The Other McCain

"One should either write ruthlessly what one believes to be the truth, or else shut up." — Arthur Koestler

A Rasher of Bacon As A Unit Of Measure

Posted on | April 10, 2011 | 7 Comments

by Smitty

It makes sense to scale food to some hand unit of measure. Who wants to fret calories and grams and whatnot?
Via the Weekday Vegetarian, which I swear my wife shared with me in the Google Reader, as I would never be caught with my masculinity so impaired as to subscribe directly, we have:

Ms. Meyer took three restaurant meals and analyzed them, and then determined how many bacon slices she would have had to eat to arrive at the same caloric count and amount of fat. Bear in mind that the average person requires about 2000 calories a day and should limit their saturated fat to 16 grams per day.

A Chicago deep dish pizza came in at 770 calories with 18 grams of fat. She could have eaten 18 strips of bacon for the same amount. A plate of ribs had a whopping 1750 calories with 29 grams of fat. That’s almost all of your caloric allotment for the entire day, and almost twice the amount of saturated fat you should have. You would get the same amount with 26 slices of bacon. A chicken and shrimp carbonara from The Olive Garden clocked in at 1440 calories with a shocking 38 grams of saturated fat. You’d have to eat 35 slices of bacon to accomplish that, but of course, you never would. It’s like figuring out how much sugar you are ingesting when you drink a regular soda. You’d never sit down and eat the equivalent amount of sugar out of a bowl.

That’s still a lot of detail. However, the entire discussion has been broken down to a simple chart by the excellent xkcd:

Also: bacon cologne, for when you haven’t time to fry up a pound and just wear it for her.

Update: linked at Dyspepsia Generation.

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