing -- other than "the Paleo Diet is clearly bullshit because, well...it sounds kinda weird to me" -- get published by a prominent food periodical?

My wife then interjected with an even better question -- this one, posed to me:

"Why are you paying attention to what Bon Appétit says?" M asked. "That magazine's even dumber than Cooking Light."

Syringes + Starvation = Weight Loss?

This looks smart:

Every morning, Kay Brown engages in a ritual similar to a heroin addict’s, or a diabetic’s: she sticks herself with a syringe. Only hers contains hCG, a pregnancy hormone.

Ms. Brown, 35, is not taking hCG to help her bear a child. She believes that by combining the hormone injections with a 500-calorie-a-day diet, she will achieve a kind of weight-loss nirvana: losing fat in all the right places without feeling tired or hungry. “I had a friend who did it before her wedding,” Ms. Brown said. “She looks great.”

Only kooks like Dr. Oz thinks this "syringe 'n starvation" diet is worth a second look. Most others (I hope!) have figured out that the weight loss is prompted not by the (useless and risky) injection of urine-derived pregnancy hormones, but by taking in fewer calories than a typical ten-pound human infant.

[Source: NYTimes]

Mobile Treadmill

Quite possibly the most pointless invention ever:



Oh, wait -- scratch that. I totally forgot about the toilet-paper-dispensing hat.

My bad.

Let's Make Gym-Going Even Less Pleasant!

From the Freakonomics blog:

A lot of people who join gyms or health clubs find it very easy to stop going. Gym-Pact, a new program in Boston, aims to change that. “Gym-Pact offers what [co-founder Yifan] Zhang calls motivational fees: customers agree to pay more if they miss their scheduled workouts, literally buying into a financial penalty if they don’t stick to their fitness plans,” explains Susan Johnston of The Boston Globe... Currently, participants are fined $25 if they fail to follow the schedule in any given week."

This is super-dumb. Why? Find out over at The Five Tribe.

No Deadlifts, But Here's Another Slice of Pizza

Zach Nicolay posted an excellent article over at EliteFTS that eviscerates Planet Fitness, the chain of low-cost globo-gyms that cater mainly to budget-minded folks who are taking their first (extremely) tentative steps off the couch. Read it here.

I'm sure that every January, legions of couch potatoes who've resolved to finally join a gym end up choosing Planet Fitness. After all, the monthly fee is dirt-cheap (just $10!), you don't have to sign a long-term contract, the bright purple cardio and weight machines are easy to use, and you're encouraged to not exercise very hard. Half-assed occasional gym-goers, rejoice!

But despite the chain's promise of "no judgments," the staff will most certainly judge your ass if they decide you're working out with any level of real effort. Why? Because it makes the other members feel bad about themselves.

In fact, if you exercise with such intensity that your exhalations become audible, a "LUNK ALARM" goes off. According to Planet Fitness, a "lunk" is someone who "grunts, drops weights, or judges." Apparently, it's also someone who tries to perform "unapproved lifts" at the gym, including deadlifts. (I'm not kidding.)

So what happens when the Lunk Alarm sounds? The staff'll kick you out and/or call the cops.



And that's not all: Planet Fitness offers members free pizza, bagels and candy. You know, health food.

The first Monday of every month is Pizza Day. Unlimited pizza for members, all day. They also have a Bagel Day, and on their own website they mention that they hand out over one million Tootsie Rolls per month to their members. That’s it, I’m calling conspiracy on this one! They set up this “judgment free” gym for “regular” people -no pressure, no contracts, no goals- and they give their clients free pizza and tootsie rolls? It’s a scheme, and they’re either the most wicked businesspeople on earth or the smartest. Or maybe both.

It's like a Chuck E. Cheese's, but with elliptical machines.

Teach Me How to Eat an Artichoke or I'll Sue You

From the Consumerist:

A doctor has sued the Houston's restaurant in Miami after he ate a complete artichoke that he ordered, including the spiny and sharp exterior leaves. He subsequently suffered "severe abdominal pain and discomfort," and a "exploratory laparotomy" showed that the artichoke leaves were jammed in his "small bowel." His lawsuit claims that he had "never seen nor heard of previously" an artichoke and that it was the restaurant's fault for not teaching him how to eat it.

When I was an obnoxious high schooler, my buddies and I frequented an all-night diner staffed by the cast of "Alice," only much, much crankier. But our favorite waitress (the one we nicknamed "Lemon" for her sour disposition) taught me an important life lesson when I once inquired about an item on the menu: "If you don't know what it is, DON'T. ORDER. IT."