The Most Important Meal of the Day

I’m sure the first thing that popped into your mind when you read the title of this rant was the word “breakfast” – and rightfully so. Research has shown that our brains and our metabolism function much better when we begin our day with a nice balanced meal. It could be a bowl of cereal with fruit and milk. Maybe you decide to opt for cheese and crackers and half a grapefruit. Perhaps oatmeal with raisins is more to your liking. Or, if you’re like thousands upon thousands of people all across this great land of ours, you might use this opportunity to kick your day off the right way by downing two eggs, a sausage patty, two slices of American cheese and three strips of bacon, all on a delectable specialty bun.

America, say hello to Burger King’s Enormous Omelet Sandwich! Get your day started right with 730 calories and 47 grams of fat (both more than a Whopper, which contains a paltry 700 calories and 42 grams of fat – weak!), not to mention a salt-ilicious 1860 mg of sodium. I have the utmost confidence that many Americans will seek the convenience and flavor of this breakfast option, thereby bucking every piece of conventional wisdom known to man. The best thing about the Enormous Omelet Sandwich (as if there were only one)? If you eliminate the “specialty bun” from the equation, you’re only downing 5 grams of carbs! That’s right – if you’re a carb counter, and you leave out the bun, you’ve got a meal sent from the heavens. Granted, you’re still left with 44 grams of fat (16 of which are saturated) and over 1400 mg of sodium, but man, will you ever lose some weight!

My only question is this: what the fuck are these fast food restaurants trying to prove? It’s like they got word of the ruling that says that the fat slobs that make them their staple meal can’t sue them for making them the fat slobs that they are, so they’re reveling in their innocence. “Hey, since Joe Trailerpark and Suzie Morbidly-Obese can’t hit us in the pocketbook, let’s thank them by speeding them towards heart disease and certain death!” Now, I’m all for holding people responsible for their own actions, but come on – this sandwich is ludicrously horrific. Can’t you just picture tens of thousands of half-assed parents across middle America saying to themselves, “Well, I should buy Cheerios, but that fat little shit will throw a fit if I make him try and eat them, so I’ll just shut them up with an Enormous Omelet Sandwich. In fact, that sounds so good that maybe I’ll shove one down my engorged esophagus to assist with my certain heart and/or liver failure. Who cares that I’m already past the point where I can sit in a regular movie theater seat?”

Yes, I can hear it too, and it’s too damn bad. As I alluded to in an earlier writing, the Center for Disease Control (http://www.cdc.gov/) indicates that approximately 65% of American adults are either overweight or obese. Now granted, the Body Mass Index gives a crude indication of whether one is overweight, and at 5’5” and 145 lbs, I am on the fringe of being “overweight”, so there is some room for error here. But let’s dumb it down and say 50% of American adults are at least overweight. HALF of us are a heart disease case just waiting to happen. This will lead to earlier death, higher health care costs, skyrocketing insurance premiums, and a whole bunch of shitty habits passed on to the fatbodies of the future (i.e. eating an Enormous Omelet Sandwich due to price and/or convenience).

I realize that eating healthy can be considered somewhat of a luxury – fresh fruits and vegetables and healthy grain-based products are not cheap. There seem to be 10 times as many drive-thru shitholes as there are remotely healthy options. Kids are much more inactive today than they were even 10 years ago. And goddamn, if that Hardee’s Double Monster Thickburger doesn’t look divine (what, with two 1/3 lb meat patties, three slices of cheese, six slices of bacon and mayonnaise – mmmm, good). Why don’t you go build a meal at Hardee’s.com and see how many ways you can kill yourself slowly: http://www.hardees.com/nutrition/.

As with most of these rantings, I am not sure what my point is. Maybe fast food restaurants need to take it upon themselves to offer more sensible options (instead of chicken fingers and salads that often have more fat and sodium than the burgers). Maybe the government needs to protect idiotic Americans from themselves. Maybe we should just let the fatbodies be grossly unhealthy and sort out the consequences another day. I guess you are what you eat, so you can either choose to be healthy, or you can choose to be an Enormous Monster.