I read an article last night about a guy (writer) who decided to do a different take on Morgan Spurlock's
"Super Size Me" experiment.
https://www.eater.com/24152247/swee...-healthy-eating
As the link indicates, he was going to do a healthy version of it, eating nothing but salads.
A few caveats -
Sweetgreen wasn't open for breakfast:
Quote:
|
Since Sweetgreen doesn’t have a breakfast menu, I’d dine there for lunch and dinner without snacking in between meals (breakfast would be limited to salad-like bowls of yogurt, cereal, or fresh fruit to limit any variables).
|
(I question how cereal is in any way salad-like, but that's what he was calling his breakfast bowls with cereal)
The salads at Sweetgreen are expensive: (about $16 each) so he settled on doing 15 days (still cost nearly $500)
They didn't have a varied enough menu for him to do a full 2 weeks of different salads, so he had to customize his salads to avoid repeating meals.
The salads often had a base of quinoa or rice though, so perhaps the rice and quinoa are why he was considering cereal to be a "salad-like" breakfast.
I was really thinking that this Sweetgreen place must be vegan - and you could certainly get vegan salads there if you wanted, but there were a surprising number of salads that had meat added to them.
With the sheer amount of grain added to so many of their salads, there were usually twice as many g of carbs as protein though.
In the end he was salad-ed out after only 15 days, and couldn't wait to get back to eating... McD's.
And this was one of his conclusions:
Quote:
|
The day after I finished my final Sweetgreen meal, I’m back at McDonald’s. After studying the nutrition facts — a lingering legacy of Super Size Me — on the glowing kiosk, I do the math: It would take three basic Sweetgreen salads to reach the caloric threshold of the Double Quarter Pounder with cheese and bacon combo meal I just ordered. At a time when most Americans are struggling with the shrinking value of their dollars, choosing affordable calories over designer nutrition is often an easy, and necessary, decision.
|
It sounded like it would have been possible to eat a relatively healthy meal there - order the salad without any grains, order meats for the salad that didn't have sweet sauces on them, with full-fat salad dressings that weren't icky-sweet.
I just thought that as an aside to the ridiculous article about eating vegan at McD's, it was interesting that despite knowing how mediocre McD's food is, and how bad it is nutritionally, this guy went for eating at the healthiest fast food place he could find... and couldn't hack it, had to go back to McD's as soon as his experiment was completed.