So, here we have a young woman in the UK who has has eaten nothing but Chicken McNuggets™ her whole life, and is in poor health, but a mystery remains:
…despite a diet that regularly means she eats at least a third more than the 56g of fat recommended by experts, she manages to keep relatively trim.
This may be down to the amount of exercise she does or to her metabolism.
Or maybe, just maybe, eating fat is not what makes you fat.
It is an awful diet, to be sure, but not because of what’s in it (fat) but because of what is not (healthy vegetables). It has a reasonable balance of protein and carbs (though it would be better if the carbs weren’t a batter, and could be a little lower). It’s the lack of nutrients that is killing her, not the fat.
I know the Paula Deen story is being beaten to death, but when I first saw your header, I thought you were going to link to this ridiculous article where the food police are again snitching on Paula Deen for–oh, horror of horrors–being seen eating a cheeseburger.
Of course it only stands to reason that today’s food puritans don’t know what they’re talking in the first place, but they still feel free to lecture the rest of us on nutrition.
It is not unheard of for women who eat a good diet to also get anemia.
Yes, I was thinking that too. Anemia has several different causes, and not getting enough vitamins from fresh vegetables isn’t one of them.
Oops! Or as I meant to say “isn’t the only one of them.”
Okay, another Daily Mail article, and I’m calling bullshit. For one thing, they show her with her “favorite meal” — that includes fries and a soda. That’s not “eaten nothing but chicken mcnuggets her whole life.” Not that eating nothing but chicken mcnuggets, fries, and soda her whole life is the greatest of diets. (On the other hand, it isn’t that bad. She’s getting meat, potatoes are vegetables, and soda really is just sugar and carbonated water so she’s getting hydrated.) But here we come to the second thing: the young woman in the photos is perfectly healthy looking. Except for maybe the slight bags under her eyes in the first photo, and that could just be the way her facial features are made, she looks like she gets adequate nutrition. So I’m thinking she probably eats a little bit more than those three things. Yes I’m accusing the Daily Mail of printing a flat-out lie. Or else that’s not the young woman they’re talking about at all, but a model. Which of course still makes it a lie.
In any case, people in Europe existed for thousands of years without large amounts of fresh fruits or vegetables. (Even potatoes, addition to the European diet). Year round they mostly ate meat, some legumes like lentils and broad beans, and grain in the form of bread, and vegetables and fruit were seasonal, garnishes (herbs), or made into fermented drinks or herbal tonics. Root vegetables like turnips were mostly fed to animals. There was no refrigeration to preserve anything fresh so most food was what we would call “processed” today (dried or salted, usually), if they weren’t eaten right away. Yet somehow Europeans not only thrived but constructed a great and dynamic civilization. They did this before a lot of the vegetables we’ve grown accustomed to thinking of as part of the European diet (like tomatoes and potatoes) were brought over from the new world. Of course people were shorter, generally, and didn’t live as long, but there were a lot of contributing factors to that. She’s basically eating what working class Britons ate in the nineteenth century — meat and potatoes with the “occasional” slice of toast. Like I’ve said it’s not the greatest diet in the world but I rather doubt death will result very soon for her — she does not look anywhere near at death’s door.
Sigh. I don’t know what is wrong with my typing. That should have read, in the first set of parentheses in the second paragraph, “Even potatoes, a recent addition to the European diet.”
I mentioned this article to a McDees manager friend of mine, she said adding a salad would have improved the diet and she could still have her 20 piece box of nuggets with her boyfriend. I said a salad and bran muffin for bowel health.
Lucky boyfriend 🙂
Not only does fat not make you fat, but the only way diet kils young people is through micronutrient deficiency or an underlying condition (Type I diabetes, celiac disease, etc.) This young woman’s immediate problems could be solved with no change in diet beyond a daily multivitamin. And in the long term…well, i’m hopeful we’ll have a much better understanding of CV disease in 20 years, when that might be a concern for her. Hopefully by then we’ll have better controlled studies on the current nutritional hypotheses, particularly the Omega-6 hypothesis and Taubes’s anti-carb crusade.