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Fitness: Whales And Hippos Eat Healthier

Posted October 16, 2007 9:08 AM

Fast food restaurants have always been leading the race in fat/cholesterol/calorie based foods with burgers and fries and everything else that can be cooked with grease, but recently the trend has been to focus on breakfast. I'm sure you guys have seen the jack in the box commercials where jack only pays attention to breakfast and not lunch and dinner, but jack has some solid competition now. CKE Restaurants' Hardee's has unveiled their new breakfast, the Country Breakfast Burrito.

Composed of two egg omelets filled with bacon, sausage, diced ham, cheddar cheese, hash browns and sausage gravy, all wrapped inside a flour tortilla, this meal becomes one of the worst to grace a table, and that's before ten o'clock in the morning. The burrito sludge brings in a whopping 920 calories too, 540 of which are from fat, all 60 grams of it, 23 of which are saturated fats. The sodium and cholesterol aren't any easier on you either coming in at 1970 mg and 500 mg, respectively. Enough about the Country Grease Burrito though, how about a quick digestive lesson. We'll start off by saying that a balanced diet is important, though not necessarily balanced meals. Also that your body produces enzymes to help with a myriad of tasks, one of which is digestion. These enzymes allow your body to break down and absorb nutrients in food better, but they are different for different types of food. The same enzymes that break down meat are going to be different for dairy and carbohydrates. Keeping this in mind you want to continue to eat a balanced diet, but separating the big food groups as much as possible. Your body needs to produce the enzymes and when you eat a "balanced meal" with food from every group, you're asking your body to produce enzymes for every type of food, something it isn't capable of. Eating fruits and vegetables together with the other groups is fine if you have to as they are the easiest to digest, but to optimize your digestion you really need to play into your enzyme production. Eating right is the key to healthier living and is one of the steps in having a lean, wholesome body. The others are when you eat and even more important is exercise.