This nanny state gets ever worse. You can’t buy anything these days that tastes any good because they’ve removed the bloody salt and sugar from it. I had a couple of hash browns from McDonalds this morning and they were devoid of flavour (they only have any if they’re crispy, and mine were bordering on soggy).
When I came home I saw this article aggregated by MSN from the Huffington Post. Neither of them are to blame for anything – the real pain in the arse is a British food nanny TV show called ‘Tricks of the Restaurant Trade’. They’ve apparently made the ‘shocking’ discovery that when you add dressing to salad, the calories go up, and that hot tomato soup contains added salt and sugar.
They cited Greggs, whose Cream of Tomato Soup claims to contain 5.7g of sugar per 300g portion – but which, when measured, was found to contain over 25g. My guess here is that Greggs calculated how much sugar they had added to their recipe, and omitted the sugar already there from the tomatoes. Take 300g of canned tomatoes and you’d find over 13g of sugar naturally present, so add another 6g and you’re not far off what Greggs claimed (the TV crew also had a larger sample than 300g and declared the total sugars, and were too stupid to adjust the figures pro rata – probably to make Greggs look bad on purpose).
Greggs has said it will reformulate if necessary – but they should leave it alone. If they take out the added sugar it’ll just be like eating tomatoes, and you don’t need much help if you just want to do that.
Then there was the startling case of the Big Mack Salad. This is a Mackerel salad, which was found to contain about 760 calories – and which sent everyone apoplectic. What they didn’t point out (and probably didn’t know because they hadn’t bothered to look it up) is that a typical single serving of Mackerel on its own – raw – would contain about 430 calories. Add a mere 30mls of Olive Oil and you’re up to 700 calories right away. Add a bit of sugar and you have your explanation without any need for a stupid Channel 4 shit stirring show. In light of this, comparing the salad’s calorie content to ‘an average fried breakfast’ as though the Big Mack is something heinous is so misleading it is plain wrong.
Unfortunately, this is what happens when you involve someone like Amanda Ursell – a ‘nutritionist’. You see, anyone can become a nutritionist – the name is not registered, nor is the ‘profession’ regulated – so the title is pretty much meaningless. However, it does attract a certain demographic, and if you’re lucky enough to be blonde, female, photogenic, and emanate from the Home Counties, then you’ll have a career in television ready to fall into your lap with very little effort on your part.
People like Ursell love to compare various foods with ‘spoons of sugar’ or ‘grams of salt’ as if there is some sort of problem, and yet the only ‘problem’ is their own vague understanding of the issue and their inability to understand science properly. They can’t get it into their thick skulls that food contains calories, and these calories often come from fats and sugars.
They even had a go at Wasabi’s Sushi boxes for having too many carbs, and likened it to ‘seven slices of bread’. More simple maths: a slice of bread has 80 calories, so seven slices is 560 calories. Cooked sushi rice is about 140 calories per 100g, so four sushi rolls would have a similar overall calorific value from carbs. It’s like, wow, rice has carbohydrates in it. In fact, it is what it is, and nothing more.