Eat Breakfast Like a King…

Mandatory Listing of Calories in Fast Foods

The Ontario Government has proposed legislation to require fast food outlets like McDonald’s and Tim Horton’s to list the calories associated with each food item they sell. This will, they hope, make customers more food conscious and help relieve the problems associated with such maladies as obesity and diabetes. However, there is much more to food than calories and this seems more like a means of placating the chattering classes who probably would not dine at a fast food restaurant anyway, than having any real value.

The most important thing about food is not just the calorie content but its composition. For example, I could go to McDonald’s or Tim Horton’s and buy a black coffee and a toasted English muffin, perhaps with jam. This would provide me with enough calories and caffeine to give me an instant short lived high. Alternately, I could also go and order my coffee with the same English muffin but this time with an egg and sausage patty. This would have two or three times the calories and also the same instant high but would sustain my energy over the much longer period that it took the eggs and sausage to be assimilated. The muffin would provide me with carbohydrate but the eggs and sausage would also provide protein and fat.

We need protein in our diets not only because it is assimilated more slowly and provides energy over a longer period of time but it also provides amino acids required for such activities as blood formation in the bone marrow and the synthesis of new epidermal layers in the intestine. Eggs and sausage also contain many more vitamins than would be found in an English muffin.

Many would complain about the fat in the sausage but it is recommended that about 30% of our calories should be obtained from fat. We become obese from eating too much carbohydrate, especially sugar, not reasonable levels of fat. It seems to me that I would be much better off buying an egg and sausage English muffin sandwich with its elevated calories than simply a toasted muffin with jam.

In England there is an old saying that goes “Eat breakfast like a king, lunch like a prince and dinner like a pauper”. In other words, one should stoke up ones fuel in the morning when it is required to last all day and not at night when there is much less need for it. A couple of years ago, I went on a real ale tour of England with a friend. Each morning we had a full English breakfast of bacon, eggs, sausage, mushrooms, beans, toast and if we were lucky black (blood) pudding. We would then set of and visit pubs with real ale until it was bedtime. We walked miles and miles and in 9 days drank 51 different beers, with the good ones being drunk more than once. We had light lunches and evening meals in pubs. When I returned to Kingston, I found I had gained no weight whatsoever and felt really fit.

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My wife, Marjory, taught home economics in high school in England before we came to Canada. She had nutrition courses during her training and taught basic nutrition. She is very conscious of balancing the various components of food during meal preparation. She says one should divide ones plate into three parts. In one, you place a carbohydrate food like potatoes or rice, in the second, you place a protein food like meat or fish and the last space is for fruits vegetables and salads. When our boys were in school she attempted to make them nutritious lunches but they were upset because they wanted chocolate bars and chips like the other students.

There is a movie called “Super Size Me” made by Morgan Spurlock in which he eats the largest meal provided by McDonalds, three meals daily for three months. I have not seen the movie and could not bear to watch it. It seems a remarkably stupid endeavour. At the end, he was grossly overweight and quite sick as one might have expected. It affronts me as a scientist because it has no control. He should have repeated the experiment at a high class restaurant and I have no doubt that he would have achieved the same result. There are restaurants in Kingston my wife and I enjoy visiting, but invariable they provide far too much food for us to finish. In one restaurant, a British style pub that serves fish and chips, we always replace the chips with a small dish of mushy peas. When you eat in a restaurant, whether it be fast food or elegant, it is the responsibility of the customer to eat sensibly.

It seems to me that it would be worthwhile to consider something other than just listing calories. It would be more valuable to publish the overall quality and composition of the food people are offered in all restaurants. In England, and also in some areas of N. America, I have seen symbols placed next to menu items indicating that they are for example “heart healthy” or “low calorie” etc. with a reference list available. These are easier to assimilate and understand by most people than lists of number indicating calorie content.

I must admit, that for the most part, I would rather eat at home with home cooked food from our own garden or local suppliers.