Yesterday I posted about frozen lasagna, and I mentioned that a lasagna meal would most likely include garlic bread. Today, using the data from the wonderful www.nutritiondata.com, I am posting my findings on garlic bread, specifically Pepperidge Farm’s frozen Crusty Italian Bread, garlic style. It’s not pretty.

First, I looked at serving size. One serving of garlic bread is 50 grams, which equates to just under 2 ounces. Two ounces of bread would satisfy very few people, and it’s more likely that a person would eat two pieces or more. One piece of garlic bread contains 186 calories, 86.4 which come from fat. That’s right, 51% fat. Nowhere near the desired 30% level that would qualify this is a healthy food. About the only saving grace, is that it’s low in cholesterol. Who cares though? It’s just plain bad for you. Take nearly 400 calories from two pieces of garlic bread, plus the 760 calories from the lasagna, and you’re on the way to obesity and death. Ciao!

In today’s world of tight schedules where hardly anyone has time to make dinner from scratch, frozen dinners have become the lifesaver for many families. When looking at a frozen dinner, one looks for a tasty meal and hopefully some nutrition. Lasagna is a very popular choice for frozen dinners, and Stouffer’s “Lasagna with Meat & Sauce” is a very popular lasagna choice. In this post, I will be examining this product and also offering a healthier and tastier alternative. I would like to note that I am getting my nutritional information from the very well done site www.nutritiondata.com.Now into the details. A serving size from this product weighs 595 grams. For all you non-metric people that is 1.31 pounds of lasagna. Seems like a large portion to me. In that serving, there are 767 calories, 268 which come from fat. That would make this food 35% fat, and just over the 30% threshold needed to be considered healthy. If you add garlic bread to this, forget about it. You’ll be way over 35%.

The serving also provides 38% of your daily allowance for cholesterol, a whopping 85% of your daily allowance for salt, and a surprisingly decent 64% of your daily allowance for calcium. However, considering there are better ways to get calcium, say a multi-vitamin, the high level of calcium does little to make this healthy. Since this lasagna would most likely be paired with garlic bread, the total meal is unlikely to be healthy at all. The amount of salt, cholesterol, and preservatives give this meal a failing grade for me. No way to make it healthy, and I’m sure the taste is somewhat muted by being frozen and preserved.

As I have said in previous posts, I am a dietary vegan, and this Xmas my fiancee and I enjoyed a vegan lasagna for our dinner. We used standard pasta sauce from the store, soy cheese from Soya Kaas, and subsituted meat with fresh carrots, yellow squash, zucchini, loads of garlic, and a bit of olive oil. Kelly made two pans of this great lasagna the day before. By making two pans all at once, she assured that for the rest of the week, she would have great tasting lasagna to eat, and while it did take a couple hours to make, the taste is worth it.

We took pictures to document the process of making the lasagna to show just how easy it is, and how much better it looks than a piece of frozen dinner lasagna.

The vegetable mix where you can see the carrots, yellow squash, zucchini and garlic.

The lasagna noodles waiting to be used.

The cooking of the veggies.

The first layer of veggies.

And now the cheese.

Here you can see the layers of the uncooked lasagna.

A cooked lasagna, and it looks awesome!

Another shot of the cooked lasagna.

Heaven is served!

Kelly’s gourmet food critic shot.

I hope you can see how appetizing a homemade lasagna is. The lasagna was great, and one doesn’t miss the meat or preservatives from a store bought frozen lasagna. As I said, while it took a few hours one day to make, Kelly made enough to last a week or more, and for the result, it was time well spent.

The first food I investigated was the BK Veggie. All the information I am pulling for this post is accurate as of December 23, 2005. I used this pdf available here from Burger King itself.

I’m starting with the BK Veggie because it’s supposed to be a healthier option. It’s a vegetarian option, but I believe no fast food restuarant will guarantee anything to be 100% vegetarian. It definitely isn’t vegan.

Let’s start of by comparing calories with the flagship Burger King product, the Whopper. The default Whopper order has 670 calories. The BK Veggie has 420 calories. If you add cheese, the Whopper now has 760 calories, and the BK Veggie has 470 calories. The Whopper actually adds two slices of cheese because…well, I’m not sure why. You can shave 80 calories off the BK Veggie by holding the mayo. The Whopper actually has 160 calories dedicated to just mayo!

So the healthiest way to eat a BK Veggie would be to hold the mayo and cheese. That gives us a reasonable looking 340 calories per sandwich. Now we want to look at fat, and the mayo becomes important. Without the mayo the BK Veggie has 8 grams of fat and 70 calories that come from fat, which would make this a 21% fat product. Actually, that’s pretty good. That would be a reasonable meal. Most people would keep the mayo however. That brings that sandwich up to 16 grams of fat and 150 calories from fat, meaning the product is now at 36% fat. At most you should have fat make up 30% of your calories. So the default BK Veggie is too fatty. Throw in the fact that most BK Veggies are sold with fries, and well, why even bother? For comparison, a Whopper has 350 calories from fat, a whopping (pun intended) 52% of its total calories. Insane.

In conclusion, a BK Veggie gets a middling grade from me. If you have just a BK Veggie, no cheese or mayo, it’s not a wholy unhealthy option. Even two BK Veggies for dinner wouldn’t be bad for you. In reality, though, most people get a soda and fries with it, which pretty much voids any benefits you would gain. A lot of people eat fast food while they’re traveling, and in airports, I don’t know that this would be available there. You’d be better off just packing a bag of carrots.

As I’ve gotten older, it’s been harder to lose weight. I don’t have a chemical imbalance, genetic disposition to gaining weight, or problems differentiating advertising from reality. I just have habits. It’s on me. No one else.

So while struggling to lose weight, I finally found a way of thinking about eating that has allowed me to enjoy eating, not feel starved, and still keep a low caloric intake. I won’t say how long I’ve been doing it, but it did take a few weeks of experimenting and creating certain steps that broke me out of bad habits.

I haven’t accomplished anything great or amazing. My girlfriend Kelly puts me to shame with her amazing discipline. When she wanted to get into better shape, she had an extreme amount of willpower to keep exercising and try different programs until she found something that worked for her.

My only accomplishment is now feel like I have control of when I’m hungry. Since I finished the habit breaking steps I created, I’ve not had an urge to snack on anything junky. When I get hungry, at say 2pm, if I can’t find an apple or banana, I get a nice big glass of ice water. At home, where we have apples all the time, I take a lot of enjoyment in snacking on an apple. Just the apple. No peanut butter, sugar, or syrup added. Sometimes I even eat the seeds.

One thing I have noticed often when doing my grocery shopping, is that so much of what we eat is absolute garbage. It’s not much more than oil, infused with air, with sugar piled on top. Compare the weight of a pack of Twinkies with an apple. Just air infused garbage.

This blog is going to be a continual investigation into how awful certain kinds of foods are for you. Each post will be a different food. I will try to post a new food every few days, complete with the necessary nutrional information. This isn’t meant to be a vanity blog. I want to know more about the food that is out there. As I see it, this blog has two purposes:

1) To educate those who want to know how bad certain foods are

2) To force myself to get educated on how bad some foods really are.

Some of the foods will be obvious, but with not so obvious takes on them. Even if no one ever reads this blog but me, I will still come out ahead.

As a note, I want to say I am a vegan dieter. I will not be trying many of these foods myself. However, being a vegan has its challenges. Vegan style foods are hard to come by, and I have an inkling that I will be surprised what some vegan goods contain. However, I am a full supporter of the vegan and vegetarian food movement. For economic, social, and moral reasons, I no longer thing a meat filled diet can be sustained on this planet. More on that later, for now I will be going food by food.