New Food Study Gives Bacon a Higher Nutritional Score than Couscous
Researchers at Tufts University in the US have created what they call the ‘Food Compass’ which turns common assumptions about snacking on their heads. Turns out, a chocolate ice cream in a cone is better for you than a granola bar – and couscous scores lower than bacon, in spite of it being linked to cancer. The team at Tufts spent three years looking at more than 8,000 foods and drinks, from melon to a McDonald’s, and ranked them according to 54 different attributes. They say they have created the most comprehensive system to date to assess the nutritional content of what we eat. MailOnline has more.
As it stands, food labelling in the U.K. highlights calories, fat sugar and salt. But scientists say this only takes into account a handful of ingredients and ignores important ones.
Tufts researchers developed a scoring system which considers how healthy foods are across nine metrics – including ingredients, additives and protein.
As expected, sweet deserts and fizzy drinks scored extremely low – while nutrient-packed fruit, vegetables and nuts scored achieved some of the highest scores.
But there are some very unexpected results. Take a cheese and ham omelette, for example. With healthy fats and proteins from eggs and meat, you’d be forgiven for thinking it is a great breakfast choice.
According to this chart, it scores a measly 26 points — while pancakes from a fast food restaurant get a whopping 50 points.
Among the surprising findings are:
- Chips get eight times more points than rice
- Ready salted crisps get more points than multigrain crackers
- McDonald’s pancakes score higher than ham and cheese omelettes
- Unsweetened chocolate almond milk scores higher than regular milk
- A bowl of Cheerios scores higher than seeded toast
- Chicken curry scores higher than veggie soup
- A skimmed milk cappuccino scores higher than a shot of espresso
- A slice of hick cut pizza scores higher than a bowl of instant noodles
Worth reading in full.
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The push for carbohydrates over protein and fat was specifically to make some cereal company more money in the 70’s by a “doctor” shill at the time. Can’t remember his name. Which makes the food pyramid pretty much useless, so it’s decent enough to see some new takes on it all. Even if they are basing it entirely on odd point scoring systems. I wonder if the dreaded Conspiracy Theorist’s Vitamin D scores any points?
Always makes me laugh when I see things like “Natural sugars” or “good sugars”. Sugar is sugar; if it gives you a glycemic response, it’s still not great for you. They score fructose higher than glucose…in reality both do exactly the same thing, but people think fruit = good.
Remember folks; eat more meat, eat more eggs and good fat, eat less carbohydrate in all it’s forms. Or in this case, eat more bacon 😀
Are you thinking of Ancel Keys? I’m firmly in team Atkins. If cave people had eaten like we eat now, a ‘beige’ diet filled with processed, highly palatable carbage and inflammatory seed oils ( shout out to vegetable oils that are a total misnomer as no vegetables were killed in the production of such crud ) then no way would we be sitting here now. We’d have become extinct eons ago. Ancestral diet for the win…with the odd treat because who’s perfect 100% of the time?
That’s the one, yes! I’m awful with names. I’m of the same mind; it’s fairly easy to understand how a paleo-esque diet is good for us. Funnily enough, we instinctively know not to feed our pets bread, bananas and skittles because it’s bad for them.
I tend towards low carb, high fat coupled with fasting. As you mention in a reply below, carnivore feels like it’s good, but I struggle lasting without broccoli or cheese lol. I made it around 2 weeks and felt absolutely incredible, but I couldn’t stick it out much longer.
And also yes; my treat tends to be a glass (or four) of scotch on the weekends as a treat 🙂
Yes. It’s ignorance dosed with low level thinking.
So… the meat and two veg diet was best. What a surprise. no carbs in meat.
Sugars: the loonies don’t know that sugar is a generic term for a group of carbohydrates, or that sugars are in fact carbohydrates. Refined sugars are of plant origin, so ‘natural’.
All carbohydrates are broken down by the body to glycogen to store energy, and this particularly gets stored as fatty tissue.
So that ‘healthy’ carrot instead of a biscuit contains carbohydrates as does the biscuit and it’s all going to end up the same.
Very happy to have my excessive bacon-eating condoned, but seriously surely the value of any food really depends on what you are trying to achieve by eating it and what else you eat and your lifestyle. In that sense, no one food has more “value” than another, intrinsically.
An awful lot of people eat too much, and if I were them I would eat less – the easiest way to do that is to cut right down on sugary stuff. But I am not sure public funds should go into any research of this kind, because we’ll just get a load more health fascism as a result. Perhaps you could teach kids in schools about food groups and what the body needs, though I’m wary of this. Ultimately there’s a lot of information out there on diet and people need to make their own minds up having looked into it – most won’t.
I’m not fat but I drink too much, don’t really want anyone nudging me to drink less – I know the score.
I’m generally low carb but I was very intrigued by success stories of people going carnivore. I tried it but lasted about 3 days! LOL Fair enough if I had some serious and chronic disease I wanted rid of and my daily quality of life was suffering, but I just don’t like meat enough to exist on animal products only. Love eggs, fish, chicken, ham/bacon and beef that’s slow cooked, but hate steak ( anything undercooked makes me wanna hurl ), lamb, pork, burgers etc…Everyone on the carnivore diet seems to exist on steak. Plus, who can afford that?
Having said that I’m massively impressed that people have had remarkable success on an animal-based way of eating. Me, I prefer different textures, crunchy salads and veggies never did me any harm. But for anyone interested, here is the meatheals site that Dr Shawn Baker started. When you read the success stories it makes you want to give it a try. So LCHF/keto I remain as it gives results with more variety.
https://carnivore.diet/category/success-stories/
I think there are undoubtedly various routes to a diet that makes you as strong, healthy and energetic as you can be, and those routes vary by individual and lifestyle. Eating too much, especially high carb foods which make it easier to eat too much, is probably the biggest thing that a lot of people need to change
Yes there are. I’m stunned when I see the amount of vegans ( some raw or fruitarian even ) who’ve done a full U-turn and improved their ailing health ( and stepped away from their ideology for many ) and started incorporating animal protein once more, even going full-on carnivore. You can’t move for their testimonies on Youtube also. It really does speak to the fact that we need animal proteins as part of an optimal human diet. We are by nature omnivores anyway so to deny one’s ancestry and biology is asking for trouble further down the line. I’ve some very forthright animal rights neighbours nextdoor but even they eat eggs, dairy and fish. Carnivore is too extreme and limiting for me but I appreciate that as a tool for healing it is more powerful and healthy than lifelong medication or living in pain indefinitely.
Keep drinking, and keep on eating bacon. As Kingsley Amis famously said “No pleasure is worth giving up for an extra two years in a nursing home in Weston-Super-Mare” – and he was quite right. All these encouragements to eat this/don’t eat that, don’t drink, don’t even think about enjoying yourself, you will live longer, are OK until you realise that your “extra years of life” aren’t extra years of being 30 or 40 but extra years of being 80 or 90 and senile and incontinent. No thanks.
This is infuriating!!!!
Cheerios more nutritious than an omlette!!!
Just as the whole medical and government institutions are bought by big pharma, the exact process is in effect with dietary research, medical advice and government policy. In fact “Big food” has been doing it much longer, and arguably causing much more ill health and suffering than big pharma.
Here’s a little taster on the origins of the fraud “breakfast is the most important meal of the day”
https://youtu.be/ucOcj_-LL-k
Tufts of course mirror this lie
https://www.nutritionletter.tufts.edu/general-nutrition/wake-up-call/
Even the food pyramid we are advised by medical authority and government is actually harmful leading to type 2 diabetes and heart disease. Dissenters who challenge this are vilified in just the same way as Dr Yeadon and Dr Malone.
Saturated fat is bad? But polyunsaturated is good?
https://youtu.be/Ema6thM5abA
Low fat diet to lose weight?
https://youtu.be/9cTqRhC09p8
https://youtu.be/uB2uS_vzCxU
https://youtu.be/uryoX0ZYvwQ
https://youtu.be/Z7EHfqiC8iY
For a more technical deep dive, we can rely on the great Ivor Cummins
https://youtu.be/Y41gXdEGslk
https://youtu.be/9Cd6AC0rB6w
The parallels with the COVID narrative and the nutrition narrative are precise, as they stem from the same forces. They are equally damaging, and equally corrupt.
This is infuriating!!!!
Cheerios more nutritious than an omlette!!!
Just as the whole medical and government institutions are bought by big pharma, the exact process is in effect with dietary research, medical advice and government policy. In fact “Big food” has been doing it much longer, and arguably causing much more ill health and suffering than big pharma.
Here’s a little taster on the origins of the fraud “breakfast is the most important meal of the day”
https://youtu.be/ucOcj_-LL-k
Tufts of course mirror this lie
https://www.nutritionletter.tufts.edu/general-nutrition/wake-up-call/
Even the food pyramid we are advised by medical authority and government is actually harmful leading to type 2 diabetes and heart disease. Dissenters who challenge this are vilified in just the same way as Dr Yeadon and Dr Malone.
Saturated fat is bad? But polyunsaturated is good?
https://youtu.be/Ema6thM5abA
Low fat diet to lose weight?
https://youtu.be/9cTqRhC09p8
https://youtu.be/uB2uS_vzCxU
https://youtu.be/uryoX0ZYvwQ
https://youtu.be/Z7EHfqiC8iY
Just take no notice and do what you think is best.
Even the food pyramid we are advised by medical authority and government is actually harmful leading to type 2 diabetes and heart disease. Dissenters who challenge this are vilified in just the same way as Dr Yeadon and Dr Malone.
Saturated fat is bad? But polyunsaturated is good?
https://youtu.be/Ema6thM5abA
Low fat diet to lose weight?
https://youtu.be/9cTqRhC09p8
https://youtu.be/uB2uS_vzCxU
https://youtu.be/uryoX0ZYvwQ
https://youtu.be/Z7EHfqiC8iY
For a more technical deep dive, we can rely on the great Ivor Cummins
https://youtu.be/Y41gXdEGslk
https://youtu.be/9Cd6AC0rB6w
The parallels with the COVID narrative and the nutrition narrative are precise, as they stem from the same forces. They are equally damaging, and equally corrupt.
Perfection is the new alchemy isn’t it?
People will look at these studies and try to create a “perfect” diet but even then it would be specific to an individual or individuals and how they live their lives.
Then one day they die anyway.
As Bill Hicks once said – “It’s the people who die of nothing that should be worried”
Indeed. There are no solutions, only tradeoffs, to quote Thomas Sowell.
I’m happy for information to be out there about diet and for people to think about making their lives better through it, but I don’t want governments or any state agency involved in the process or deciding what people ought to eat.
was it funded by the fast food industry by any chance?
Ah screw it, it says bacon is good, I can’t fall out with that!
For a long time I have declared myself (jokingly) as a victim of a low fat low salt low sugar low everything society.
What kind of sense is there in the food retailers appearing to be more bothered about telling us what is NOT in the food, as opposed to what IS in the food?
My 9 year old son was recently diagnosed with Type 1 diabetes. The diet advice from the NHS is slightly shocking. Eat what you want then correct with insulin. You can survive with this approach but it will result in volatile blood sugar levels. I know why they do it – poor and uneducated people can’t cope with anything more difficult.
We’re going to ignore the ‘advice’ and do low carb, if not fully keto. It can be used to maintain blood sugar within normal ranges for long term health. Fingers crossed child services won’t come knocking with a bowel of cheerios for the kid and handcuffs for my wife and I.
Far be it from me to be a food fascist, but I never understood why schools always offer pudding. I mean, what’s the upside?
I am appalled by the nutritional advice handed out by the NHS. My son had dreadful food sensitivities when he was young and I did a lot of research and ignored what the hospital dieticians told us. It was a lot of hard work and as a family we ate what he ate for the most part. It made for difficult social events on occasions, especially birthday parties, but we took food that he could eat with us and I tried to make it look ‘normal’.
There is a lot of information out there about healthy eating that isn’t carbohydrate based. The low carb diet means you’ll be eating in a much more healthy way than most other people. You get to avoid all the artificial sweeteners, colourings, binders etc and won’t have weight problems. Avoid the ‘diabetic’ food as usually the glycaemic index is higher than you’d expect and it’s full of additives.
Also, none of us are overweight…
The more people obsess about physical health, nutrition and longevity the less attention they pay to spiritual health, the only thing that matters.
My understanding is that this was funded by various food industry organisations. Quite how anyone would think that Cheerios are more nutritional that eggs or that flavoured almond milk more nutritious than processed almond milk is a mystery to me.
How does the processed food fare when assessed on environmental impact compared to meat, eggs etc? That’s in another box, though, isn’t it?
Can anyone seriously believe that Cheerios are the healthiest food??? This looks like all the highly processed crap is being deemed healthy, I smell bs!